Beer Vs. Wine

http://www.slate.com/id/2167292/

Wine Vs. Beer
Slate
By Field Maloney

Wine is basically an agricultural product (fermented grapes), while beer is the result of a complicated process of manufacture (boiling barley to extract sugars, adding hops and yeast, fermenting the wort that results). This holds true whether the brewer is a medieval English villager or Anheuser-Busch. The hallmark of beer is consistency: A brewer strives to make batch after batch of Pilsener so it tastes the same—and often succeeds without much difficulty. Wine is more variable: The sugar levels and tannins and acidity of the grapes fluctuate from year to year, and so does the character of the resulting wines. This explains why the whole concept of vintages is so central to wine but largely absent from beer.

In fact, you can trace the United States' shift from an agrarian society to an urban, industrial one through beer. In the Colonial era, settlers drank mostly hard cider (the rural drink of choice), rum, and whiskey. It wasn't until the mid-19th century, when German immigrants came over in large numbers to man the new factories and brought their brewing skills with them, that beer really took off. When beer became more popular than cider around the time of the Civil War, it signaled an altered American landscape as much as altered tastes. Mass-market beer arose out of two key innovations of the industrial revolution: refrigeration and pasteurization. Suddenly, beer could travel long distances, and lager slowly took over countryside as well as town.

But in America today, beer has lost its grip. In a column on brown ales, Eric Asimov, the drinks writer for the New York Times, wrote a line that could serve as a beer elegy: "Mild brown ales, the knock-back drink of thirsty coal miners and dock workers, are not so appealing to post-industrial office workers, who are less thirsty and more aspirational."