American Beer
American Beer is a documentary about 5 “beer lovers” who travel to 38 brewers in 40 days across the USA. They stay away from the big breweries like Budweiser and such, and only tour craft beer breweries, or microbreweries.
This movie is not really exciting, but it does have some funny parts. I think it is more informative and gives you a better look at the explosion of craft beer in the USA. There are some excellent interviews with some of the “brewmasters” and owners of these breweries and some amazing stats on beer consumption in the USA. Here are just a few:
In the 1970’s there were less than 50 breweries in the US. In 2002 when this movie was filmed there were over 1400!
201,912,000 Barrells of beer were consumed in the USA in 2002 which equals 67,768,496,640 12oz bottles.
Craft or Specialty Beer only accounts for 3.08% of all beer consumed in the US.
3 Brewers, Budweiser, Miller and Coors account for 79% of all beer consumed in the USA.
If you are into beer or brewing this movie is perfect for you. Some of the interviewers are totally eye openers. One of these “brewmasters” started his company with $200 and now it is a multi million dollar company. So on that side of things there are interviews with like 38 people who love what they do, and do what they love, and are successful with it. So based solely on that it would be a good movie to rent for some inspiration in your life.
But with the good there is bad. I would say about 1/2 the movie is some annoying moments where the guys in the movie are drunk and just being stupid. Personally I would prefer just interview after interview with these brewers, because I found their stories fascinating.
I give the movie 3.5 stars. 
This movie makes me want to open a brew pub!
It took me a while to actually get the movie from Netflix, it was a long wait for a while, and the availability was low. When they sent it, it was received in one day, and they received it in 2 days.
