A little national-pride music, maestro. Thank you. Our very own United States of America (rooty-toot-toot) makes the best TV beer commercials (tantara) in the universe. Nobody else is close, unless it is some race of advertising geniuses in the Crab nebula, and that is not close, and anyway the Crabs do not have John Madden or Mickey Spillane, so forget them.
However -- some really gloomy national-shame music now, if you please -- it is also true that most of what the U.S. makes and labels as beer (gronk, honk, sound of oboists performing underwater) is fizzed up and flavorless, the worst brew in the universe. Why this should be so is puzzling. Other nations do not find it impossible to brew serious beer. The Germans and Austrians are masters, of course. Scandinavians, Dutch and French are experts. Italians see no point in beer, but what they make is drinkable. Mexicans produce good summer-weight cerveza. Canadian beer includes such hairy, out-of-the-swamp- and-still-dripping specialties as Moosehead, fondly known as Moosebreath by truck drivers in the Northeast. Japanese export beer tends to be thin and disappointing, which is to say it tends to taste far better than our mainstream belly wash. For that matter, Ladakhi Buddhists in remote Himalayan valleys make beer better than ours in open earthenware pots, in which dazed microorganisms swim for the shore. Furthermore . . .
But it is time to turn off Vermont's Interstate 91 into White River Junction. White River is an old railroad town and, as some old-timers brag, an old bootlegging town, an old red-light town. Those glories are long gone, and just now it is simply an old town, at the confluence of the White and Connecticut rivers. The surrounding country is some of the handsomest in New England, but there is a scuffling, head-down quality to South Main Street, out by the Legion hall. It is just the place for a brewery, though the last of the old breweries in Vermont went out in the 1890s, as far as anyone knows. There is one brewery in New Hampshire, the big, mass-market Anheuser-Busch operation in Merrimack. And only one very small outfit in Massachusetts, an enterprising Boston pub called the Commonwealth Brewing Co. Ltd., which turns out a variety of sturdy ales and porters for consumption on the premises. It is true that the somewhat misleadingly named Boston Beer Co. sells Samuel Adams, a good, chewy boutique lager that yuppies buy for nearly $7 a six-pack on payday, but the stuff is made in Pittsburgh. To the north, Maine Coast Brewing sells a tart, beer-flavored beer called Portland Lager at a stiff $5.35 a pack, but despite the sea gull, lighthouse and sailing ship on its label, Portland is made by a brewery in Eau Claire, Wis.