Beer itself is a culinary achievement. The humble combination of water, grain, hops, and yeast is able to create familiar flavors and aromas that are rooted in our world’s modern food culture, and thus make it the ideal adult beverage companion to any meal. But that’s not how everyone sees it. Because of the disruption that Prohibition caused in the history of American beer making, and the subsequent decades after its repeal, when only a handful of large breweries remained in the country—and basically all made slight variations on the same style, the bland American lager— beer has been playing catch-up with the minds and taste buds of drinkers for decades. It’s true that going back to the 1960s, advertisements from the likes of Budweiser and Coors Banquet suggested pairing lagers with the meat, potato, and vegetable dinners cooked at home, or alongside a cut of steak at a restaurant. But it was the wine industry that largely ran the table when it came to asserting itself as a steady food companion. Thanks to a price point that could denote a special occasion, and some great marketing, wine has long been what went with dinner, because that’s just the way it was. The beer industry has made extraordinary strides over the last five decades. These days, there are nearly ten thousand operating American breweries—most of them small, independently owned, and serving local communities—and they’re pushing the boundaries of what beer is and can be. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, brewers began to experiment with ingredients, going heavy on hops to impart big citrus or pine flavors to batches of ale, as well as adding spices and specialty grains to the mix. Looking around the world for inspiration, American brewers found it in other sophisticated beer cultures, replicated it, and then quickly went to work adapting those recipes to suit their tastes and needs. Over time craft beer started showing up in restaurant kitchens where chefs were drinking the good stuff in the back and it soon appeared on menus. These beers embraced flavor, and soon enough those beers were showing up as dinner pairings on their menus.

Free download https://wz.d-ld.net/a37f3db640