this website kicks ass in case you didn't know about it. www.ratebeer.com has to be one of the best places to educate yourself about beer and find the really awsome beers in the vast sea of microbrews that are out there. Is anyone else a member there?
I would have to disagree. I'm often disapointed by many of the european brews, comparred to smaller scale, craft beers made in the US. Granted, if your talking about where the styles of good beer come from your completely correct, i do love my belgan style tripples. Even then, I would say that contential europe is a little too spefic. The English have made some awsome beer and invented great styles, IPAs, Imperial Stouts, Porters, ect. But nuff about that, Rate Beer is the SHIT!
It's true, American beer is just piss and water. Weak, nasty light stuff. Also, British real ales are top notch
i love belgian beer, but america has some good microbrew. the thing about europe is they mass produce their top recipes.
Well that's not true either, e.g Belgium has over 400 microbreweries and you will find that you can only get the best stuff in the actual country.
If that's all you can be arsed to post then it doesn't hold much for a conversation and therefore, I guess we're done with talking about ratebeer or whatever.
some of the best and some of the worst beers in the world come from north america. as with music, there are very few all-american styles to choose from, and the vast majority of beers produced here are american takes on european styles, and the so-called "extreme beers" (beers with what were formerly thought of as outrageous levels of hops, beers aiming to be particularly high in alcohol, experimental beers, and so on) in general an american pale ale (like flying dog pale ale, or sierra nevada pale ale) is pretty different from an english pale ale like samuel smith's old brewery pale ale, tetley's english ale, old speckled hen and others, though the ideas behind the beers are roughly the same. same goes for other styles. there are a number of fantastic american and canadian beers, and there are probably a larger number of good beers made in north american than swill beers made in north america. its just that the swill is produced in significantly larger volume and accounts for the vast bulk of america's beer consumption because thats what the average beer drinking american enjoys. similarly some really fantastic beers come from europe, and often we look at traditional european beers as having set the standards, but there are some lousy or just unimpressive beers brewed there, too. i dont know what the situation is like in europe, but for the average american its much easier to find american craft beers than truly great european beers. the most commonly purchased european beers are things like heineken, becks, st. pauli girl, bass pale ale, newcastle, guinness draught, stella artois, to name a few. this isn't to say that these are all bad beers, and in fact they're better than the bulk of american macrobrews like budweiser, miller, labatt blue, and so on. but they're nothing compared to great european beers, which most americans are completely in the dark about (recently i was with some coworkers and said i had a beer and was willing to share, and presented a bottle of gouden carolus d'or - grand cru of the emperor, and having never seen a corked bottle of beer the response was "i thought you said you had beer") now i'd assume that the market for exporting american craft beers to europe is a lot more limited to americans' desire to import european beers. we know that while there are imports in the grocery stores and gas station, they aren't the best european beers, and there is much better to be had. great european beers are not imported to the US in anywhere near the quantity in which we import stuff like heineken. i'd imagine the bulk of american beer europeans have been exposed to has not been anywhere close to the best of american brewing. anyway, ratebeer.com is a good site, but i usually use beeradvocate. they're both good.
I'd have to say that those beers listed are some of the worse. I mean...Heinekken... only good as cheap beer at parties where you don't give a fuck. Same with Wife Beater (Stella Artois). The top stuff I'd recommend is anything from the Czech Republic or Belgium. Both quality brewers of beer and yes, I'd have to agree with you that Europe set the standards for brewing beer. It is where it was created hundreds of years ago, afterall.
