US beer vs UK beer

I like to believe that I deal with all the weighty cultural issues in this British expat blog and what could be of more import than the relative merits of British and American beer?

The first thing that I would say is that the almost universally negative image of American beer that exists in Britain (and Europe too for that matter) is certainly too simplistic.  (The negative image is summed up by the old Monty Python joke: “American beer is a little like making love in a canoe.  It's f**king close to water.”)

The problem for American beer is that the only brands that you tend to see in the UK are the awful ones like Miller Lite and Budweiser (Anheuser-Busch).  These really are bland, watery beers.  Like in the UK, however, the better American beers tend to come from the smaller, local breweries, rather than the leviathans.  (To some extent, the US has similar problems with beer as the UK did in the 60s and 70s with aggressive major breweries [with crap beer] trying to muscle out the smaller and medium-sized breweries [with good beer] with the intention of creating local monopolies.)

Because of the localized nature of brewing and the size of the US, plus my own admittedly limited experience, it would actually be ridiculous for me to even attempt to give a comprehensive major overview, so instead I will just settle for giving my personal experiences of living in north-central Florida. 

My favorite (big brewery) US beers that I drink regularly here in North Central Florida:

 

Shiner – brewed in Austin, Texas is easily my favourite that I've found.  It has a strong and distinctive taste.  When I used to visit Florida, I couldn’t believe how dirt cheap it was in the store.  By the time I’d moved here, however, they’d bumped up the price!  They only sell Shiner in certain US states and luckily Florida is one of them - I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t get hold of it up in New York.

Blue Moon – A Belgian-style wheat beer which is very palatable (despite being a Coors product!)  Belgian-style wheat beers (think Hoegaarden) seem to be fairly common here nowadays (I believe that US breweries started making witbeers about 10 or 15 years ago), but German-style, tarter wheat beers are generally rarer, it seems.

Sam Adams produce reasonable beer and I enjoy some of their selection packs - some of these beers can be a little gimmicky but it’s fun to try them.

Yuengling is for me just on the right side of the line between the watery American beers and the good ones in my opinion.  I will drink it sometimes, however, because it’s often cheaper(!)

Most British/Irish beers are relatively specialist in the US in my (limited) experience.  The most commonly available ones in the bars and stores where I am are Newcastle Brown Ale and Harp, which seems a little bizarre to me, as these drinks were common in the UK back in the 70s and 80s but have largely waned in popularity. 

The best British beer, the real ales, aren’t really available in draught form, which is a pity, but no surprise.  You can get a limited but reasonable range in the bottled section – although the US tends to put everything into small (approx 300ml?) bottles, which still irritates me a little.  I still find it strange seeing a US miniature, differently shaped version of the iconic Newcastle Brown Ale bottle and there is something sacrilegious about seeing hefeweissen sold in bottles below 500ml in size (although you can buy the ‘proper’ German 500ml bottles in the specialist stores!)  ;-)

European beers are also fairly widely available in the US in my experience and I drink a lot of Becks Dark, Warsteiner, and Heineken here.  I have also found a couple of outlets locally that sell my all time favourite (more specialist) European beers, which tend to be from Germany*, Belgium, and Central Europe.  German hefeweissen will always be one of my favourite tipples.

Cider

Cider isn’t a beer, of course, but it’s drunk in a similar way, so I thought that I would give it a mention.  I actually love cider as a refreshing alternative to beer and having cheap, available cider is something that I miss here in the US, especially when you’re on a limited budget (cider is often the cheap drunk’s tipple in the UK!). 

From what I gather, cider wasn’t particularly common in the US (compared to the UK) until relatively recently.  Now it’s easier to get hold of, but the ciders tend to be the big Irish brands that are advertised to be drunk over ice, such as Magners.  American ciders often seem to be sweeter and relatively weak, compared to the stronger and drier British ones, in my experience. 

Scrumpy style cider is pretty specialist in the US, although it’s difficult to imagine that it doesn’t exist in a rough form somewhere in the USA? 

The good news is that do sell Strongbow on draught in some bars of the bars around here – hurray!

*German bars are quite possibly the best place in the world for drinking draught and bottled beer, in my opinion.  Mainly because they are scrupulous when it comes to storing their beers at the correct temperature.  This is why Germany is generally known to be the best place for drinking draught Guiness methinks (even better than Ireland, ironically).  The sad and slightly strange fact is that in places like the US and Britain, bars will quite often undermine a great beer by storing, or serving it too cold or too warm in my experience.

Identity crisis?

One tends to think of the immigrant/emigrant experience as being one of cultural difficulties and social adjustment, but as Eve expresses in her recent post at Queen’s English, the personal and emotional impacts of moving to another country can in some ways be greater. In fact it’s no exaggeration to say that one’s entire sense of self can be challenged to a surprisingly large degree.

The thing is, as psychologists have pointed out, our sense of who we are to a large degree relates to memory. So suddenly having nobody around us who shares any of the major experiences from our previous life can be unnerving and troubling from an emotional point of view. Often when we meet up with old friends in our everday lives, we will reminisce about events from the past and the people that we’ve known, both good and bad. It backs up and reasserts a sense of who we are.

I must admit that one of my favourite fantasies when seized by bouts of homesickness is just to be in the pub with old friends. People who know me, understand where I coming from, get my sense of humour. They’ve done some of the same things as me, met some of the same people, and lived in the same places. (I sometimes yearn for my previous access to affordable health and dental care too, but that’s another matter!)

Of course, one can’t allow oneself to be too much seized by nostalgia. It is easy to slip into the trap of romanticizing one’s homeland, if you’re not careful. There is nothing worse than the sentimental expat barfly, crying into his beer. Plus for me personally, I have been through some not dissimilar experiences before – leaving home and going to university in another part of the country, for instance. I have also known many people in the UK who’ve come to live from other places. It sometimes seems like half the world is hopping around between countries nowadays.

Given the pressures, I can understand why some emigrants return to their homeland within a year, or university students drop out before the first term has finished, but that isn’t really my style, and nor is it Eve’s, I would venture.

Questioning authority (British and American differences)

I remember back in the 1980s when I shared a house with the American poet, Lyman Andrews, who worked as an American Studies lecturer at Leicester University at the time.  He used to really make fun of what he saw as the British tendency to obey authority without question.  He saw it as virtually a form of instinctive sheepishness.  His theory was that you only had to behave like a figure of authority and British people would obey you without question. 

Part of Lyman’s attitude came from his own rebellious personality (he was a raving alcoholic, openly bisexual, and loved to behave outrageously) but mostly it was cultural, I’d say.  His assertion that Americans are far more likely to question authority figures is almost certainly true.

British people are brought up from a young age to respect authority and there is a reverence for rules and laws that can mystify many other cultures.  (There is, of course, the British yob/hooligan subculture which delights in deliberately breaking rules, but they are the exception that proves the rule).

The advantage of such conformity, of course, is that Britain is essentially a very stable society and hasn’t had as many destructive upheavals as our European neighbours in the past two hundred years, or extremist governments, for that matter.  If you want something changing in Britain, you are supposed to go through all the proper channels and at some point in the future, it might or might not happen – in the meantime you are supposed to endure things as they are – which can be somewhat frustrating to say the least!  Another criticism of the British attitude (that even Brits themselves will often acknowledge), is that there is a general reluctance to complain about anything, a fear of “kicking up a fuss”, even when people are treated in an obviously rude, or poor manner – such as getting a bad service in a restaurant. 

American’s value their freedom, which is a good thing.  But the American attitude towards authority isn’t always entirely healthy either, in my opinion.  At the extreme, many Americans can seem distrustful to the point of paranoia at times, when viewed from a British perspective.  Conspiracy theories (many of them positively outlandish) about the government and other public bodies abound in the US.  There is also a tendency sometimes for rants about the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution to be invoked for trivial matters like getting a parking ticket.

My American wife doesn’t quite agree with me on this next point, but I would say that generally speaking, the US authorities allow more freedom, but if you cross the line, they come down on you much heavier and in a more pedantic way than in the UK.  In Britain, there is a tighter overview of things, but there is a more pragmatic approach taken by people such as the police and other officials and much of the time you can be let off for transgressions, even when you have clearly broken the rules.   In some ways, the overall net effect of the US and British systems are the same, but how they go about things can be quite different.

I would also say that although joking around with officials such as customs officials and the police can often be a tricky game to play, I personally suspect that you can get away with an awful lot more in the UK.  US officialdom doesn’t take any crap, basically.  As American writer, Bill Bryson says: “I had also got used to the idea that here (in Britain) you can make quips all the time and in America that can be very dangerous. I wrote about it in one of the books. Once I was going through customs and immigration in Boston, and the guy said as I went past "Any fruit or vegetables?" and I said "OK, I'll have four pounds of potatoes if they are fresh" and it was like he was going to take me off and pin me to the floor.”

If my wife is anything to go by, Americans tend to be troubled by things such as the number of CCTV cameras that exist in the UK, which are seen as an infringement of privacy (I don’t like them much myself either, but I am generally outnumbered by other Brits who tend to see them as deterring crime).

There is also a big fuss here in the US at the moment about airport security checks – although I do suspect that part of the difference in attitude is that in the UK, where domestic terrorism has been a major problem for longer, the security has been incrementally increasing over decades, so we have got gradually accustomed to it - whereas the US had very little internal security before 9/11 and then lots after, so many people resent suddenly being searched after traveling more or less unhindered for years.

Brits, on the other hand (well, certainly me), are disturbed by what seems like an extraordinarily high amount of people who are incarcerated in the US.  7% of all Americans are locked up in a jail at any one time, which is the highest documented rate for any country in the world according to Wikipedia.  I know that the US has lots of problems with violent crime, but it just doesn’t seem right for a democracy to lock up so many of its own people (even if there is popular support for it).

I guess my overall view would be that the US can seem paradoxically both a bit more anarchic and a bit more authoritarian than the UK, if that sounds possible?  Maybe “authoritarian” is bad word usage, maybe it’s better to say that the authorities just seem harsher.  I guess it’s also worth noting that Britain is fairly extreme in that the police aren’t evenly routinely armed, so that is the kind of “norm” that I come from!  (Of course, many in the US and some on the rightwing in the UK would just say that Britain was just too soft and a “nanny state”).