Anyone hiring at the moment?

[Ricardo Signes]

* Nicholas Clark <nick at ccl4.org> [2009-09-29T05:18:15]
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 02:06:32AM -0700, Ovid wrote:
> > That's the same reason so many Americans like piss, er, rice lagers.  Due
> > to grain rationing in WWII, rice was often substituted for barley.  It
> > results in a much weaker, watery beer with no flavor and Americans seemed
> > to forget that beer can actually taste good.  Heck, I learned to *like*
> > Diet Coke after drinking enough of it.  I have no taste, either.
> 
> That's what you say. I think that this is just a large Yankee conspiracy to
> make the rest of the beer-appreciating world think that there is no decent
> beer in America. This way America can keep the good stuff to itself, because
> no-one realises that they need to get upset because it's not exported.

I suppose that as a Yank, I can't properly dismiss this theory, but I'll try.
We have some totally amazing beer here.  My favorite beers are all American,
and I've had enough good British, Irish, and European beer to feel like I can
fairly choose between them.  There is a large culture of beer appreciation
here.

...but there's also a large culture of beer ignorance.  It's 11:18 here, local
time, and the guy across the aisle from me on this motor coach just finished
drinking a pint can of Busch, a horrible beer in the family known as "American
adjunct lagers."  The adjunct in question is, yeah, rice.  These are the beers
that America is infamous for in the rest of the world, and rightly so: they're
ubiquitous and awful.  A crappy bar will always serve Miller, Busch, Bud,
and Molson.  Maybe there will be one or two local beers of random quality.
Locally, you will *always* find Yuengling Lager.  If you say, "gimme a lager,"
you get that.  It's actually beer (unlike Busch) but it's not great.

Even a fair bar has a number of good beers on tap, though, and they're almost
always all American.  I think that we Yanks who like our great American beer
would love to share knowledge of it with the rest of the world -- but it's
mostly produced by local concerns who don't make enough to supply the world.
That said, my absolute favorite brewery, Victory, apparently supplies some
places in London.  I urge you to see if HopDevil is available near you.  I
imagine it will have suffered a bit from the trip, but it's a fantastic beer.

> (I think that the Danes adopt the same policy, and the Germans do for wine)
> 
> On the other hand, the Japanese managed to make decent lager from rice.
> How come America can't?

Do you mean happoshu, or Japanese rice-adjunct lagers?  I've never had an Asian
beer that I liked much, but I'd love to find one.

-- 
rjbs