Nice article at Reason on the flourishing American beer market. Despite the sneering connotations often given to the phrase “American beer,” the article notes that “More styles of suds are now brewed in America than in any other place. Along with the light-tasting lagers that still dominate the market, the new offerings include porters, stouts, barley wines, bocks, hefeweizens, pale ales, bitters, and Belgian-style farmhouse ales. American beers consistently win the highest proportion of awards in international competitions. Local and regional beer has re-emerged: There are more than 1,400 breweries in the United States, up from only a few dozen at the start of the 1980s.”

I will also come clean and say that I actually enjoy some mass-market American lagers. Just the other evening, in fact, I was partaking of the Champagne of Beers, Miller High Life, or what I like to call the thinking man’s PBR. Which is not to say that I don’t also enjoy stouts, ales, IPAs and all that good stuff, but sometimes a bottle of the High Life or a cold Bud slakes the thirst in a way that an overly complex microbrew just can’t.