A lot of America hasn’t recovered from Prohibition; they’ve lost the taste for it. During Prohibition, all you’d get is bathtub gin or still hootch, and that’d be mixed and flavored. When the bad times ended, Americans didn’t return to ales in the same way, but Budweiser, with added Rice as a grain mix, was popular because of the smoother taste and in the next few generations it quickly became the leading, and definitive, American beer taste. 1970s-1990s found imports. Craft brew became more popular as people, generally folks who traveled abroad and knew that good ales existed and also didn’t mind paying more for a bottle, started to migrate from imports like Bass and Guinness to local microbrews if they were available (hello Colorado) and slowly it all took a foothold.

I feel that beer & ales can be a generational taste, swinging like fashion (who really drinks Becks now, right?). Maybe a bit like “pizza cognition theory”, where your earliest experiences with a slice define what you think “real” pizza should taste like.

Edited for grammar. Man, mine sucks now.