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A taste for temperance: how American beer got to be so bland
Ranjit S. Dighe
Department of Economics, State University of New York at Oswego, NY, USA
This article examines the historical origins of bland American beer. The US was not strongly associated with a particular beer type until German immigrants popularised lager beer. Lager, refreshing and mildly intoxicating, met the demands of Americaâs growing working class. Over time, American lager became lighter and blander. This article emphasises Americaâs uncommonly strong temperance movement, which put the industry on the defensive. Brewers pushed their product as âthe beverage of moderation,â and consumers sought out light, relatively non-intoxicating beers. The recent âcraft beer revolutionâ is explained as a backlash aided by a changing consumer culture and improved information technology.
Introduction
Americans drink bland beer. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is subjective; one personâs âinsipidâ is anotherâs ârefreshingâ. But compared with traditional beer-drinking countries like England, Germany, and Belgium, America is notable for the lightness, paleness, and relatively un-hopped character of its beer. A prominent importer said âthe American palate tends to go for âless challengingâ beers, when compared to the world level of bitterness and bodyâ.1 Even before 1900, Americans drank a domesticated version of Bohemian pilsner beers, with corn or rice adjuncts to lighten the taste. It is widely believed that American beer has become blander and weaker since then, especially with the rise of light beers, a top brand of which âhas been described as âwet airâ and âthe nearest thing to nothing in a glassâ.â2 The beer industry in the second half of the twentieth century is typically associated with increased concentration, advertising, and homogeneity. Today, despite the much-vaunted âcraft beer revolutionâ, light beers still account for more than half the American market and craft beers are only about 10%.3 This article examines how the distinctively bland American beer came to be.
Upscale beer drinkers often attribute the blandness of most American beer to sinister forces such as monopolistic corporations that manipulate a gullible public with slick advertising campaigns, cost-minimising measures such as the addition of tasteless adjuncts, and the displacement of small, quality brewers due to Prohibition and predatory competition from the big brewers. Historians tend to find these explanations unsatisfying. Table 1 shows that Americaâs dominant beer styles and their alcohol content have not changed a great deal since 1880. What did change was the beerâs composition, with traditional malt and hops content falling, and the availability of alternatives like ales and porters, which fell to near-zero before rising dramatically in the late twentieth century.
Table 1. American beer styles and strength, 1607âpresent.
Note: * Beer strength is in terms of alcohol by volume (ABV). Earlier figures given in terms of alcohol by weight have been converted to ABV by multiplying by 1.25.
Maureen Ogle agrees that, relative to European beers, American beer started off bland and became even more so during the twentieth century and emphasises consumer sovereignty.4 Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, and the other top brewers of the late nineteenth century pioneered a product that was uniquely suited to American tastes. In addition to having a high-protein diet that did not require additional nourishment from the grains in beer, Americans tended to drink faster, without food, and in more social settings. The American way of drinking demanded a lighter, less-filling beer. Ogle points out that Anheuser-Buschâs use of rice adjuncts in its Budweiser lager actually made it more costly to produce at the time. No inferior good, it sold for a higher price than other beers and won the top prize at a Paris competition against 100 other beers and ales.5 The blanding down of beer in the twentieth century was similarly a response to demand, in Ogleâs view. The national palate, âsince the 1920s, had gravitated toward the sugary and the bland, both of which can be seen as hallmarks of a modernising societyâ. The rise of bland processed foods was a market signal for the brewers to make their products even easier to drink. Miller High Life was a classic example.
The homogeneity of American beers prior to 1990 is something that Ogle says less about. It is a puzzle that in an affluent, growing economy famous for its high beer consumption and its consumerism in general, the selection of beer was so limited. While craft and high-end imported beers may be a niche market, this is a niche in the largest economy in the world, and the explosive growth of that market since the late 1980s suggests that its potential may have been ignored in earlier decades. Amy Mittelman says the niche is not new: âSome three to fifteen percent of the American beer-drinking public didnât and still doesnât like drinking Bud, Schlitz, Miller, or Pabst,â she writes.6 That 3â15% range is roughly the combined share of craft beers and imports of total beer sales over the past century. Until recently that share was less than 5%, so it seems that the publicâs demand for something other than American adjunct pilsners not only can fluctuate a lot but fell sharply and stayed at a very low level for a long time. The shrinking of that niche, and its subsequent expanding in the past quarter-century, still need an explanation.
David Y. Choi and Martin H. Stack say the lack of variety in the American beer market reflected a âsub-optimal equilibriumâ in which non-generic-tasting beers were not demanded because consumers were âno longer familiar with the full range of what beer is and can beâ.7 Therefore, such beers were not supplied. Consumersâ lack of familiarity with different beer style was a âbehavioral lock-inâ due to such factors as Prohibition, competition from soft drinks, refrigeration and packaged beer, and the demand for consistency and national brands. Citing Paul Krugman, they compare the situation to the state of English food for most of the twentieth century.8 Despite rising affluence, the English did not demand better food because they had forgotten what good food tasted like.9
Regarding the recent surge in craft beers, the academic literature is slim next to the vast popular literature. Glenn R. Carroll, Anand Swaminathan, and Carroll and Swaminathan have applied the ecological concept of resource partitioning theory to explain the rise of microbreweries as a natural and endogenous outcome of the growing concentration of the industry.10 As the biggest mass brewers drove other mass brewers and regional brewers out of business with their superior scale economies and marketed to the middle with an ever more homogenous product, they opened up space for fringe and specialty producers. The industryâs consolidation was a century-long trend, however, so this theory is hard pressed to explain why craft brewing took off when it did. Swaminathanâs paper also considers niche formation theory, in which exogenous forces like changing consumer tastes and new technology lead to the entry of new firms.11 State-level regressions indicate that consumer tastes, as proxied by consumption of imported beer, were more important than industry concentration in explaining the launching of microbreweries. What, then, explains changing consumer tastes and the widening of that niche? Ogle seems to give most of the credit to the high-profile pioneers of craft and home brewing, while also noting the cultural context of environmentalism, food purity concerns, and distrust of big business.12 Craft brewers and brewpubs market themselves as well as their products, appealing to peopleâs non-gustatory tastes for adventure, non-conformity, and artisanship. Carroll and Swaminathan have noted this marketing strategy,13 and Jill J. McCluskey and Sanatan Shreay have linked beer preferences to identity economics, in which individualsâ conceptions of themselves influence the utility they derive from particular products.14 Wes Flack, and Steven M. Schnell and Joseph F. Reese argue that a growing âneolocal cravingâ for locally produced goods and foods helps explain the craft beer explosion.15 Craft beer names and labels tend to be heavy on geography, as if to appeal to this neolocalism.
This article focuses primarily on the brewers and what they said about their product, particularly in trade journals such as Western Brewery, American Brewer, and Modern Brewery Age, as well as a tabulation of the nearly 1300 brewery profiles in the Western Brewerâs 1903 publication One Hundred Years of Brewing. A consistent theme in their communications is that beer is a temperance beverage, consumed for different reasons and deserving different treatment from intoxicating drinks like whiskey and rum. The brewers emphasised the low alcohol content of their product and claimed that it was not only refreshing but non-intoxicating. They treated the prohibition movement as a real threat, even decades after repeal, and constantly sought to reassure the public and policymakers that beer was âthe beverage of moderationâ. This line of argument and the desire of most of the public for an easy-drinking light beer were mutually reinforcing and made for beer that was weak in alcohol content and taste. Until the late twentieth century, nearly all other developments affecting the supply and demand for beer also tended to keep American beer weak or make it weaker.
From colonial times to 1850
The first beer consumed by British colonists in North America was a dark beer, similar to porter or stout and about 6% alcohol, which they had brought over from England. Beer was a staple of the British diet at the time â âsmall beerâ for family dining, âstrong beerâ for social occasions â partly because the water was undrinkable. Adam Smith (1776) noted that âin the country, many middling and almost all rich and great families brew their own be...
