Why do Americans like their beer cold?

As for the OP? Well the simple fact of the matter is that here in America, unlike in Europe, we tend to engage in various, tremendously masculine vocations which cause us to sweat and build muscles in other-than-gym settings. We prefer beer of a lower temperature because it helps to cool us down after our dusty, manly undertakings.
 
Checkmite said:
As for the OP? Well the simple fact of the matter is that here in America, unlike in Europe, we tend to engage in various, tremendously masculine vocations which cause us to sweat and build muscles in other-than-gym settings. We prefer beer of a lower temperature because it helps to cool us down after our dusty, manly undertakings.
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It's also refreshing after a bout of gay sex.
 
Here's a long, but interesting article on the history of beer in America.

In the history of American beer, the modern period begins on the spring day in 1882 when the short-lived American Association of baseball teams opened for business. The establishment-leaning National League, aiming for a tonier clientele, had recently doubled ticket prices and banned gambling, Sunday playing, and—most important—beer. Franchise owners in St. Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and other brewing centers refused to accept the new rules and seceded from the league. Several of them were brewers themselves, and they had learned to count on a sizable increase in collective thirst on home-game days. So, banding together, they formed the American Association. Dubbed the Beer and Whiskey League by the competition, it scorned the toffs and made its pitch directly to the average workingman, keeping the ticket price an affordable 25 cents, playing on the Sabbath, his only day off, and serving what had already become his signature drink.

Though there were strange days ahead for the mostly German-born beer barons, here, in this heady mix of beer, baseball, and fun, were most of the elements that would come to define beer’s role in the American living room and the American imagination: its connection to sports and other places men go to escape and to bond; its connection to leisure, especially of the American working class; and its implicitly rebellious, nose-thumbing attitude toward the tastes and rules of social “betters” and other authority figures.
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The beer served in the Beer and Whiskey League stadiums in spring 1882 was recognizably the American beverage we know today. Milder, lighter, and less bitter than older American ales or European beers, pale, effervescent, low in alcohol, and served very cold, it was a refreshment, meant to be drunk quickly. No longer part of the history of American nourishment, it was now part of the history of American entertainment.
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Spending a few hours in the hot sun watching baseball, a cold, refreshing, lower-alcohol beer makes sense. Plus,

Lager, if kept cold, was more stable than ale, and advances in bottling, refrigeration, and railroad transportation, along with the introduction of pasteurization (invented by the French chemist while studying the fermentation of beer), meant longer shelf life and the ability to ship beer long distances without spoilage. (The advent of the crown bottle cap in 1892 would extend shelf life even further.) Adolphus Busch was the first to see what all this made possible: the creation of a national brand. Near Pilsen was a town, once home to the royal court brewery of Bohemia, that made a slightly sweeter version of golden lager whose recipe Busch felt was ideally suited to American tastes. The town was called Ceske Budejovice, but it was better know by its German name, Budweis. The Budweiser brand, created in 1875, would make Busch a very wealthy man.
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Cainkane1 said:
Drkiitten is wrong about American beer these days.
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No, I'm not, thanks.

The craft beer/microbrew movement is relatively new. The Boston Beer Company, for example, started in 1984 and sold its first beer in 1985. As they themselves put it, "In 1984, the American landscape was vastly different from what it is today. The only options for domestic beer were pale lagers from the mass market brewers. To find a flavorful, "better beer", there were only a handful of imports like Heineken and Beck's that were thought of as the only option for quality beer. American craft beers were virtually non-existent, or still in the basements and kitchens of a few spirited brewers. There were virtually no widely distributed micro brewed beers."

The problem, of course, is that you can't reverse the 50+ year legacy of prohibition on a dime. During Prohibition, the only way to get beer was to smuggle it in, or more often to make it yourself (badly), so the effect was that American beer tasted bad and had to be drunk very cold to be palatable; after prohibition ended, the only companies in a position to expand into the new beer market did so with the generic American-style lager that, again, had to be drunk very cold to be palatable.

By the time Sam Adams entered the market, Americans had gotten used to the idea that beer should be drunk at refrigerator temperature, not cellar temperature.
 
Good beer in America is nothing new. Back in the 60's you could go to certain restaurants and find an assortment of good decent imported beer. Bud and Pabst and miller etc wasn't my cup of tea even in those days and beer from the UK, Germany etc was what beer lovers preferred.

Busweiser is something to drink at a red neck dive. The same goes for the other macrobrewed slop.
 
drkitten said:
No, I'm not, thanks.

The craft beer/microbrew movement is relatively new. The Boston Beer Company, for example, started in 1984 and sold its first beer in 1985. As they themselves put it, "In 1984, the American landscape was vastly different from what it is today. The only options for domestic beer were pale lagers from the mass market brewers. To find a flavorful, "better beer", there were only a handful of imports like Heineken and Beck's that were thought of as the only option for quality beer. American craft beers were virtually non-existent, or still in the basements and kitchens of a few spirited brewers. There were virtually no widely distributed micro brewed beers."

The problem, of course, is that you can't reverse the 50+ year legacy of prohibition on a dime. During Prohibition, the only way to get beer was to smuggle it in, or more often to make it yourself (badly), so the effect was that American beer tasted bad and had to be drunk very cold to be palatable; after prohibition ended, the only companies in a position to expand into the new beer market did so with the generic American-style lager that, again, had to be drunk very cold to be palatable.

By the time Sam Adams entered the market, Americans had gotten used to the idea that beer should be drunk at refrigerator temperature, not cellar temperature.
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Wait, you think Sam Adams is a good example of craft brewing? I mean they're decent, but they're hardly top tier over here.
 
I wonder why people drink beer at all. What a foul taste. Often people tell me it's an 'acquired' taste... Well, so is vinegar and you don't see people drinking vinegar by the bottle.
 
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IMST said:
Wait, you think Sam Adams is a good example of craft brewing?
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They've been overtaken as brewers, but they did more or less create the craft beer movement in the States, and for the better part of twenty years, they were the type-specimen for a commercially successful microbrew. (They've now gotten large enough, of course, that they're no longer "microbrewers.")

So, yes, I think they're a very good example of how craft brewing works in the States, and of the background assumptions that underly the American brewing industry, and of what you have to work with if you want to understand what "American beer" is.
 
hgc said:
I have to assume that much mass-marketed beer in the US is actually aimed at people who don't like the taste of beer.
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This too is an illogical argument (at least as stated). At the very least, it's a "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Beers like Snow and Bud Lite are the biggest selling beers in the world. To say that most of the beer people drink is only consumed because those people don't like beer makes the implicit claim that those best-selling beers aren't beer somehow.
 
drkitten said:
The problem, of course, is that you can't reverse the 50+ year legacy of prohibition on a dime. During Prohibition, the only way to get beer was to smuggle it in, or more often to make it yourself (badly), so the effect was that American beer tasted bad and had to be drunk very cold to be palatable; after prohibition ended, the only companies in a position to expand into the new beer market did so with the generic American-style lager that, again, had to be drunk very cold to be palatable.
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While this account of history might be true*, it's largely irrelevant today, where those big-selling beers are actually made and intended to be served cold.

I think the biggest issue here is that people on this thread are expressing a personal preference for ales rather than lagers. However, they seem to deny the fact that lagers are by far the biggest-selling kinds of beers.

*It could also be that refrigeration technology was developed and in general use roughly the same time Prohibition ended. On a side note, in pre-Prohibition days, St. Louis was a major beer capital in part because of its wealth of caverns in the city that were used for low-tech "refrigeration" in the lagering process.
 
American beer is like vengeance -- it is a bitter brew that is best when served cold.

Euro beer is like coming home -- A warm and satisfying welcome for the weary traveler.
 
As a dedicated Beer drinker across the south of England fo 30 years I can tell you that I have never, ever encountered a warm or room temperature pint or one below 3.5% We have fantastic Beers with countless micro breweries churning out award winning Beer week in week out.
I stopped drinking a while back.
All this talk of Beer makes me want to get off the Wagon and start again.
 
Cainkane1 said:
On occassion I talk to a Brit or german working here in Atlanta ga. They don't like their beer as cold as we do. Theres nothing wrong with drinking room temperature beer but I like it cold myself. I talked to a Polish girl at my watering hole and she told me that some cultures like their beer warm enough to steam a bit.

Here in the American southeast I can understand. It gets darn hot here so we drink cold soda, iced tea and we prefer our beer as cold as we can get it without it actually freezing.

Ok Most caucasian americans ancestors come from England, Germany etc. Why do we like it as coold as we do? What changed us?
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It helps paralyse the taste buds so you don't actually taste the USAian beer.:)
 
Gawdzilla said:
Between the sweeping generalizations and the tired cliches this thread has it all.
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Yes, I'm still trying to figure out how something can be simultaneously watery, tasteless, bitter, rancid, and bad tasting. Neat trick, that.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
This too is an illogical argument (at least as stated). At the very least, it's a "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Beers like Snow and Bud Lite are the biggest selling beers in the world. To say that most of the beer people drink is only consumed because those people don't like beer makes the implicit claim that those best-selling beers aren't beer somehow.
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No, they're beer. I could have said it better, but I'm used to stating the case in hyperbolic terms. I'm just saying that they have a weaker taste of beer, less of a "beery" taste, than quality beers. Of course beer drinkers like the taste of the beer they're drinking.
 
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