A Matter of Taste

Few loyalties are stronger than those that bind beer drinkers to their brews. But beyond real artful packaging and the image-stroking advertising, is there really any significant difference between the various brands of American beer?

Most experts answer no. The major U.S. brews all look and taste pretty much alike because, by and large, that is the way most American drinkers prefer them.

They like smooth-tasting, relatively bland suds as compared with, say, the heavy and bitter Germanic brews from which American beer descended. The result is a standardized American "taste" that varies little from beer to beer. Says a Boston beer consultant, Joseph Owades, of the two leading brands, Budweiser and Miller High Life:

"They are both beautiful women, but one is a blond and one is a brunette. Under the right conditions I can recognize them blindfolded, but only when I am in my prime, not for example after a full meal."

To make their beers even smoother and easier to swallow, many American brewers have been skimping on the use of hops, a perennial vine of the mulberry family. Hops are used to give beer its distinctive and some times bitter flavor, and during the past ten years U.S. brewers have cut back by about 15% on the ingredient in nearly all their brands. Explains Leo Bernstein, vice president and director of laboratories for Schwarz Services International, a Connecticut consulting firm that works with breweries around the world: "Lighter beer was a marketing decision when American brewers wanted to enlarge the market by making a beer you could drink a lot of. With German beers, you can't drink so much or the bitterness will make your mouth go numb."

Another reason for the striking similarity of U.S. beers is that brewers hire consultants like the Vienna-born Bernstein to ensure that their products taste the same wherever they are made. To help them, Bernstein's 101-year-old firm not only offers expert advice but provides a full-service line of beer-brewing aids that range from water-treatment salts to about 40 varieties of yeast.

Schwarz Services also fields panels of taste testers who sample beer from store shelves and report their findings to a client's management. The trained tasters must first prove themselves by passing a barrage of tests that include sipping different quinine solutions and ranking them by strength.

Ultimately, of course, it is the consumer's taste that counts, and after two or three refills even the most discriminating elbow-bender may grow a little fuddled. A 1978 report to the Federal Trade Commission concludes that a person's ability to tell one brew from another probably "declines drastically as the quantity of beer consumed per sitting increases." In short, it is the first few sips that make the difference, since the more a beer drinker guzzles the less he seems to know what brand he is imbibing.