re: What Country Produces The Best Beer?

You are woefully informed on the state of US craft beers if you're referencing Lagunitas, Stone & Sweetwater as the nation's elite.

I had no idea that they drank beer in India. I thought they drank potions, dirty river water, and cobra blood.

This thread makes my head hurt. Anyone saying anything other than USA is incorrect. The US gets a bad reputation for our BMC lagers and turbocharged IPAs, but the fact is that we pump out by far and away the best beer in the world as a whole. There are some outliers, of course. We can make some awfully shitty beer, and we can also make some whales.

I love a lot of continental beers. Saison is my favorite style. I seek obscure, funky Franco-Belgian farmhouse beers. I can pound Pilsner Urquell as fast as your average Czech. A crisp southern German lager is divine after a day hike through the Alps. I have a Vienna lager on tap at the moment. The point is to say I'm not a typical freedom-boner nationalist, but to say we don't make the best beer in the world is kidding yourself. We currently rule the roost.

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You are woefully informed on the state of US craft beers if you're referencing Lagunitas, Stone & Sweetwater as the nation's elite

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I never said they were elite but they are beers that are distributed on a national level everyone can identify. Even in other countries.

North Carolina has 23 more breweries than Belgium.

I mean really. There are hopheads around the US that will never sample all of the great beers we have in this country and you're preaching about traveling the world to broaden our beer horizon. I could travel the state of North Carolina and get a more diverse range of beers than I could in Belgium.

US has no claim to the best "common beer". The swill they drink in Europe is better than Natty ice and bud heavy, but nowhere else can really come remotely close to the range and quantity of quality produced here. The continent of Europe+UK vs USA is grounds for an actual debate. Any particular country vs USA is a first round knockout.

Who gives a shite if NC has more than a small country like Belgium. Belgium is world renowned for its beer. You keep harping on local micro brews that most people will never have. Quantity does not mean quality.

Just bc we make good craft beer doesn't mean we make the best beer. It's all preference of the beer drinkers.

Germany has purity laws for fricks sake, steeped in tradition for hundreds of years.

Purity laws hold German beer back.

Those laws mean they avoided the cheap adjunct beers like Bud, Stella, Carling, but it also means their craft Brewers can't do a lot of the creative stuff brewers elsewhere can.

America has the best beer, we have been on an amazing upward trajectory, and not only that, our shitty mass produced lagers have infected the rest of the world making their beer worse.

I don't have a dog in this fight.

However, if the United States produces all these local micro brews that are high quality but people won't have them because they're so local and the United States is so big... isn't that a testament to the overall quality of the country's beer? Isn't the best the best, regardless of popularity?

Are y'all arguing which country produces the most of the best or the highest percentage of the best? Because the United States could win the first one due to the high number of breweries, but it'd be hard to win the second one because of that high number. The U.S. just produces more, period, and that includes terrible ones.