Introduction:
Sit Down, Stay a While, and Have a Beer

There has never been, in the history of the world, a better time to drink a beer. That may seem a little too absolutist, not to mention hyperbolic, but it’s 100 percent true. There has never been a single point throughout earth’s existence when there was as much consumer choice as there is at this very moment.

If one were to make such a statement forty years ago, that person would have been laughed right out of the room. The number of American producers had sunk to the mere double digits. And as for the ones that were still producing, they all were pretty much making the same beer: pale, fizzy, industrial lager that was not only light in color but doubly light in flavor. To be sure, the handful that remained were doing quite well, having put small, regional brewers out of business or having absorbed them into their own snowballing operations. The big got bigger and the small . . . well, they just vanished.

But little did mainstream society know that a gargantuan tidal wave was bearing down on legal-drinking-age society. The DIY spirit of a handful of upstart American artisans was driving those enterprising individuals to mine the world’s great flavor and style traditions—some still common in their local markets, others nearly extinct—and ultimately returning beer to its former glory.

And now, with more than 4,000 operating breweries in America—a number that’s likely to double by 2025—and tens of billions of dollars added to the economy that hadn’t been there previously, beer, to paraphrase legendary (albeit fictional) TV anchor Ron Burgundy, is kind of a big deal.

However, it’s also a beverage that, more often than not, gets taken for granted by just about everyone who’s ever drunk a bottle or pint or glanced at a beer ad or two. It’s just . . . always been there.

But most rarely take a second to think about every little step—from the cultivation of ingredients to the design of a can or bottle’s label—that goes into getting that drink to the store or bar and, ultimately, into the drinker’s hand.

Beer is more than a beverage; it’s the culmination of seven millennia of natural happenstance, technological innovation, political upheaval, and shifting social structures. It’s the rare invention whose credit belongs equally to science and religion.

And the styles and brand imagery reflect that rather odd juxtaposition between those often contradictory forces. For most of beer’s time on earth—remember, we’re talking thousands of years here—its delicious, mildly intoxicating existence had been credited to divine forces. And as it survived through civilization after civilization, from the Sumerians to the Egyptians to the Romans and to the medieval citizens of the European feudal system, it ultimately was in the hands of the clergy where it evolved toward its contemporary iterations. Science perfected beer, made it replicable, and brought consistent quality into the equation, but it remains, at its core, art rooted in the spiritual.

Breweries continue to venerate beer’s divine heritage by using names and imagery tied to ancient gods and goddesses credited with the beverage’s invention, as well as the monastic tradition that formed its bridge to the modern era.