The United States of Beer, mapsplained

Here's the real question: how did beer get to the United States, then get bad, then get good again? Here's the video.

How this video happened

I've long wanted to do a sequel to the US of BBQ, Mapsplained, but I hadn’t found the right story (I'm getting closer with pizza, but not there yet). When I realized how untold the arc of beer is in popular media, I knew it was the perfect subject.

The geography works differently here — it's mainly about the flows of people and the concentration and dilution of the beer business. But I think it's a story worth telling — beer coverage on YouTube is great, but it's more focused on taste and brew than the history that made it possible. And I wanted to know — in the twenty years I've been a legal drinker, how did the cultural identity of beer change so much?

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Here's a link to the reaction video (for some paid tiers).

When suds could kill

As a graduate of a certified party school, even a nerd like me received his beer education at the keg. Rule #2 was to avoid a beer with a lot of head, since that violated Rule #1: get as much beer as possible! Since then, beer culture has evolved a lot, and I've learned that even beer geeks favor a bit of head on their beer. But judging by the recent pours I've received at bars and breweries, foam has faded as a priority.

So it’s odd how much American Pilsner marketing fixated on frothy, foam-topped beer. Peruse vintage ads like I did, and you'll quickly see that there was an almost fetishistic appreciation of a gigantic creamy head (their words, not mine). The obsession went so far that, at one point, it became deadly.

In 1967, Dr. Yves Morin published a paper that made national news: Quebec Beer-Drinkers' Cardiomyopathy: Etiological Considerations.

What does it mean?

Beer drinkers in Quebec were dying.

In the 1960s, a good beer head was critical. If beer wasn’t foamy, it was considered bad. But in the 60s, synthetic detergents in dishwashers were leaving a film on the glasses, and that film kept beer from foaming at the top of the glass. To a beer drinker in the 60s, that was a war crime! And to brewers, that was bad for business.

The solution? Some brewers added cobalt chloride to the beer to stabilize the foam. This super-foam could withstand the evil dishwasher detergent. The cobalt probably wasn't good for anybody, but it definitely wasn't good for people who were drinking a lot of beer every day. Alcoholics drank really large amounts of cobalt in their beer, and it caused heart failure because no one was supposed to ingest that much cobalt.

Around 20 men in Quebec died, and others around the world died too. Autopsies showed that the hearts of the heavy beer drinkers contained ten times as much cobalt as a normal heart. Authorities quickly banned the use of cobalt as a foam-stabilizer in beer, but the damage was done — people had died, all for a little bit of foam.

What's the takeaway? I think the regulatory story is a bit muddy — I was able to find some info on it in the United States, where it looks like the FDA permitted some cobalt use in 1963 and then revoked it after Dr. Morin's report. Maybe there's a story of influence there, but it seems a bit muddled. Maybe this is a story about rules. Maybe it's a story about business. Maybe it's something else.

This week, an acquaintance gave my family a ghost pepper to try. When my sweat had subsided, I went down a mini-rabbit hole to learn about the spice craze. I'd never heard of the one-chip challenge before, in which eating a super spicy chip became a viral phenomenon. It turns out that one teenager with a heart condition died after eating it. No child should have the same burden of responsibility as those adult beer drinkers, but there is a dark common thread between them. Sometimes irrational enthusiasms — like for a spicy chip or a really nice, foamy beer — invite dangerous experiments for profit, and the same unpredictable fervor that powers these products' success can have tragic consequences.

Sources for the video

• Can I just say how happy I was to find Ranjit's paper? And then to find out he was such a pleasant conversation partner? Featured in the Journal of Business History, it's really a history paper more than an economics one, but I think his background provided a nice lens for understanding the history of beer. And it answered my big question: how did beer get good?

• Beer map data!

• As is often the case, tracking citations is really useful. It led me to Amy Mittelman's book about brewing. It's a good overview of beer up to 2008, and it was great to see some of the history laid out — especially early history — to check against other sources. The Pabst brewery chart came from this book.

• I didn't read Pete Dunlop's entire book about Portland Brewing, but it helped me get the right beats for the Oregon section and avoid some misconceptions. It also led me to Oregon's archive of brewpub discussions! I don't think this audio is, like, insanely gripping, but I love having proof of an assertion. And kudos to Oregon for putting this online.

• This paper by Martin Stack was a helpful overview of brewery consolidation. It actually presents a slightly more complicated narrative than the one in the video, but I felt the overall arc of the video was most important (this paper has this nuanced take that breweries didn't consolidate quite as much as you'd think, though they still did). Another paper by Stack and a co-author helped clear up the craft beer renaissance. This change is often credited, in popular media, to Jimmy Carter alone — research shows that's a stretch, and the home brew legalization was actually slipped into a larger bill by California and Wisconsin interests.

• This history of microbrewing was good to check my assumptions, though I basically ignored the UK section.

• This paper helped give me the confidence to say that, yes, big brewing was a thing.

• Charts in the episode are edited/redone from data in the sources above - they're attributed in the bottom right of the screen.