Ever wonder why you drink the beer you drink? Because most of us do settle in on one kind, on one brand, and stick with that: Bud Light, Corona, Pabst, Miller Lite, what have you. We drink that beer when it's available – it's "our beer." It's what we have at home, and it's what we reluctantly stray from when the tavern we visit doesn't stock it, or when a different brand has made an exclusive deal with a stadium.

 

That's not exactly what we're talking about this week, because I'm just not going to dive into the cesspool that is marketing and branding and advertising, the whole panoply of mind-bending techniques that business uses to tattoo its brands right across our ass. (For a warped look at that, find "The Space Merchants" and "Venus, Inc." at the library: you'll never watch an ad the same way again ... and you'll probably never want to eat chicken livers, either.) I would, but it's too insulting and, well, I's kinda taken a likin's to ya, ya wee pack o' dolts. So no insults this week.

 

What I do want to talk about is why almost all of us drink the same kind of beer. All those brands I mentioned above, and more – Budweiser, MGD, Tecate, Busch, Keystone, Old Milwaukee: they're all very similar, to the point where most people who drink them regularly cannot pick them out of a blind lineup of other light lagers. Most beer geeks find that hilarious. Screw 'em. I'd like to see them pick Guinness out of a lineup of dry stouts. Beers of a type should be alike.

 

On the other hand, it IS kind of weird that over 85 percent of the beer drunk by Americans is of that same type. It's as if almost every wino in the country drank chardonnay. And I know that's not true – I've seen it. But that's how it is on the beer side of the aisle, and we're going to find out why.

 

Go back 100 years, and you find much more variety in American beer, and the stuff we made and drank was much more full-bodied and bitter. We drank bock beer in the spring time, we drank a lot of pilsner, we drank Vienna beer (a dark lager a lot like Oktoberfest beer), we drank ales.

 

Heck, you don't even have to go that far back. Ballantine Ale was one of the biggest beers in the country only 40 years ago, huge in New England, a hoppy shot in the chops that even I can remember.

 

What happened? One of the biggest parts of it was Prohibition, one of the worst government projects ever thought up. As humorist Don Marquis put it, Prohibition made you want to cry in your beer, and denied you the beer to cry into.

 

Luckily, there were people who were willing to sell you that beer. Criminals, mostly, which was another wonderful side effect of Prohibition, but that's beside the point. The point is that the beer these guys made was cheap, light, and fast.

 

You may hear stories of how the beer Al Capone sold in Chicago was better than the beer the breweries made before Prohibition. Tell Gramps to put a sock in it, because he's wrong again. Criminals may have been great free enterprise types, but they worked under some serious handicaps as brewers, guys like Capone being one of them.

 

Gangster beer was lower in alcohol than pre-Prohibition beer, because they could stretch it further that way. It was not aged as long, so they could turn it over faster; gotta keep those tanks in use. And it wasn't as hoppy, because hops are only used for one thing: making beer, and the less they used, the less chance they'd be traced. It's not like anyone was going to call them on it: it was beer, it was the only game in town.

 

We drank this light, sweet, half-green stuff for 13 years, and not surprisingly, we got used to it. We got used to it so much that when Repeal came through and the breweries opened up again and started making beer the way they had before Prohibition ... we didn't like it. And the brewers, no dummies, shrugged and made lighter beer. After all, it was cheaper and faster for them, too.

 

After that hammer-blow to beer, the next one wasn't far behind: World War II. We shipped beer to "the boys," of course, in the new-fangled cans, but brewing supplies were tight – for some reason, they wanted farms devoted to food production! – and it was again cheaper/easier/faster to make all light lager.

 

People have tried to pin the lightening of American beer on Rosie the Riveter. "They made the beer lighter to appeal to women while the men were away at war," the story goes. I don't buy it. "Rosie" was not only working long hours at the factory, she was taking care of the home and everyone else. And even though she was a factory worker now, women in the 1940s didn't go out for a drink by themselves very often. Besides, the breweries weren't looking for new markets with the restrictions on materials.

 

The final factor was the victory of the big brewers over the small ones. It's no coincidence that most of the small brewers who are still around from before Prohibition make a variety of beers. Yuengling Brewery of Pottsville, Penn., America's oldest brewery, makes a porter, as does the 100-year-old Lion Brewery of Wilkes-Barre, Penn. The big guys concentrated their efforts on one type of beer, and got the most effective economies of scale that they could.

 

Making this one kind of beer, a light-bodied, light-tasting beer, made it easier to sell one kind of beer. It appeals to the biggest number of people – kind of like McDonald's – and it's relatively inexpensive – kind of like McDonald's – and you always knew what you were getting, no matter where you were – just like McDonald's. Nothing succeeds like success: fast food and big beer were two of the most successful ideas in the 1960s.

 

Light beer was almost an afterthought, and when it was first tried, it failed; men didn't want to be seen drinking a "diet beer." But "tastes great, less filling" crashed that barrier: those of you in your 30s or older might remember being at the ballpark back in the day when half the crowd would chant "tastes great!" and the other half would yell "less filling!" Now that's a pretty damn effective marketing campaign. Today, light beer is the biggest part of the American beer market, and still growing.

 

That's how it happened. What's all that mean? Well, white bread is still the most popular seller, Maxwell House outsells Starbucks, and there are still more McDonald's around than there are Ruth's Chris Steak Houses. What it means, then, is that light lager is the biggest seller in the American market, for a variety of historical and market reasons that still make sense today.

 

What's really impressive, though, is how Big American brewers have managed to convince all of us that light lagers ARE beer, period. When we think "beer," that's what picture pops up in our heads, not porter, or bock, or IPA, or any of the other many types of beer, all equally valid creations. That's got to stand as the triumph of the beer marketer, who has found what people will buy the most of, and found ways to deliver that in spades. Pretty impressive. Let's order up another pitcher.