The Rise of Extreme Beer

Picking up a six-pack at your local grocery store is more complicated than it used to be. Sure, there’s the old stand-bys: Budweiser, Miller Hi-Life, PBR and Heineken. But you’ll also find pumpkin ales, chocolate stouts, and the absurdly-named, like Skull Splitter, Old Leg Humper, Moose Drool, He’Brew, and Ale Mary Full of Taste.

The craft beer movement has caught up with America’s foodie and wine snob culture and invaded the local liquor store. In 1965, the United States had one single craft brew – Anchor Steam, from San Francisco. Today, there are over 1,500. Burkhard Bilger is staff writer for The New Yorker, and wrote about the rise of extreme beer in its recent food issue.

It's a quickly growing market in the U.S., where sales of craft beer grew by twelve percent last year. But the movement really has roots that stretch back thousands of years, drawing inspiration from the fermented beverages of ancient Egypt, and of the Aztecs and Mayans.

Bilger profiles Sam Calagione, a vibrant character, savvy marketer, and founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Delaware. Dogfish's motto is "off-centered ales for off-centered people," and it makes everything from elegant Belgian-style ales to experimental beers brewed with fresh oysters or arctic cloudberries.

But not everyone is crazy about what Calagione is doing – making beer with blue-green algae, or cardamom, curry and lemongrass. There are people within the craft beer movement who see "extreme beers" as detrimental to the craft beer brand. Bilger traces this debate over what constitutes beer back nearly five centuries, to the battle between German and Belgian brewers. And he notes that this isn’t the first time America’s experimented with odd beers - in 1873, the country had some four thousand breweries.

While craft beer still makes up a tiny part of the market – only four percent, or equalling about as many bottles as the Michelob brand, the small brewers hope they'll grow to make a much larger dent in the industrial beer market.

(Photo by Hawkins)