Sunday Beer Blogging

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.

-– FRANK ZAPPA

When was the last time you saw a commercial for a mainstream American beer that actually extolled its virtues, which is to say how it tastes? (And no, I'm not talking about "Less filling, tastes great.")

It's been quite a while, hasn't it?

There is a reason why Buttwiper, Millard and Boors, which dominate the $90 billion a year U.S. beer market, use big-breasted women, golden retrievers wearing sunglasses and college frat house pranks to push their brews: Taste-wise, they don’t compare very well to what little competition they have – imports (about 7-8 percent of the market) and domestic craft beers (about 3-4 percent).

American brewers did not always have to find other ways to market their beers.

Prior to the advent of Prohibition in 1919, most American cities had at least one brewery with beers and ales that compared favorably to their tasty counterparts in the Old County, most often Germany. This is because the owners and brewmasters were direct from the Old Country, or were first or second generation Americans.

But a funny thing happened in the years after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Brewery owners who survived those 14 dry years and the shakeout as shuttered breweries began to get back on their feet realized that they had a big marketing problem -- There wasn’t a ready-made way to increase sales.

But with millions of beer drinkers returning home at the end of World War II, brewers stumbled on an idea startling for its ingenuity:

If their beers were watered down, people would drink more of them.

As Joe Sixpack, an old friend and award-winning beer blogger (good work if you can get it), explains:

"After the war it wasn’t just beer getting dumbed down. It also was in all the food we were eating, the way we were living. This was more a product of where Americans were headed. This was the age of being bland, of TV dinners and the suburbs."

Mr. Sixpack and I share the view that what makes a beer good are the edges – the robust flavors that vary so much from one good brand of from another.

But he says, post-war beer lost those edges because brewers began watering it down as well as using cheaper grains and other ingredients, in part because there was a premium on supplies.

Surprisingly, Mr. Sixpack notes that the precedent for the move toward lighter beers was in Germany before Prohibition, of all places, with the advent of lagers that were much less dense and flavorful than dark beers and ales.

* * * * *

Truth be known, I am a died-in-the wool beer snob. I blame my Uncle Werner.

Werner, a German émigré, was a caterer in Washington, D.C. whom I would visit. I was 14 or so when he offered me a Heineken, which in those days (but alas, no longer) was a lager with a tasty edge. I was hooked. Not literally, but until the microbrewing revolution in the 1990s, I never found a domestic beer that compared to old-formula Heineken, which Mr. Sixpack says was abandoned in the late 1970s for a more mainstream American taste that is reflected in its moronic Buttwiper-like advertising.

So what is American taste?

Beers that are indeed watered down, explains Mr. Sixpack, but not because they are made wrong:

"It's all based on image. It's human nature that we associate ourselves with specific brands. AB (Anheuser Busch) has two completely different markets for Bud and Bud Lite. That’s why people drive the car they drive. And some people do like being seen with an imported bottle in their hand at a bar."

Just not that many.

As it is, Heineken has ceded its longtime title as the best-selling imported beer to Corona, a Mexican beer, which is ironic considering that most Americans want to tighten the borders at a time when Mexican and Latin American foods, beers and other products have never been more popular.

Says Mr. Sixpack:

"Sure, some Mexican beers are being consumed by immigrants, but the majority of drinkers are born-and-bred U.S. residents. Heck, sales of tortilla chips are now growing faster than potato chips. Isn’t that sort of a contradiction?"

Indeed.

Having lost the cachet of being a "special" import, Heineken is now trying to cash in on the popularity of Mexican beers and recently bought the marketing rights to Tecate and Dos Equis.

Would Frank Zapppa approve?