Beer Styles: American Pale Lager

Much maligned, the American pale lager was (and based on sales, still is) the most popular beer style in the United States and perhaps the world. There are several different reasons for this. One is the fact that in the late 1800's, early 1900's there was a large influx of German immigrants, and many of them had been brewers back home. There had been beer brewing from the earliest days of North American colonization, but that had been mostly by small local brewers. Frederick Pabst, Adolphus Busch, and immigrant brewers with names like Stroh, Miller and Schlitz turned it into a serious business. At the time of this "German Invasion", the pilsener style was the cool new thing in Europe. A hoppy, pale lager that was crisp and clear, pilseners had nudged out many of the local varieties of beer in the European beer-drinking regions, so it was natural that the newly American beer producers would seek to emulate this style. A second influence on what would become classic American beer styles was the difference between European (2 row) barley and American (6 row) barley. The American variety had several characteristics which negatively influenced the taste of American-brewed beer, so corn was added to the grain mix. Later, during a period of grain  rationing, rice was also added - this practice continued after rationing ended.

The big influence on how beer developed in the United States was Prohibition. For thirteen years it was illegal to brew or consume beer. Most of the smaller brewers went out of business, with only the largest able to weather the storm by producing root beer, ginger beer and other items. When beer production geared up after the 21st Amendment was passed, it was no longer a predominantly local affair. The surviving brewers now had to appeal to a wide clientele, not just the tastes of the drinkers in their city, so the beers post-Prohibition were geared to theoretically appeal to everyone. A style that we now refer to as Vienna Lager may have been representative of the pre-Prohibition beers. Vienna, now in Austria, was home to many German-speaking brewers who emigrated to North America, including Mexico. Representatives of this style include Samuel Adams Boston Lager, Yuengling, Negra Modelo and Bohemía. Post-Prohibition lagers were brewed with a lower hop profile and what many refer to as a least-common-denominator flavor, not only to appeal to the largest segment of the population, but to appeal to women as well.

None if this is to suggest that mass-produced beers taste bad, it's just that they don't vary much from  one to another and the flavor is overly processed - think your run-of-the-mill white bread or a McDonald's hamburger - okay, but nothing special. Until recent years there wasn't much to choose from outside of the giants: Budweiser, Miller, Coors etc were all pretty similar, the only variety one might find in most markets came from the imports: Guinness Stout (for the adventurous), Heinekin and Lowenbrau were the ones that I recall from my youth. In the next installment, we'll look at those "classic" imports