Discovering Real Beer in America. Finally!

A lovely little side effect of my fluoride “allergy” was my discovery of Real Beer. Beer was never my beverage of choice. I drank it on occasion in social settings, but if you looked closely you might have noticed that I usually nursed that same bottle for most of the evening. I liked the smaller breweries like Yuengling and Sam Adams better than the mega brands, but not enough to genuinely look forward to the drinking experience.

That is why I was so surprised by how much I enjoyed the beer on my first trip to Germany. It was early July and the biergartens dotted every street corner. While in Stuttgart, I actually looked forward to drinking a beer along with my meal, something I never did back in the States. Even though the glasses were much larger than I was used to, the whole thing went down so smoothly without any of the full, bloated feeling I usually felt after drinking beer. How was this possible?

I bought a few bottled German beers after I returned to the States but they just weren’t the same. It wasn’t until my Fulbright year in the United Kingdom that I was able to enjoy drinking beer again. It was always the unassuming local pubs with some draught beer I’d never heard of that seemed to taste the best… I didn’t know why I enjoyed them so much, but I knew they were a completely different beverage than the beer I was accustomed to drinking in the States. (One particular pub in Dublin forever ruined my tolerance for American beer, especially their home-brewed Oyster stout. Unreal!).

My fluoride allergy was diagnosed soon after returning to the States, and in an effort to limit fluoride consumption I took to ordering imported beers when I was out with friends. After some trial and error (fyi: Newcastle is one of the few cities in England that fluoridates its public water supply), I figured out that I was always safe with Belgian beer. Even better, Belgian beer seemed to have that certain je ne sais quoi that I had been searching for in the States ever since my first taste of German-brewed perfection!

Not only are Belgian breweries careful to use (non-fluoridated!) artesian well water, but most Belgian beers are bottle conditioned –meaning the yeast is still active after the bottle is corked. This second fermentation process results in a complex, full-bodied beverage more akin to a fine wine than to a can of Miller Lite. Like wine, the active yeast culture settles into dregs at the bottom of the bottle. While opinion varies as to whether or not one should drink the dregs, they are an added source of B vitamins. Furthermore, the yeast sediment scavenges the oxygen in the bottle, acting as a natural preservative and allowing the beer to continue to age and mature. A recent article in Malt Advocate reviewed a beer tasting from a 25-year-old Thomas Hardy’s Ale. Try that with a bottle of Bud!

Thanks to stores like Total Wine and even Whole Foods, Real Beer is easier than ever for American consumers to acquire. Some American microbreweries are starting to catch on to the benefits of bottle-conditioning their products. Try Hair of the Dog or Russian River Brewing Company.

Have you tried Real Beer yet? What’s your favorite?

*This post is a part of Real Food Wednesday hosted at Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

Tagged as: Diet, Fluoride