What’s fueled the American Craft Brewing Movement?

The 21st century has seen an explosion in craft brewing in the U.S.

Today in many grocery and beer stores across the nation, individuals are exposed to literally hundreds of different beer choices while most states in the U.S. have at least a dozen craft breweries and growing.

The sheer breadth of choice in the local beer aisle can leave an individual in a daze.

It may come then as a surprise for many younger drinkers that this was not always the case.

As far back as the mid-19th century, the U.S. had a thriving beer culture largely in part due to the hundreds of thousands of European immigrants who, desiring beers reminding them of home, established their own breweries across the U.S.

In 1873, there was a peak of 4,131 breweries in the U.S., however, within fifty years this number would drop to zero with the onset of Prohibition.

When Prohibition ended, very few independent craft breweries remained and the revival of brewing was hampered by both the Second World War and lingering proponents of Prohibition who attempted to use the war to their advantage to make a case against the comeback of beer.

By the time the 1970s had rolled around, American beer was more often than not a bland, watery spin-off of European style pilsners.

The question then remains: how did the U.S. go from having both limited quality and variety of beer to having the largest selection of craft-beer in the world?

The answer may partially lie in the the U.S.’s eclectic cultural roots.

The U.S.’s ‘melting pot’ of ethnic back grounds had gradually translated into a diverse market for beer.

The diverse taste of the American beer drinking market, however, was ironically matched by an ever growing consolidation of corporations and a concurrently ever more bland product leading to an all time high in the stagnation of quality beer.

Beer had never been so homogenized, boring, bland or watered down — a trend that curiously also extended to the mainstream European brewing market as well.

The American market chafed for more variety amidst the legacy of stringent post-Prohibition regulations that effectively made brewpubs and home-brewing illegal.

Paired with the failure of corporations to produce high quality beer, better educated and more enterprising individuals chose to home-brew themselves, setting the stage for the boom in craft brewing that would occur over the following decades.

This wave of furor for better beer brought legislative momentum to efforts to deregulate both home-brewing and brewpubs.

By the end of 1970s, the federal government had begun to deregulate many industries, including home-brewing opening the way for the craft-brewing boom to come.

By the 1980’s, the federal government had deregulated brewpubs as well paving the way for the first brewpub to open in Yakima, Washington in 1982.

Brewpubs spread from 10 states in 1988 to 30 at the beginning of the 1990’s and all 50 by the end of 1999.

Many of these brewpubs would eventually morph into the craft breweries that they are today.