Beer in the States

I’ve just returned from a fantastic trip to the north eastern United States: Boston, New York and Vermont. I was pleasantly surprised at how good the craft beer scene is in the States – it seems to be growing at an increasing rate over there. In some respects that makes me jealous: there is a massive range of beer styles available and you can get interesting beer pretty much anywhere in the north east. But in other respects it doesn’t: if I lived there I would really miss cask conditioned ale drawn through a proper beer engine. That concept doesn’t exist over there. All beer is kegged or bottled, highly carbonated and served cold. Whilst I like that too, I’d miss English real ale.

Anyway, I have a few specific thoughts and discoveries from my trip to share on this blog. Rather than writing one huge article, I’m going to split it over a bunch of posts, starting with:

Craft beer availability

There are loads of craft breweries across the States. We stayed in Stowe in Vermont, and there are SEVEN craft breweries within ten miles of Stowe! (There’s even one at the von Trapp Family Lodge, for you Sound of Music fans.)

But it’s not so much that there are an expanding number of craft breweries that amazed me. After all, there are 33 craft breweries here in Cheshire (not including Cheshire Peaks of course! :-). What amazed me (and made me jealous) was the availability of these beers in supermarkets and restaurants.

Here in the UK, the big supermarkets will sell plenty of bottled beer, but it is usually all beer from the larger breweries. There might occasionally be a few beers from smaller local breweries in better supermarkets like Waitrose. I went into a Wegmans supermarket near Boston, and they had three huge aisles of American craft beer. There were other aisles for imported beer and for “domestic” beer such as Bud and Coors. But there were THREE aisles of just craft beer. I was astounded and somewhat jealous.

Three long aisles too. Count them:

Now let’s look at restaurants. Here in the UK the best you can hope for is the most generic of kegged bitter or lager. Indian restaurants will sell draught kegged Cobra or Kingfisher. Italian restaurants will sell bottled Italian beer (Peroni etc.). There is never EVER any British craft ale available in a restaurant. That lives in pubs.

Over in the States, every restaurant seemed to have at least one or two craft beers on draught. Really, I can’t remember going to a single restaurant where they couldn’t offer at least Sam Adams on draught. More often it was five or six beers, even in a simple Vermont pizza house.

Now to be fair, British cask conditioned ales require considerable more skill to manage than kegged beers. And the shelf life (sorry, cellar life) is considerably less. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect British restaurants to start serving cask conditioned ales. And most of our kegged ales are pretty generic. But as a restaurant goer there’s certainly a great deal more choice of beers with your meal in the US than here in the UK. Which is a shame because I think beer goes really well with food, and there are so many beer styles to choose from you can choose a beer to fit whatever you are eating.

That’s it for this post. I’ve got more to share about brewery tours and bars, but that must wait for another post.