I grew up on a dirt road in rural New Hampshire, just across the border from Vermont where the drinking age was higher and the beer was more expensive. On hot summer nights a lot of underage drinkers would stop to ditch their unfinished beer and their empties on the side of the road before crossing the state line into Vermont. My dad had us pick up the empties, and bring home the full bottles and cans to kill the slugs in the garden. The beer was mostly inexpensive domestic stuff in aluminum cans: Budweiser and Schlitz, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and sometimes maybe Molson's Golden or St. Pauli Girl bottles. When I got to be old enough to drink, I tried a sip here and there, but mostly, thought beer was pretty wretched, and decided to stick to wine.

A few years later, in Britain in the 1980s, I discovered microbrews and craftbeers, mostly because that was the easiest beverage to find in some of the small towns and local brew pubs. I discovered I liked British beer quite a lot, in fact. I've subsequently discovered I like American beer too, and no, not just the microbrews; I'm talking about the "macrobrews." The large-scale mass-produced and widely distributed major label beers. There's something about an ice cold beer in a plastic cup at a Dodger game, a beer that's so cold that there are actually micro crystals of ice on the edge of the cup, a beer that goes excellently well with a fully loaded Dodger dog, and, well before the seventh inning, tastes like more. There's something terribly American about beer. That makes sense, because it is, by far, the most popular alcoholic beverage in the United States, so much so that the recent increase in the popularity of wine has barely even touched the dominance of beer.

We've been brewing beer in the America since the first colonists arrived from England, followed in short order by colonists from the Netherlands, Germany, and Eastern Europe who brought their own brewing styles with them. Several of the large macro breweries—Miller, Pabst, Anheuser-Busch, and Schlitz, all had breweries decades before Prohibition. Miller, Pabst, and Schlitz were founded in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee was a reasonable location for breweries to start; they were in easy reach of farms and water, and in a metropolitan area where brewers had a growing population of beer drinkers. But with time, even the large macro breweries have begun swallowing each other, and then in turn, been swallowed by still larger international corporations.

Adolphus Busch's brewery supply company was bought out by Eberhard Anheuser's Brewery in St. Louis, to form the long-lived company most famous for producing Budweiser. Some of the major American breweries were able to make it through Prohibition by making malt syrups and carbonated soft drinks; others became bottlers. Larger breweries mostly turned to other businesses. Anheuser-Busch, according to their website, maintained solvency, at least in part, by manufacturing refrigerated cabinets. After Prohibition ended, World War II affected the availability of ingredients and labor, and thus the American beer landscape became dominated by the macro brewers, and by beers made with more readily obtainable (and often cheaper) ingredients, including grains other than barley. For a very long time after Prohibition ended, large scale bulk breweries owned the American market, and they weren't shy about using cheaper grains, like rice and corn, grains that are "adjunct" or unmalted additives to the malted barley traditionally used to brew beer.

There are, essentially, two species of beer: lager and ale. The two kinds of beer are differentiated by the type of yeast used in the brewing process. The yeast use to brew a lager works at colder temperatures, and sinks to the bottom of the fermentation tank. Ale yeasts must be warmer, and the yeasts rise to the top of the fermentation vessel. Lagers were introduced to American breweries by German beer-making traditions. A lager, then, is specifically a bottom-fermented beer, usually also aged at cold temperatures (but not always). Lagers usually also undergo a secondary ferment. Pilsners are a specific style of pale lager—and American breweries tends heavily towards these pilsner-finished lagers. The American domestic mass-produced beers are semi-fondly referred by beer aficionados as "adjunct lagers," or "pale lagers"; they are essentially first cousins to European Pilsners, though they tend to use nitrogen for carbonation, producing a low alcohol beer that is substantially more carbonated than similar beers in Europe.

While I will drink, and enjoy an occasional Miller High Life, or other macro beer, I'm very glad to see that the current climate, and the interests of consumers, have caused microbrews and and craftbrews to flourish; we have now, as many or more breweries in the United States as there were before Prohibition. That said, I must say I'm a little baffled by the snooty attitudes expressed by some beer drinkers towards macro beers and those who drink them; it reminds me, very much, about those wine drinkers who sneer at domestic table wines, and boxed wine, and anything that doesn't come from Europe, unless it's California Chardonnay.