Beer is Culture

“Every major industrialized nation has a beer. You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline – it helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer”

-Frank Zappa

My last post regarding the Germans who disliked American style beers got me thinking about how beers can reflect the culture it comes from.

It has always been a law in Germany that they keep a beer’s purity. This is known as the, you guessed it, ‘German Purity Law’. This law states that a beer brewed in Germany should not contain anything but the essentials: Grain, Yeast, Water, and Hops. It’s very ‘German’ and sterile of them to abide by these laws, but what they do, they do right. German beers are pure and extremely well balanced beers. This is probably why their style is copied by every one in the world.

Because of this purity they are typically easy to drink and put great care into their beer and their glassware reflects this. Take this stein for example, it's a large, elaborate mug with a handle so as not to warm the beer with your filthy heat filled hands and a cap that keeps impurities out that will disrupt the flavor of the beer. With this stein we can see that there is great care put into the beer, there is a focus on the individual and the beer.

As an American, though, I find this and German beers to be rather boring and the stein overly complicated. Americans tend to have this ‘devil may care’, ‘don’t tread on me’ attitude that has seeped its way into our beers and food. Americans really have a palate for destruction: We like things heavy, fatty, salty, greasy, and most of all; delicious. As such, we like to play with our beers, try new things, and above all, make beers smack you in the face and destroy your taste buds. ‘MURICA!

With this attitude, we are the progenitors of interesting and extreme beers that have swept the world by storm: Such as the hoppy double (and Triple/Quad!) IPA, the wildly sour Wild Ale, the palate defying Cascadian Ale (black IPA), and of course, the smooth, massively hoppy, and hazy New England IPA. All often enjoyed in a standard pint glass.

Somewhere in the middle of these extremes we have the sophisticated Belgians who are a combination of the two. They like creativity and depth, but also appreciate balance. If you look at their glassware that they drink from, it says everything about their beers:

The tulip glass allows the drinker to pick up on the fine layers of flavor that are contained within each sip of a Belgian beer with their nose. But where do these layers come from?

Belgian beers are considered Belgian because of the brewing process and the yeast they use. Their yeast creates a very fruity and uniquely ‘Belgian’ flavor with open fermentation. It’s rather difficult to describe the taste until you’ve had a Belgian beer. To add to the flavor of the yeast, like their chocolatiers, Belgians will often add herbs and spices that are normally used to add flavor to cooking such as coriander, orange peel, candied sugar, and anise. The layers of flavor are unlike any in the world, and are meant to be appreciated slowly. The tulip aids in this flavor.

The glasses and beer that the Chinese drink also reveal a lot about them as well. As I posted previously, the Chinese mostly drink rice adjunct lagers, the ‘working class’ beer, but something new is revealed in their glassware.

As you can see here, the Chinese use these small glasses to drink their beer. Their glassware really caters to their lifestyle. It has to do with their community centered origins as well as their ganbei 干杯 ('cheers', or literally ‘dry glass’) culture in which an individual is asked to finish their entire glass with others. Communism worked in China because a strong belief in practicality, community and family was already so prevalent and you can see it as well in their beer culture.

They add rice to their beer to increase the potency in a cheap way or drink it warm (practical) and they share their drink with everyone much like they do with their family style meals (community oriented).

This goes to the extreme in Tsingtao where they sell beer in bags with a drinking straw.

Just by knowing one’s culture, you can see where their differences in drinking culture come from, but there is one uniting factor: they all enjoy their beer in their own way.