(building pubs)

There is a certain traditional feeling behind the craft beer scene, the sense of doing things your own way on your own time.  It’s something many Americans might associate with a pioneer spirit, flipping off the “big boys” and making something special that can’t be easily replicated by anyone.  Of course, there are also failures, but on a small scale with a broad scope one failure doesn’t have to be the end of you.

The roots of American alcohol are probably the same as anywhere else.  If humans can find something to alter their state of consciousness they will cultivate it with glee and devotion.  The early colonists were by no means drunkards, but as a sort of purification of the water around settled areas, alcohol production was a necessity.  Not all drinks had high alcohol content, of course.  The “small beer”, produced after other varieties had used most of the power of the mash/malt, had perhaps 1-2%.  This was a drink that even the children could enjoy during meals, without much worry about contaminated water making anyone sick.  Other beers were mostly ales.  The reason being, ales are produced with specific types of yeasts which the English had in their homebase, and apparently the Dutch shared those varieties.  The lager yeast would not arrive until mass German immigration in the 19th century.  Colonists produced their own beer, whisky, and other alcoholic beverages, at least until the concentration of housing made it uncomfortable to do so.  Taverns were a natural feature of the landscape, although women were not allowed to enter in the early years of the colonies.  A separate entrance did allow them to pick up an order of beer or whisky, though.

There seems to have been a complicated relationship to alcohol from early times, with the whisky tax and subsequent rebellion after the Revolution, and religious movements through the 19th century promoting an alcohol-free lifestyle, in order to get closer to god.  It is also true that some civil rights movements tried their level best to separate alcohol from the American experience, mostly to protect less privileged populations from its negative effects, even if they were not the ones drinking it.  At the same time, there is an idea of having a right to drink as we please, even though there is no constitutional amendment or anything similar to point to to claim it.  The “English” taverns had the reputation for being fairly unsavory places, for less than correctly behaving people.  However, the Germans who came in the 19th century brought the idea of the wholesome beer garden to the public.  These were areas where adults could relax with a drink (or two or three) while the children played in healthy green areas, or enjoyed carnival rides to distraction.  This was, of course, propaganda.  The Germans at the time were not really Americans.  They didn’t speak English, for one thing.  And they didn’t belong to the right churches, for another.  Still, they persevered and became good “white” Americans, and their beer gardens became respectable places to have a lager beer.  Naturally, there would be trouble when Germany became the clear enemy of the United States in the First World War, but over the second half of the 19th century, Germans were simply hard-working, hard-drinking, wanna-be Americans, the same as the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese...well, maybe more than some of those.