Of course we are back to the sentence I already wrote should have been better constructed. And which is how I got in trouble from the get go.

And while it’s true you didn’t call me a t.t.t. bastard, neither did I you. Truce before we start?

Otherwise I appreciate the perspective.

And Mike, well at least I didn’t call you a “total, total, total bastard.”

And thank you very much for those god-awful hops! I had a de Molen bokbier brewed with them and asked the pub for my money back (they declined). However, I saw Menno (de Molen’s brewer) and asked him about it. He said it was sort of a joke. He wanted to make a bokbier that wasn’t sweet (like a lot of the Dutch ones). So, yes, here’s a Dutch brewer using US hops (to make a point). You know, there are some mushrooms that are poisonous. People don’t eat them, do they?

More new breweries have opened in Europe than in the USA. Around 600 (still open) in the UK alone.

The US is not at the centre of new brewing in Europe. Yet.

In the UK, it began in the 1970′s. In Holland, the 1980′s. In Germany around the same time with new brewpubs. France had to wait a little longer. In none of these cases was the US an inspiration.

New European breweries aren’t the result a single cause or a single source of inspiration. What’s happened in France and Germany, for example, hasn’t taken its cue from the Anglo-Saxon world at all. In the case of the former, Belgium was the catalyst.

In Europe, if there was a country that demonstrated new breweries could succeed, it was the UK. And it was CAMRA that inspired other European countries to start beer consumer organisations, which also played a crucial role in encouraging brewery startups.

These are what I’d say was behind the new wave of European breweries:

David Bruce with his Firkin chain of brewpubs
Belgian beer
EBCU
CAMRA
increased consumer interest in quality products

The influence of the US scene on most European countries is too small to measure. Denmark, Sweden a fair bit. The UK and Norway a bit.

Opening a small brewery has became easier anywhere in the world because vendors, fabricators – an entire industry – sprung to life to supply more than 1500 (some since closed) breweries that opened in the US in just 20 years.

Plus, of course, the availability of Cascade hops ;>)

Stan, as you well know, there are many small breweries all over the world and not all of them make the “same” beer. So, does that make it different?

The quote from Dan Shelton is almost laughable. There have been small breweries in Europe for almost two thousand years and it took the Americans to show the modern ones how to do it?

I also don’t understand what the article by Evan Rail has to do with this topic. New breweries opened in the Czech Republic – is that thanks to the US as well?

Breweries have and do open all the time. Most try to make something that people will like. How has the US craft beer movement changed that?

“People had no model for modern small brewery success. Americans gave them that.”

New (small) breweries are popping up everywhere – Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, Italy, South American and so on. Much of what success they have comes from offering something “different” – which doesn’t many it has to be crazy or “innovative.”

That’s the model the US provides. It doesn’t mean that they have to copy the beers.

Besides – and to your credit, you know this – the vast majority of “not Bud” sales are not intense-tasting beers.