Want Variety In Your Life?
Look To Beer
A
lthough beer has been around for countless millennia, its separation into styles and categories is somewhat recent. While scholarly analysis used to be primarily for beer judging and homebrewing, the average consumer now needs a modicum of brewing knowledge simply to wade through all the brands and styles currently available. Just 30 years ago, there was only a handful of national breweries in North America, all producing basically the same kind of beer, along with a sprinkling of craft breweries offering a couple of styles each. Restaurants and bars tended to be aligned with a single supplier, and liquor stores carried a few local craft beers and imports to break up the monotony of mass-produced lagers. Basically, when you found your favourites, you stuck with them for life. That methodology no longer applies.
34 Culinaire | June 2021
BY DAVID NUTTALL
It’s impossible to know how many different varieties of beer have ever been made, given that brewing was largely a cottage industry up to about 200 years ago. Until craft brewing arrived in the last quarter of the 20th century, beers were usually classified by the brewery or region of origin. Governments got involved for taxation and regulatory reasons, but for the most part, no one really cared about beer’s nomenclature. By the time brewing had expanded through the Industrial Revolution, it became even less important. Breweries actually started producing less varieties of beer as they grew larger, given the enormous cost of development, production, and marketing needed for each new line. In the last century, breweries were more likely to change the packaging of an existing brand than introduce a new product. This began to change when a perfect storm arrived in 1976; Jimmy Carter got
elected president of the United States and Michael James Jackson started writing The World Guide to Beer. These unrelated events kickstarted the craft brewing industry and initiated the avalanche of beer varietals that define 21st century brewing. Jackson’s book got published in 1977, and a year later, Carter legalized homebrewing again (banned since Prohibition began in 1920). This inspired thousands of university students and young professionals to study and brew beers similar to those mentioned in Jackson’s book, exploring styles unavailable in local stores and bars. Over the next decade, many of these neophytes opened small breweries all over North America. These new breweries usually started with two-four different beers; mostly ales since lagers take longer and are more finicky to brew. Knowing they had to compete against giant brewing conglomerates, they explored varieties
