has a history of brewing that began with efforts by the earliest English colonists to make beer from the only grain available to them, corn. Thomas Hariot, one of the unsuccessful settlers at Roanoke Island, published his “Narrative of the First Engli2sh Plantation of Virginia” upon his return to London in 1588. Hariot wrote of the diversely colored corn that made very good bread and “We made of the same in the country some mault, whereof was brued as good ale as was to be desired. So, likewise, by the help of hops, thereof may bee made as good beere.” Later, when a colony was established in Virginia, Capt George Thorpe wrote on December 29, 1620, of the difficulty of growing barley in the hot climate of the South. “And the greatest want they complayne of us a good drinke—wine being too dear, and barley chargeable, which though it should be there sowen, it were hard in that country, being so hot, to make malt of it, or, if they had malt, to make good beer…they had found a way to make good drink from Indian corn, which (they) preferred to good English beer.”

Even the puritanical Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock was influenced by their thirst for beer. Alexander Young’s “Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers” records the diary of one of the passengers on board the Mayflower in 1620: “So in the morning, after we had called on God for direction, we came to this resolution—to go presently ashore again and to take a better view of two places which we thought most fitting for us; for we could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our beer, and it now being the 19th of December.”

The first brewery on Manhattan Island was established by Dutchmen Adrian Block and Hans Christiansen in 1612. The Dutch administration levied the first excise taxes on beer in the New World. Dutch-run breweries proliferated in New Amsterdam despite the taxes. Philadelphia also prospered as a brewing center. Founder William Penn’s early letters indicate the first brewery in Philadelphia was built around 1685. Penn described its proprietor, William Frampton, as “an able man who had set up a large brew-house, in order to furnish the people with good drink.” Several breweries also opened in Baltimore during the colonial period.

The brewing industry languished during the Revolutionary War when American ports were blockaded and consumption of beer declined. However, the founding fathers also were partisans of American beer. George Washington had a fondness for taverns; his farewell address in 1783, after the revolutionary war, was held at Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both promoted the benefits of beer and ale over distilled spirits, as did Samuel Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, member of the first national congress and maltster.

After the war, ale and porter breweries flourished in the big cities of the East, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York. Among prominent Philadelphia breweries was the Robert Smith India Pale Ale Brewing Co and the Gaul Brewery. The brewing business also caught on in the Lehigh Valley. D. G. Yuengling started a brewery in Pottsville in 1829. In Baltimore there was the Globe Brewery and the James Sterret Brewery. In New York City, the Old Brewery, or Coulter’s Brewery, was erected at the junction known as Five Points. The brewing business also took hold in Upstate New York. Matthew Vassar, founder of the eponymous college, ran a brewery in Poughkeepsie, New York. The Evans Brewery started up in Hudson, New York, and the Albany Brewing Co in the state capitol. In the 18th century, Boston developed as a distribution point for the ales and porters brewed in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. The Bunker Hill Brewery was established in Boston in 1821.

US breweries and brewpubs. george chakvetadze, alliance publishing

Lager beer brewing came to America in 1840 and virtually transformed the American brewing landscape overnight. The advent of lager beer heralded a golden age for brewing in America. Before then, all beers brewed in America were warm- fermented ales. John Wagner brought a bottom-fermenting lager yeast from Bavaria and set up a small, eight-barrel brewery in the rear of his house in Philadelphia. The beer was lagered, or stored, in the cellar. The relatively light-bodied lager beer was immediately popular, and a wave of German immigration insured its success in cities across the United States. In the 1830s, 600,000 immigrants poured into the United States, in the 1840s, 1.7 million, and in the 1850s, 2.6 million. Seventy-five percent were beer-loving Irish and Germans. The Irish were fleeing famine and the Germans were fleeing a suffocating culture dominated by feudal lords.

For the next 80 years, lager breweries proliferated across the country. They brewed light lager beer and experimented with corn and rice adjuncts to lighten their beers and 2hedge against shortages of barley. Virtually every city in the country had a brewery, and the big cities had dozen2s. New York City, the largest urban center in the nation, was by far the biggest brewing center, with lager breweries established by Frederick and Maximilian Schaefer, Col Jacob Ruppert, and George Ehret. In Brooklyn, then an independent city, the Liebmann family established Rheingold. There were more than 40 other breweries in Brooklyn when it became part of New York City in 1898. There were more than 100 breweries in metropolitan New York. Philadelphia also was a major brewing center, with Schmidt’s, Jacob Conrad’s Keystone State Brewery, and Ortleib’s.

What was not clear at the time was that the future of brewing in the United States would not be written by the big urban brewers of the East, but rather by the German-Americans who had settled in the Midwest. Phillip Best started “Best and Company, Beer Brewery, Whiskey Distillery & Vinegar Refinery,” which eventually passed into the hands of Frederick Pabst, who had married Best’s daughter Maria. August Krug started a brewery next to his restaurant and saloon in Milwaukee and hired a bookkeeper named Joseph Schlitz. Krug died in a freak accident and Schlitz married his widow and changed the company name to Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company. Phillip Best’s brother Carl had opted for the family vinegar business, but he eventually started the Plank Road Brewery with a partner. The partner ran the brewery into the ground and fled, and Carl filed for bankruptcy. Frederick Miller, a 31-year-old German immigrant, purchased the defunct brewery and launched the Miller Brewing Co. These are the men whose beers made Milwaukee famous.

In St Louis, 18-year-old Adolphus Busch went into the brewing supply business and eventually met Eberhard Anheuser, who had acquired a failing brewery in a settlement of debts owed him by the previous owners. Busch married Anheuser’s daughter Lilly and went into business with Anheuser. He brewed a beer called Budweiser for a friend, Carl Conrad, an importer of wines and liquors. Conrad had tasted the light, pilsner-like Budweis beer from the Czech town of the same name.

Perhaps because of the limitations of their home markets, perhaps because of the pioneering spirit that drove them West, these Midwestern brewers eventually eclipsed their brethren in the big cities of the East. The Midwestern brewers invested in many new technologies to help them reach new markets far from home: artificial refrigeration, pasteurization, automated bottling lines, and refrigerated rail cars. They built state-of-the-art laboratories and staffed them with well-trained European scientists. In short, they were more entrepreneurial than their Eastern counterparts who could hardly meet the demand for beer in the burgeoning cities around them.

By 1910, there were 1,498 breweries in the United States. In the 1880s and 1990s, price wars broke out among breweries. The advantage, of course, lay with the large breweries that could afford to buy raw materials at lower prices and sell at lower prices. But the seeds of a catastrophe for all American brewers had been planted decades before.

The temperance movement in America, led by religious opposition to alcoholic beverages, had claimed its first victory when Maine passed a prohibition law in 1850. In the next 5 years, two territories and 11 of the 31 states followed Maine’s lead. Maine and the other prohibitionist states were small and rural and were not big consumers of beer, so there was little organized opposition from the beer industry.

The greater threat came in 1893 when Howard Hyde Russell founded the National Temperance Society, with support from capitalists J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie, who lamented the effects of alcohol abuse on their workers. An even more powerful group, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, had formed in 1873, campaigning against alcoholic beverages and persuading people to sign pledges of abstinence. Opponents of alcoholic beverages eventually coalesced into the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), led by the very effective advocate Wayne Wheeler. By 1902, the ASL had 200 employees and offices in 39 states and territories.

The brewing industry seemed oblivious to the threat to their livelihoods. Many breweries owned the saloons and beer gardens that the ASL was targeting. There were sporadic efforts to oppose local option laws in Texas and other states, but by 1909, 46 million Americans lived in dry territories. Nearly 500 breweries went out of business in the next decade. Brewers seemed unable to put aside their competitive instincts and cooperate against a common enemy. The ASL began attacking the lavish lifestyles of successful brewers like the Uihleins, Ruppert, Ehret, and Adolphus Busch.

The U.S. Brewers Association finally got its act together in 1913, funding the National Association of Commerce and Labor, made up of brewers and the trades that supplied the industry: grain and hop farmers, glass and bottle-cap manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, saloonkeepers, and hotel workers. The new organization turned to the National German-American Alliance, a group dedicated to preserving German heritage, culture, and language in America, for help combating the “drys.”

This alliance backfired when, in 1917, the United States entered the war against Germany. Eventually, the Senate opened hearings into the activities of the National German-American Alliance. In the course of the hearings, the U.S. Brewers Association admitted that it was funding the antitemperance efforts of the Alliance. Wayne Wheeler linked the U.S. brewing industry to the perfidy of the German enemy, completely undercutting the efforts of the U.S. Brewers Association.

Efforts by the brewers and distillers to head off Prohibition were too little and too late. Through decades of patient advocacy and by speciously linking the German-American brewers to the German war effort, Wayne Wheeler and the ASL had engineered a fundamental change in the political landscape. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the necessary 36 states on January 16, 1919, and Prohibition was to come 1 year from that date. In May 1919, the Volstead Act put in place the apparatus for enforcing Prohibition.

Some brewers made “near beer” to get through the dry spell. Some made ice cream. Some were fortified by side businesses: Jacob Ruppert in New York owned the New York Yankees baseball team. Organized crime took over the production and distribution of alcoholic beverages during Prohibition, and violence flared between mobsters and authorities across the country. There were 1,179 brewers in the United States when Prohibition was imposed. Many companies launched when Prohibition was repealed in 1932, but by 1935, there were only 703 breweries in America.

The next 45 years saw consumption of beer rise in America, but paradoxically, the number of breweries in the United States declined. The reasons included consolidation and brewery closings. By 1978, there were 89 breweries in the country, and they were owned by fewer than 50 brewing companies. Advances in refrigeration and the construction of the interstate highway system enabled the big Midwestern breweries to ship beer to all parts of the country economically. Economies of scale enabled them to buy raw materials much more cheaply than their urban counterparts. Mass advertising, particularly through national television, enabled them to persuade consumers that their beer was so special they could ship it to your market and price it competitively against your local beer. Why drink the local stuff when you could drink a beer that was being sold across the country and advertised on national television? The Midwest giants eventually triumphed over the big regional breweries of the East Coast, which had been content to brew and market their beer in their rich urban markets.

But not everyone in America was satisfied with the bland light lager beers that the national giants were peddling. Fritz Maytag, a scion of the Iowa-based washing machine company, purchased the failing Anchor Brewing Co in San Francisco in 1964, after graduating from Stanford University. Maytag revived Anchor Steam Beer, the rich, malty lager beer that was fermented in open vats at higher temperatures, like ale. A few years later, Jack McAuliffe, a submarine technician who served the U.S. Navy in Aberdeen, Scotland, became enamored of English cask-conditioned “real ale,” a type of beer that was being rescued by Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale, a consumer advocacy group. He came home to Sonoma, California, in 1976 and started the New Albion Brewery, America’s first “microbrewery.” A microbrewery was simply a small brewery making flavorful beer in small batches and selling to a local market. New Albion lasted only 4 years, but former employees went on to start the Mendocino Brewing Co in Hopland, California, in 1982. Ken Grossman, a former bicycle repair shop owner, cobbled together old dairy equipment to start the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co in Chico, California, in 1980 with friend Paul Camusi. In the East, William Newman, a former state budget clerk, started Newman Brewing Co in Albany, New York, in 1979, brewing a beer called Newman’s Albany Amber. By 1990, there were 284 breweries in America. The new breed of “microbrewer” was making flavorful and strong ales and lagers—big beers that looked, smelled, and tasted very different than the light lager beers made by the national breweries.

In 2010, there were more than 1,700 breweries in the United States, more than existed before Prohibition and more than in Germany. About 500 were production breweries and the rest were brewpubs, small breweries that make beer for a single restaurant. The Brewers Association, the trade association of small brewers, claims that virtually all Americans now live within 10 miles of a brewery. The Brewers Association defined a microbrewery as a brewer making fewer than 16,500 hectoliters (15,000 barrels) of beer a year. Breweries producing more than 15,000 barrels were called “regional breweries.” As breweries that had been called microbreweries outgrew their “micro” size, a new term sprang up—“craft” breweries—a term that broadly covered independently owned breweries making flavorful beer by traditional methods. Craft breweries were producing about 5% of the beer sold in America in 2010, but they represented the fastest growing segment of the alcoholic beverage industry, with many producers growing at a pace of more than 10% per year. The passion for craft brewing now has spread to Asia, Europe, South America, and Australia.

The Midwest brewing giants still produce most of the beer consumed in the United States, but they are no longer run by the families that gave them their names and they are now controlled by international brewing conglomerates. Anheuser-Busch brews half of the beer sold in America, but the company was bought by the Belgian-based brewing company InBev in 2008. Anheuser-Busch InBev is run by Brazilians. Miller Brewing Co was purchased by South African Breweries Ltd in 2002. Coors Brewing Co merged with Molson Breweries of Canada in 2005, and then Miller–Coors formed a joint venture in 2007. Miller–Coors sells 30% of the beer in America. Just as craft beer has become a force in the US beer industry, so has imported beer. Imports now account for about 13% of the beer drunk in America. The leading importing countries are Mexico, Holland, and Canada.

By 2010 the United States, a country where a mere 30 years previously there had been little beer to be found beside light mass market lagers, was home to the world’s most diverse and dynamic beer culture. Having originally taken their own inspirations from England, Germany, Belgium, and other great brewing nations, American craft brewers are currently at the leading edge of creativity and culinary exploration in the world of brewing. Flavorful, interesting beers from the United States, Europe, and beyond are slowly moving out of the realm of specialty bars and into the mainstream of the American food culture.