"Where do you come from, and where do you go…"

We’re ordering some sushi at the sushi bar not long ago, and knowing the limited offering of beers there, I ask for a Sapporo. The guy next to me hears and feels inclined to tell me that of the two big Japanese import beers, he prefers Kirin Ichiban. “But Kirin isn’t an import,” I tell him. “Of course it is!” (You stupid, uncultured swine, he thinks.) He laughs lightly. I grab the half-empty bottle out of his hand, turn it, and point to the “Brewed under the strict supervision of Kirin’s brewmaster at Anheuser-Busch, Inc. in Los Angeles, CA” and retort, “NO. It isn’t.” My serving of miso soup has, at this point, gone cold.

Despite the fact that I’m not even remotely a gambling woman, I’m willing to bet that there will come a time in the not-so-distant future when the distinction between domestic beer and imported beer will be supplanted by that of mass-produced beer vs. craft beer. Given the lines—or should I say borders—that are being blurred because of big-brand buyouts and global mergers, defining what is and isn’t an import is an even less stable conjecture than stock investment planning at this point. Add to that the fact that in terms of case sales, most of the leading import brands are pale pilsners (I mean, Corona and Heineken alone account for half the category for fuck’s sake), and suddenly that foreign landscape begins to look an awful lot like the domestic beer scene here in the US.

The growing confusion between domestics and imports, for starters, doesn’t end with Kirin. My husband happens to like Blue Moon Belgian White—a light-bodied wheat beer he sometimes chooses with sushi—a name that pissed off the Confederation of Belgian Brewers enough to sue Coors, the company that brews the beer. Thing is, Coors is now a division of Molson Coors Brewing Company, and Blue Moon gets brewed on both sides of the border. Then there’s Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, NY which, given its locale, would appear to be a domestic brew. But since 2003, Ommegang has been owned by Duvel, a Belgian brewery, and their Three Philosophers is a blend of an ale brewed here in Upstate New York and a kriek brewed by Liefmans in Belgium. So what the hell are you drinking, something domestic or something imported? The short answer is, you’re drinking something tasty, so why care? How important (or accurate for that matter) is citizenship at this point?

Despite the pathetic softness of our economy, and oftentimes despite tighter wallets, many consumers are counter-intuitively splurging on the priciest segment of the beer industry—craft brews. Country of origin is no longer as important as how the beer tastes. The unfortunate side effect, however, of American craft brewers being inspired by old European recipes, and European brewers being inspired by the American craft beer movement, is that the big boys—the ones producing the pale, bland, insipid pilsners—are now playing off the “small is better” philosophy and reaping its benefits like hungry leeches. Those Goliaths are fighting tooth and nail to hold on to every last bit of their market share by creating companies like Green Valley Brewing (owned by Anheuser-Busch) that mislead consumers into thinking that they are buying a craft, small-production beer, and it’s that competition that needs to be regarded with a proverbial fine-toothed comb at this point.

Tagged as: Blue Moon, craft beer, domestic beer, imported beer, Kirin