I usually assume when Europeans complain about American beers, they just are complaining about our “domestic” beers like Bud Light, Coors, PBR, etc. which makes sense, they are our bottom shelf beers.
I recently chatted with someone at a party who said “no, all American beers are bad” including microbrewery beers.
I’ve never been to Europe so I wouldn’t know, but I do like my Left Handed Milk Stout, NWPAs, and hell even the hipstered out IPAs.
Are these what y’all are referencing?
Germans make great lagers. But that’s it. There’s a lot more beer styles out there and the American microbreweries excel at a lot of them.
The best beers in the usa (said microbreweries) are mediocre at best compared to the low standard European ones. Sorry to say this, but there are very, very few acceptable beers in usa. Mexicans and Canadian are better.
No hate, but they all lack a flavourful taste.
German, belgium and czech beers are great, Irish stouts are wonderful, and so on. You can grab a random (best: local) beer and it will be a good one.
You have to really look out for an acceptable one in usa. If you are lucky, a microbrewery in your area will produce a good one, but you have to have a good portion of luck here. Most of those good ones are brewed by an „imported“ german brewer who got a formal education on this. You can actually study this in the city nearby me and some students think of opening a brewery in the usa. So naturally i got in touch with some of them. One factor is the hops you can get in the us. The quality and taste is very different to the one we produce. You almost cannot reproduce the conditions you have here in the holledau. Even if you get very good hops the malting and the grain is different (mexicans use corn, which actually tastes very good). Barley doesn’t equal barley, so you have the differences here.
Long story short: the ingrediens are different due to locally available products, the methods are slightly different, so you have a different product. Unfortunately the circumstances in the us are what they are, so you need very experienced personell to produce a good beer.
Wat?
We’re gonna need some names here, so we can evaluate this take.
There’s over 400 distinct breweries in Washington State alone, you can’t possibly have enough personal experience to justify sweeping claims of trenda and quality. And we export most of the hops that we grow to countries like Germany, Belgium, and the UK so they’re using the same stuff. I don’t even like beer and it’s obvious you’re talking out of your ass to support preconceived anti-American notions.