Make Great Beer Again

Ah, St. Patrick’s Day.  Or, as I like to call, "Oh Sure, NOW You Like Immigrants" Day.

Time for everyone to take a break from talking about penniless moochers, dangerous religious fanatics, deportations, travel bans and border walls so they can instead reflect on the Irish, who came to this country as penniless moochers, were beaten and shunned as religious fanatics, and regularly threatened with deportations.  But they fought hard to be accepted, to assimilate, and now they can keep homosexuals from marching in their parades.  Because nothing says America like turning the hate that was focused at you onto some other group!

As for me, I'm gonna have some corned beef and cabbage (yes, yes, I know, but I LIKE corned beef and cabbage, in spite of myself), drink a nice, dark ale, and think about the immigrant experience of my Irish ancestors.

Because, of course, I'm part Irish.  The great-grandson of immigrants.  Not much surprise there.  This country is a nation of immigrants.  In school, I was taught that America was the great Melting Pot of cultures from around the world. 

Turns out, this is total bullshit.  Our nation HATES immigrants.  Always has, always will.  Hell, our main symbol of welcoming immigrants into this country, Ellis Island, was built on an island because that made it easier to turn potential immigrants away.  From our very beginning, we hated any immigrant group that was in any way different from us.  And as those immigrants came to be accepted as American, both conforming to American culture and conversely forcing American culture to conform to their traditions, they became the new face of America, by totally HATING the next wave of immigrants.  German, French, Irish, Hungarian, Italian, Asian, Hispanic, we’ve always HATED immigrants.  We always seek to keep anything that we perceive as foreign out of our country.

So thinking, and still in the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day, I stepped into a local bar.  It wasn't a bad bar; seemed alright.  The paint was peeling in places, but the giant screen TV was clearly very expensive and very new.  I wasn't sure it would live up to the banner above the bar, calling it, "The Best Bar Ever.  I Mean, Ever.  Seriously, Just the Best."

I sat down and asked the bartender for a stout.  The bartender, a large, somewhat overweight fellow in ill-fitting clothes with an vaguely jaundiced complexion and pale blond hair that looked like it might jump off his head at any moment, shook his head and said, “Sorry, but we only serve American beers here.”

"Excuse me?"

I did a quick double-take.  “Don’t you have any American stouts?”

“No, I mean real American beers, not American versions of immigrant beers.  Stout’s an English style of dark ale.  We fought the Revolution to be rid of stuff like that!”  He picked up a glass and began to clean it with a rag.  As he did, I noticed the slogan embossed on the glass: “Make Beer Great Again.”

Now, the guy had a point.  Of course I knew stout was an English style originally.  I just never thought of it as an immigrant beer before.  Plenty of high-quality stouts, or any other ales, we made right here in the United States.  Surely, one must count as “American.”  I decided to press my case.

“So, do you have any ales at all?”

The bartender shook his head again.  “Ales, by which you mean beer made with the classic top fermenting ale yeast Saccharomyces Cerevisiae, are all foreign-born immigrant brews.  Not welcome here.”

It was becoming clear that this bartender was a) incredibly well-informed on the nature of beer-making, and b) serious about this whole “American beer” thing.

“Okay,” I replied.  “I’ll take a Bud.”  Nothing un-American about that!  Why, nothing said “America!” like a cold bottle of Bud.  Well, maybe Bud Light, but my hypocrisy only goes so far.

“ ‘Fraid not,” the bartender replied, now seeming a little sad at my total inability to listen to what he was saying.

“Oh, c’mon!  Bud is totally an American creation.”

“Your Budweiser is the major commercial example of what is known in the beer world as Premium American-style Lager.”

“Exactly,” I shouted.  “American-style!  Can’t get more American than that!”

“It’s a German immigrant beer,” my new-found beer guru explained.  “You see, that pale, light version of lager centers, as a style, around the city of Pils in what is now the Czech Republic, but was at one point Bohemia.  German immigrants to America brought the style with them and started brewing it here.  Budweiser itself, as a specific beer, was based on a beer found in the city of Budvar in the Czech Republic, known in German as Budweis.”

I’d heard this story before, and wouldn’t let a distortion of the facts pass unassailed.  “But Budweiser, while based in part of the Budweis beer, was created independent of that beer by Carl Conrad, who worked with Adolphus Busch to make a lighter, paler version of pilsner, using rice in place of some of the malt.  That’s a strictly American variation.”

“A variation of a foreign beer is still a foreign beer.  We have to have standards.  Just because it was first made here, if it was spawned by a foreign beer, it’s still an immigrant.”

“Well, you could put green food coloring into it.  That’s a pretty American thing to do.”

But seriously, don't ever do this.

He didn’t respond, which was fair enough.

I was clearly getting nowhere with this guy.  “What about California Common beer?” I asked.  “That was first brewed in San Francisco!”

The bartender nodded.  “Yes, steam beer, as it’s also called, was first brewed in San Francisco, and it is a unique product of opportunity and environment.  But it’s made from the same bottom-fermenting lager yeast known as Saccharomyces Pastorianus, traditionally brewed in colder temperatures than the top-fermenting ale yeast.  Brewers trying to make German-style lager in the 19^th century ran into trouble from the California heat, resulting in a totally different flavor in their beer.  But, despite the higher brewing temperature, California steam beer, like Budweiser, is a derivative of German-style lager.  Immigrant brew.”

I threw up my hands at this.  “You’ve banned every beer that isn’t native to America?  That makes no sense!  Beer has been coming to this continent since the first English settlements here!  It’s part of this country’s backbone.  You can’t ban any beer because it’s too foreign for you.  What would you have left?”

Without answering, the bartender turned to his beer tap, poured some yellow, murky liquid into a pint glass, and placed it front of me.  “Try this.”

I did.  It tasted cloying sweet, and slightly sour, like cornbread topped with something that had been sitting in the hot sun for too long.  Not terrible, but hardly what I’d call refreshing.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s called Chica.  Originally made in South America.”  I raised an eyebrow.  “Hey, at least it’s AN America.  Anyway, it’s fermented from corn.”

Corn.  Maize.  American enough, I guess.  I took another sip.

“They make it by chewing the corn, spitting it back out and letting it ferment.”

I put the chica down.

Having had quite enough of this malarkey, I got up to leave.  But before I did, I turned to the bartender and said, “You know, St. Patrick was pro-immigration.  He was an immigrant himself, and according to legend he played a big role in snake immigration patterns.

“If we keep everything foreign out of this country, we’ll only harm ourselves.  If nothing else, our beers will suck.”

And I left.  And this descendant of immigrants went home to make (and enjoy) a batch of homebrewed immigrant beer.

Make Great Beer Again.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!