Introduction

“I’m a big fan of international lagers.”

I said that to a friend, years ago. We were drinking cans of Kirin at the time. He nodded and accepted my statement. Months later that same friend had something awkward to tell me.

“My brother’s a beer guy and I told him that you’re a big fan of international lagers. He said that’s not a thing.”

Fair enough. No one can really claim they’re a fan of international lagers for reasons of flavor. Certainly you can love the taste and the function of it — refreshing and refreshing, respectively — but it’s tough to be a connoisseur of something so anonymous and generic. No thick foamy head to squint at, no sourness to detect, no hop varietals to deduce. Just the same effervescent malt water, no matter where you are in the world. Beneath mention, really, or if they must be named, do so dismissively: “macro” or  “industrial.”

But it was a search for flavor that first drew me to these lagers. For years my food-obsessed fiancee has sought out every genre of restaurant (happy to tag along), looking for far-flung food flavors, and most times the menu features a far-flung lager imported from that genre’s home nation: a Kingfisher to go with the curry; a Mythos to wash down the gyro; a Taiwan Gold to pair with a bowl of beef noodle soup. Yes, these beers from the “Imports” section tend to cost a dollar more than the Budweiser and Miller High Life of the “Domestic,” and yes they tend to taste the same, but… well, I’m not quite sure what. But I always order them.

Over those years I’ve collected very specific memories of encountering beer brands for the first time. I first saw a case of “33” Export in a Vietnamese restaurant in a strip mall in suburban New Jersey. I first read the word “Hite” off a tiny beer glass in South San Francisco. I first tasted Tiger in Southern China, in a city called Beihai. There, at a bar called Le Nest, as I was sipping a third can of Tiger (tasting notes: formaldehyde?) a woman approached and seized the rare opportunity to practice her English on an actual white person. “I love you,” she shouted over the music, then immediately walked away.

Of course, you need not be a cynic to wonder: does lager’s international reach really count as a good thing? Like rats in Hawaii or bullfrogs in Australia, lagers are an invasive species, a reminder of that era when Europeans first decided to disembark and visit the world uninvited. Just another marker of cultural hegemony and western imperialism. Every time a homesick European pitched a tent in some new land and had no crate of cold ones close at hand, a thought bubble appeared: what if I built a brewery here?

More often than not that kind of thought turned into brick and mortar, and for good reason: when the 19th century turned into the 20th, world-wide shipping was expensive, lager-loving Germans (or Dutch or Norwegians or Americans or English) were everywhere on the face of the earth, and drinking water was almost always pretty gross. So if you possessed a little capital and an entrepreneurial spirit, why not start a brewing concern?

Step one in your new enterprise: send off to Germany for some brewing equipment and a sample of some bottom-fermenting yeast, i.e. Saccharomyces pastorianus, i.e. the good stuff, i.e. the living thing that makes lager lager — and makes its story strange.

You see, no one really knows where or how lager yeast entered the kingdom of living things. But we do know that lager yeast is quite cosmopolitan, a hybrid of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (classic European ale yeast) and Saccharomyces eubayanus, a strain of yeast recently discovered in Tibet by a team of Chinese scientists. Which raises a tempting but untestable hypothesis, something to offset the colonial bitterness in the drink: did the international trade via the Silk Road actually make lager possible in the first place?

And if international lager is no more than a colonial legacy, why exactly do beer drinkers worldwide grab sweaty bottles of bubbly Germanic lager and not pints of the Queen’s warm, flat ale? The latter empire was far more far-reaching; maybe flavor does have something to do with the history of lager after all. (Or, as noted Budweiser spokesman Dave Chang pointed out in GQ, maybe it’s the unopinionated lack of flavor that’s got everything to do with it.)

But I didn’t respond to my concerned friend with the above paragraphs. I think I laughed. I said I knew liking international lagers wasn’t a “thing” so far as I could tell, that really I liked their logos more than anything else (the dragon on those cans of Kirin is particularly wonderful), and really I just couldn’t resist the geographical thrill offered by my local BevMo, where I could stare at a shelf of lagers all in a row. One from Tahiti, one from Brazil, one from Kenya. You know, like the childhood thrill of flipping through a large format atlas, or memorizing flag designs. Those are normal kid things right?

Each bottle is a momentary excuse to think, briefly, about somewhere else. Or, in my case, an excuse to do some light reading on a lager’s history — reading that has taken me to imperial Mexico, revolutionary China, colonial Kenya, post-war Okinawa, and the board rooms of 1960s Europe. (Stay tuned — those will all be links once I write corresponding articles.)

So is liking international lagers a “thing”? Probably not, though I do love to drink them, and to tell their stories.