National American Beer Day is observed annually by beer drinkers across the nation on October 27.
There are more than 4,000 breweries that manufacture beer in the United States. They range in size from industry giants to brewpubs and microbreweries.
- The U.S. produced 196 million barrels of beer in 2009.
- The U.S. consumes roughly 20 US gallons of beer per capita annually.
- In 2008, the United States was ranked sixteenth in the world in per capita consumption, while total consumption was second only to China.
- Prohibition in the early twentieth century caused nearly all American breweries to close.
- After prohibition was repealed the industry had consolidated into a small number of large-scale breweries.
- The majority of the new breweries in the U.S. are small breweries and brewpubs, who, as members of the Brewers Association, are termed “craft breweries” to differentiate them from the larger and older breweries.
- The most common style of beer produced by the big breweries is American lager.
- Most of the smaller breweries, which were founded in the 1980s, produce a range of styles.
- Beer styles originating in the United States include:
American pale ale, Pennsylvania porter, American IPA, steam beer, amber ale, cream ale and Cascadian dark ale. - Egypt was likely the first civilization to tax beer. Queen Cleopatra imposed a tax on beer in order, she claimed, to discourage public drunkenness, though it is widely believed that the tax was actually used to raise money to fund war with Rome.
- In the United States, taxes on the production, distribution, and sale eat up 40% of the retail price of beer.
- To help pay for the Civil War, Congress imposed an excise tax on beer. The Revenue Act of 1862, signed into law by President Lincoln, included a tax on “all beer, lager beer, ale, porter, and other similar fermented liquors, by whatever name such liquors may be called.”
- The most expensive state to buy a beer may be Tennessee where state excise taxes reach a whopping $1.29 per gallon, the highest in the country. The cheapest state to buy a beer? Wyoming, where the excise tax is just $.02 per gallon.
- The most popular state to grab is a beer is Nevada
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