Beer has a long history stretching back thousands of years. The American beer industry once consisted of a handful of huge companies that dominated the entire world. Today, none of them exists any longer, and America is home to almost 3,000 craft "microbreweries".
Virtually every known human society had its form of "beer". Natives in North and South America brewed a beer-like beverage from corn; Australian Aborigines made an alcoholic drink by mixing honey or flower nectar with water; ancient tribesmen in the Himalayan Mountains drank fermented yak's milk. Since any sugary solution can spontaneously ferment if it is invaded by wild yeasts, it is likely that alcohol was independently found by most human cultures as a happy accident.
The earliest forms of what we now think of as "beer" (a mildly alcoholic drink made from wheat, rye, or barley) appeared almost as soon as humans settled into agricultural societies. The earliest written story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, mentions that when the wild man Enkidu was given beer to drink, "his face glowed and he sang joyfully". Because ancient people did not know anything about yeast or fermentation, the entire process was a mystery to them, and they viewed it as a magical gift from the gods. In ancient Sumeria, the goddess of beer was Ninkasi; in Egypt, it was the goddess Tjenenet.
Beer became particularly important in Egypt. It was a staple of the diet, consumed in large quantity by everyone from the Pharoah to the lowest stable slave. Along with bread and dates, beer was issued to laborers as a part of their wages. The workers who built the pyramids were paid in beer.
Beer-brewing was carried out by the women. First, grains of barley were ground into flour and mixed with water to form dough. This was then baked into barley bread, and the loaves broken into small pieces and soaked in water. It was traditional to re-use the same open-mouthed clay mixing vessel, without washing it in between batches. (Unknown to the ancient brewers, this is what allowed the yeast cultures to be carried from one batch to the next.) This concoction was then placed in the shade and covered with a cloth to keep the bugs out, while religious rituals and prayers were recited. If Tjenenet granted you favor, the yeast would eat the sugars from the barley bread, and excrete alcohol. If Tjenenet was unhappy with you, bacteria would invade and turn your beer into vinegar.
Ancient Egyptian beer differed significantly from ours. It was thick and doughy, almost like a liquid bread, and was often drunk through a straw. It was valued more for its food qualities than its alcohol. The alcohol content was pretty low, and served mostly as a preservative to prevent spoilage (though getting drunk on beer was a part of several Egyptian religious ceremonies). Egyptian beer was also flat. In modern beers, carbonation results when carbon dioxide gas is released during the fermentation process and becomes dissolved in the beer. The Egyptians, however, had no clay vessels strong enough to resist the resulting pressure, and therefore all the CO2 escaped, leaving behind a flat uncarbonated beer. And since the Egyptians had no refrigeration, it would be served warm.
The Romans adopted the Egyptian brewing methods and produced a beer they called "cerevisia." By medieval times, brewing was being done throughout Europe, often centered in monasteries. Since there was no sanitation and the local water was often contaminated and a source of cholera and dysentery, drinking alcoholic beverages was far safer than drinking water. In most of Europe, wine was the daily beverage of choice. In the Germanic parts of Europe, however, including England, beer was produced far more often than wine. Most popular was a low-alcohol form known as "small beer".
When the English colonists went to the New World, they took their small beer with them. Beer was then mostly a homebrew affair, with each household or tavern making only enough for its own needs. By the early 1800's mechanization began to change the industry--now larger brewers began appearing who would produce huge batches at a time. In 1829, David Yeungling opened a beer brewery in the little town of Pottsville PA, in the anthracite coal belt. It still produces beer today and is the oldest existing brewery in the US.
Most of these early American beers were heavy English-style ales and porters, which were only lightly carbonated and were generally served warm. It wasn't until the late 19th century that German immigrants began arriving in large numbers, bringing with them a taste for lighter sparkling lager beers. Soon there were over 4,000 commercial breweries in the US. It was during this time that the best-known American beer companies were formed: Pabst, Schlitz, Annheuser-Busch, Coors, and Miller. After a wave of mergers and consolidations, by 1910 there were only 1500 breweries left, and these were dominated by less than 100 large "shipping breweries", who were able to use the new technologies of cans, glass bottles, and refrigerated train cars to take their product national, usually providing their beers to large networks of bars and saloons owned by the company. Brewing became the realm of multi-million dollar corporations with thousands of employees.
Then in January 1919, it all came crashing down. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, Prohibition went into effect, and the entire industry became illegal. Gangster bootleggers like Al Capone had a field day. Some of the large brewing companies switched to making other products, or closed down entirely. Others, hoping that Prohibition would just be temporary, continued producing things like non-alcoholic "near beer" and malt syrup, to keep their staff and machinery intact. They proved to be correct. In 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified, repealing Prohibition. Beer was back in business again. There followed another wave of consolidation and buyouts, and by 1980 the five largest American beer companies controlled over 70% of the market. Budweiser Beer, made by Annheuser-Busch, was the best-selling brand in the world.
Within just a few decades, however, the American beer industry was on the ropes. Partly this was due to changing consumer tastes: the light bland rice-based American beer was falling out of favor as people began turning to darker and stronger imports like Corona and Heineken. Changes to the laws in the 1970's made home-brewing legal, and small "microbreweries" began appearing, offering a wide variety of styles and tastes (everything from stouts to wheat beers) and capturing a significant minority of the beer market. Global economics also came into play: in the 1980's and 1990's, American industries began losing out to foreign companies in the areas of automobiles, steel, electronics--and beer. In the 2000s, the Coors company, America's third-largest brewer, was purchased by the Canadian brewer Molson, which was then itself bought by Miller. Shortly later Miller, the second-largest brewery in the US, was purchased by the South-African based SAB. And the largest American brewing company, Annheuser-Busch, was bought by the Belgian company InBev. Today, there are no major American brewing companies left--the largest market share held by any American-owned brewery is less than 1%.
One of the historical centers of the American brewing industry was St Louis, where the Annheuser-Busch Company was formed. The company's St Louis plant, built in the 1910s, still makes beer, and guided tours are offered daily.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)