Napoleon is said to have compared the Berlinner weisse style to champagne, but he would have found the similarities here more striking. The beer is bright, twinkling gold in the glass, with a light head and a steady stream of tiny bubbles. The aroma has the sweet and tart notes of fresh pineapple rind, overlaying fresh breadrolls and hints of lemon. The beer has a medium mouthfeel. The first impressions of pineapple and passion fruit are less sweet than the aroma. Developing hints of juicy honeydew and summer rhubarb yield to earthy, rooty notes and a dry finish that is – yes – champagne-like. Noble hops contribute some gentle citrus but no bitterness. Although the beer contains 10.3 percent alcohol, it wears its strength dangerously well. Infinium will be available for a limited time starting in November. An elegant choice for the Thanksgiving table.

This is what they want in America,” he said, happily.

His customers in Vernante might not understand, either that Americans brew such assertive beers or that America is also the world’s best market for bad-ass beers from almost anywhere. Call it the Americanization of world beer or simply globalization, but the international beer landscape is changing. Not everybody agrees that’s good, but few dispute America is at the center.

The Beer Starts Here

In one of the last essays he wrote in 2007, the introduction to Beer: Eyewitness Companions, the late Michael Jackson argued that, “tomorrow’s classics will evolve from a new breed of American brews that are categorized by their admirers as ‘Extreme Beers.’ These are the most intense-tasting beers ever produced anywhere in the world.”

British beer writer Adrian Tierney-Jones agrees. “The twenty-first century is definitely the American century in brewing terms—and I think it’s a good thing,” he said. “Beer is an international language, a language that crosses borders and at the moment the language we are hearing involves the yeast Brettanomyces, lots of hops, strong alcohol, hoppy barley wines, farmhouse ales with a twist—what is wrong with that?”

Importer Daniel Shelton of Shelton Brothers has an answer for Tierney-Jones. “It’s really sad to say the future is American beer when we haven’t perfected [brewing] the stuff from Europe yet,” he said. Shelton can be blunt, has a reputation for shooting from the hip and as an importer wouldn’t be expected to champion domestically brewed beers. However, many of the breweries he represents benefit because Americans are lapping up their bold, often intense, beers. Shelton is sincere when he talks about what he sees as dangers both within the United States and beyond.

Quite simply, if beer drinkers focus on the most exciting styles, if they measure the quality of a beer based on its intensity, then what happens to beers with nuance and to yesterday’s classics?

Know Your History

Even though beer never should be called “the new wine,” a quick bit of grape history seems relevant. In 1976, upstart California wines outscored classic French wines in a contest now called “The Judgment of Paris.” The tasting not only validated the quality of California wine, but convinced vintners from Australia to South Africa to Argentina that great wine could be made beyond France.

American beermakers can point to no “Judgment of Paris,” but their influence—whether it comes from larger breweries producing pale lagers or smaller breweries making something more flavorful—is also felt from Australia to Scandinavia to Argentina. “People had no model for modern small brewery success. Americans gave them that,” Shelton said.

This recent trend of collaboration beers represents the next logical step in building relationships that brewers began thirty years ago at the dawn of modern craft brewing. Since then, an unprecedented sharing of knowledge and resources has led to an industry mature beyond its years. This is arguably the reason that American craft beer has built its excellent reputation in such a short time, and also why collaboration beers feel like such a natural extension of that success.

Of course, since trade guilds began in the United States, shortly after the start of the Civil War, brewers have been sharing technical information and basic advancements in brewing techniques. But today’s craft brewers have gone further. The kind of assistance they gave one another—early on and continuing through the present day—was unequivocal and without reservation.

When all the small breweries combined brewed such a tiny fraction of the total beer sold, nobody worried about market share, competition or trade secrets. Brewers in the craft industry were simply very open with one another, freely offering each other help, and freely asking for it, too, in a way that earlier generations and larger businesses wouldn’t dream of doing.

As several brewers noted, many early brewers came from a homebrewing background, and took their hobby and “went pro” at a time when there were few books available and hardly any readily available body of knowledge. Most brewers learned their craft in the kitchen, not in a formal school setting. As a result, brewers were already used to turning to other homebrew club members or on forums to fill in gaps in their knowledge.

But a curious thing happened once the size and number of small brewers increased and their market share grew bigger, too. Those close relationships endured as did their willingness to share, as brewers eschewed conventional business thinking and continued to help each other as often as needed. You’d be hard-pressed to find another business where people don’t protect their most valuable trade secrets and operational knowledge. Most industries employ corporate espionage to find out their competitors’ secrets and the threat of lawsuits to keep their own employees from defecting and taking their institutional knowledge with them to a competing firm.

You might be tempted to think that so cavalier an attitude could doom such businesses to failure or, at the very least, to not staying ahead of their competition. By any measure, however, you’d be deeply wrong. It may be counter-intuitive, to say the least, but by and large the breweries that have been the most open and helpful have also been the most successful.

By contrast, in countries where the converse is true—England, Germany, New Zealand, for example—the number of breweries is in decline and innovation is often in short supply. In England and Germany, where some of the richest brewing traditions took flower, a lack of cooperation is helping to bring about a rash of brewery closings, mergers and stagnation. In New Zealand’s craft beer scene, which actually began around the same time as America’s, a lack of openness and community cooperation has led to quality control issues and difficulty winning over consumers. In such climates, sharing recipes and providing other personal assistance with one another is not something brewers are interested in doing, and in many cases even fear their business could suffer as a result.