Beer is manufactured by more than 7,000 breweries in the United States, which range in size from industry giants to brew pubs and microbreweries. The United States produced 196 million barrels () of beer in 2012, and consumes roughly of beer per capita annually. In 2011, the United States was ranked fifteenth in the world in per capita consumption, while total consumption was second only to China.
Although beer was a part of colonial life in the United States, the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1919 resulted in the prohibition of alcoholic beverage sales, forcing nearly all American breweries to close or switch to producing non-alcoholic products. After the repeal of Prohibition, the industry consolidated into a small number of large-scale breweries. Many of the big breweries that returned to producing beer after Prohibition, today largely owned by international conglomerates like Anheuser-Busch InBev, still retain their dominance of the market in the 21st century. However, the majority of the new breweries that have opened in the U.S. over the past three decades have been small breweries and brewpubs, referred to as "craft breweries" to differentiate them from the larger and older breweries. Breweries are growing rapidly around the United States. People travel all over the world just to try out different breweries. Different types of beers that craft breweries normally produce are wheats, sours, IPA, pale ales, and lagers. Many craft beer drinkers select beer based on the ABV and IBU percentage, in order to determine the hops and the alcohol percentage.
The most common style of beer produced by the big breweries is American lager, a form of pale lager; small breweries, most of which were founded since the 1980s, produce a range of styles. Beer styles indigenous in the United States include amber ale, cream ale, and California common. More recent craft styles include American Pale Ale, American IPA, India Pale Lager, Black IPA, and the American "Double" or "Imperial" IPA.
History
Beginnings
The earliest record of brewing dates from 1587, and the first commercial brewery in the United States was built by the Dutch West India Company in 1632 in Lower Manhattan on Brewers (later Stone) Street. On February 5, 1663, Nicholas Varlett obtained from Peter Stuyvesant a patent for a brewery on Castle Point in Hoboken, New Jersey.
The brewing traditions of England and the Netherlands (as brought to New York) ensured that colonial drinking would be dominated by beer rather than wine. Until the middle of the 19th century, British-style ales dominated American brewing. This changed when the longer shelf-life lager styles brought by German immigrants turned out to be more profitable for large-scale manufacturing and shipping. The hops in lager had preservative qualities, while non-hopped local ales of the time quickly turned sour and were a perceived risk to drink.
The lager brewed by these companies was originally based on several different styles of Central Europe, but the Pilsener style, using mild Czech hops, pale, lightly roasted six-row barley and often adjuncts such as rice and corn, gradually won out.
Steam beer, the first uniquely American beer style, evolved in the San Francisco area during the 19th century. It was born out of the desire to produce lager beer without the use of refrigeration. After prohibition ended, the Anchor Brewing Company was left as the sole producer of steam beer. The company was near closure in 1965, whereupon Fritz Maytag, great-grandson of the Maytag Corporation founder, rescued the brewery and with it the steam beer style. Anchor has since trademarked the term "Steam Beer" and all subsequent renditions of the style are now termed California common.
D.G. Yuengling & Son, commonly called Yuengling, is the oldest operating brewing company in the United States, having been established in 1829 by David Yuengling, and is one of the largest breweries by volume in the country. Headquartered in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, it is currently the largest American-owned brewery.
One of the earliest large-scale brewers was Best Brewing (later renamed Pabst Brewing Company), a Milwaukee brewery built by German immigrant Phillip Best in the 1840s. Other successful breweries of the era begun by German immigrants in Milwaukee included Valentin Blatz Brewing Company, Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, and Miller Brewing Company.