The End of the Line for the Big Brewers?

I was in the elevator yesterday with some maintenance guys at my company. They were all real blue-collar types, and they were arguing about the best drinking beers for summer.

Call me a snob (I’m not), but I expected the discussions to be along the lines of “Less Filling! Tastes Great!” or Bud vs. Miller.

No way.

The three contenders? Murphy’s Irish Stout, Guinness and Sam Adams.

That discussion would have been unthinkable ten years ago (when only beer geeks drank those beers), and five years ago, those beers were strictly white collar.

Who's drinking Bud now?

Even when I was a young kid, I knew the American beer market left something to be desired (even though I never had a brew until I was 21, of course). Other countries would talk about lagers, ales, bocks, doppelbocks, India pales, stouts, weizens…But we only had standard American Lager: lifeless, pale yellow pisswater, produced in industrial-sized vats in Milwaukee.

It’s capitalism in action: giving choice to the consumer!

- posted by total @ 7/08/2003 09:03:00 AM .