Does American craft beer lack a sense of place?

An idle comment by a wine writer helped me put my finger on it. Wine is so soil and climate dependent that the studied taster can identify, or at least somewhat plausibly claim to identfy, characteristics within a wine that connect it to a specific region. That sense of place, sometimes bundled up as the more romantic and mystical terroir, brings pleasure to the drinker and pride to the vintner, and connects both.

It’s also a concept impossible to divorce from beer. Every Brewing culture developed in their beer a set of parameters specific to their region, available crops,cultural density, whatever. The point is, when an Irishman thinks of beer, he thinks of a specific thing, most likely a dark dry stout. When a Belgian woman thinks of beer, she might picture one of the hundreds of funky, strongly palated brewsfrom her country. That is, when neither of these stereotypical examples are swilling the latest fashionable worldwide light lager they saw on TV.

And that time you went on vacation to Prague and sat on the square drinking fetchingly bitter Pilsner. You knew it as the beer ofthe Czech Republic, and any Czech who would bother to talk to a lowly tourist would gush with pride over the local specialty known far and wide as Czech beer.

And you knew it when you got home, when every sip of a Munich Helles brings visions of the Hofbräu Haus, if not from actual memory, from a sincere desire to see for yourself what promise a place like that might hold.

So what’s the beer of New York like? What song of travel and delight gets lullabyed into your gastronomical ear by the beers of the Midwest?

I’m not saying American indie brewers don’t produce some of the finest beer in the world, but I’m suggesting that, too often,  that beer flows  unchanneled by the earth on which its brewers stand. With the exception of the Pacific Northwest’s West Coast IPAs, now produced by pretty much everyone, what regionalism goes into American beer?

Right about now, there are two reasons you’re saying I’m full of shit (three if you’re of the mindset that, since I almost never make beer myself, I should STFU).  Craft brewing in America is new, and as such hasn’t had the chance to develop the cultural connections for such a thing. Also, the ingredients for American beers are sourced from all over the place: Malt from Germany, hops from Washington, etcetera. The only thing truly regional is the water.

I’d encourage breweries to mine whatever local ingredients are possible, and, while brewing the luxurious variety of beers that we all love to enjoy today, brew with a sense that their beer represents something that is the best of their town, their state, their country, so that as things evolve, a Swedish dude who once visited Chicago can taste in his glass the sounds and smells of that amazing city (well, maybe not the smells).

Brew mania is catching on around the world. In Denmark, in Italy, in Scotland, fine brewers make delicious West Coast IPAs, Belgian style Tripels, and imperial stouts that rival the best American craft examples.

Right now, the USA is the king of brewing. Can we keep that crown without making beers that, in some sense, have an American terroir?

-Mark