CONTINENTAL ALES
NEARLY ALL OF the surviving styles of beer—continental ales, lagers, and the British and Irish ales—originated in three fairly concentrated regions. If you trace a line from Lille, France, through Belgium and on to Berlin, Germany, you set a course through some of the most famous ale-producing regions in the world. It covers just over 500 miles, about the distance between Atlanta, Georgia, and Richmond, Virginia, and farther than San Francisco is from Portland, Oregon. That proximity helps explain the existence of all those German ales—Cologne, after all, is only 130 miles from Brussels, but 350 from Munich. In a similar fashion, France’s old brewing traditions were centered around Lille, right on the border with Belgium, and those beers were and remain ales. Farther south, Strasbourg became the center of lager-producing France in the 20th century (which makes sense: Strasbourg is far closer to Bavaria than Bruges).
Lagers were even more concentrated. Bavaria and Bohemia share a lagering tradition going back centuries. Munich and Pilsen, two of the most famous beer cities in the world, aren’t much farther apart than Boston and New York. Vienna is a longer trek, but the triangle that joins these three brewing cities would form a country the size of Belgium.
British brewers communicated with the continent, and their ales were not born in a vacuum. Still, the famous styles produced in Great Britain and Ireland are yet a third concentration of the world’s great beers.
Draw a rough circle around these three areas and you’ve captured something on the order of 80 percent of all existing beer styles brewed in the world.
