Posted on 06/07/2024 3:36:54 AM PDT by Libloather
The best beers in the world are easier to get than ever before. Forty years ago, customers strolling through grocery stores would only find endless variations on the easy-drinking domestic lager. Care for a Busch? Miller High Life? Bud Light? If you were lucky, you might find an imported Irish beer like Guinness, a beach-y Mexican beer such as Corona, or perhaps even Foster’s, that Australian beer sold in the oversized can.
Today’s hopheads can pick from tens of thousands of the best beers that deliver every conceivable flavor and alcohol level. Hazy double IPAs are now sold alongside zippy pickle beers, prickly pilsners, fruity sour ales, and smooth-drinking hefeweizens. Beers like Allagash's White, Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, and Bell’s Brewery’s Two Hearted have become beloved classics occupying permanent perches in fridges far and wide.
Craft beer is now so mainstream that excellent IPAs are sold most everywhere, from 7-Eleven to Applebee’s and even college football stadiums. Despite the ubiquity, the beer industry has had a rough couple years, facing fierce competition from hard teas and seltzers, canned cocktails, and newly legal cannabis beverages and edibles. In 2023, store sales of craft beer slid nearly one percent while volumes declined 4.4 percent according to data from Circana, a Chicago-based market research firm.
While some breweries have shuttered, many breweries are thriving and continuing to produce beers that, to rise above the competition, are better than ever. New trends include craft breweries embracing pilsners and easy-drinking lagers, revamping the cleanly bitter west coast IPA, and creating compelling nonalcoholic beers and sparkling hop waters.
But after plenty of research—and, uh, drinking—we’ve settled on a ranked list of the top 50 best beers that are readily available.
(Excerpt) Read more at mensjournal.com ...
Does any of that stuff on the list taste like real beer or is it all fruity tasting????
For me, it was usually Miller or Miller Lite....
At college (Mizzou) in ‘69-‘73 we’d drink Busch and Bud. They were the local Missouri brands. You could only buy 3.2% ABV beer on Sundays!
Everybody was always trying to get Coors which wasn’t sold east of Colorado at the time. Looking back, I have to wonder why. It was just another bland lager.
I graduated, moved to San Francisco, and immediately discovered Anchor Steam Beer. That was heaven! I switched and never looked back.
Now I only drink obscure, small brewery local brands. I like supporting the local entrepreneurs. I really liked what Dan Gordon and Dean Biersch started in Palo Alto, CA in 1988. Gordon, a graduate from the five-year brewing engineering program at Weihenstephan, Germany, and Biersch opened their first brewery restaurant in Palo Alto, California, in July 1988.
I’m a big fan of “West Coast Style IPAs.” Just malt, hops and water. But I try to avoid the overly fruity ones.
About twenty years ago, I remember
Guinness is one most highly overrated beers that I have ever had.
Wanted to try one of those a few months back. Found out that some Japanese firm bought it and ruined everything. It went belly-up last year.
Deschute’s Obsidian Stout. Love that stuff.
Same here. Yuengling's always my first choice.
Lived 8 years in Seattle, had my fair share of Rainier!
I can’t hang with mango. And don’t get me started on pomegranates...
LOL...
I disagree. But I am dark and brooding.
A Canadian beer, Molson Golden, is a very good beer also....
Had Molson back in the day. Discovered St. Pauli Girl and it stuck. InBev (AB) owns it and just took it off the shelves for good. Rat bastids.
“Problem was always getting the Genny Squirts afterword.”
We called them Genny Steamers or Genny Screamers.
I’ve got a micro-brewery outlet 200 yards from where I live and I enjoy a pint from time to time. At $17 for a 4 pack or $7 a pint from the tap it’s a bit expensive.
Great TV ads, too, including one with croaking frogs long before Bud stole the idea. Remember the one where the guy pours beer straight across the table?
Ranier used to be available everywhere in Southern California. I recall the blues singer Pearl Bailey praising it in radio commercials in the mid-sixties. But in the 1990s, it started to become scarce, and it disappeared for good at the beginning of this century.
It's difficult to define a favorite as various beers "pair" better or worse with the environment. I won't drink a stout or trappiest on the golf course in July and I wont drink a pilsner in front of an outdoor fire in December. It's like trying to run your snowmobile on diesel.
If I have to choose a good all-around, have more than one, refreshing beer I probably would give Alhambra, Vienna Style Lager (Spain).
P.S. Any added flavors is an automatic DQ. (See Reinheitsgebot, German Beer Purity law (still in effect) of 1516.
Several years ago, they changed the shape of Guinness bottles. I swear that when they did that, they also changed what was inside. It just didn't taste as good as it used to.
“ Any added flavors is an automatic DQ.”
Amen to that!
*German Beer Purity law (still in effect) of 1516.*
Highly recommend the new beer hall in Whitsett. Every ingredient is a German import.
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