Back to the OP: 30 years ago, few Americans knew what even made good beer. While Germans were still following the Reinheitsgebot, the Bavarian "purity law" of 1516, most American brewers were adulterating their beer with corn or rice.
Proper beer is brewed from four primary ingredients, water, barley, hops, and yeast. But barley had become very expensive, and many brewers began adding corn to their barley, to reduce costs. Other even less expensive brews were cut even farther with rice, making the least expensive swill on the market.
By the 1990's, the market was pretty cleanly divided into three classes, pure barley beers, corn beers (mid-price) and rice beers (cheap junk). From memory, don't hold me to this... I might have errors here:
Popular pure barley beers:
- nearly all Euro imports
- Michelob
Popular corn beers:
- Molsen
- Yuengling
- Rolling Rock
Popular rice beers:
- Coors
- Bud
- Miller
Anchor Steam Brewing company is often credited as the first of the microbrews, bringing higher-quality beer back to the American general public, but it was really Jim Koch with his mid-1990's Sam Adams commercials that first made most of the American public that there was something better to be had. Thus began the microbrew craze that continues to today.
IPA's seem to be all the rage today, which is amusing, since this style of beer really started as a compromise option to make the brew withstand long voyages aboard ship without spoiling. The India Trading company specified a beer with much higher hop content than anyone would normally desire, as the acidic hops helped the beer not spoil in warm storage on long trips to and from Europe, and this was known as India Pale Ale (IPA). The thought at the time was, "well, it tastes like sh*t, but at least it doesn't spoil". Because its very substantially easier to brew this highly-acidic concoction, it has become the most popular style of basement- and garage-born microbreweries, and the American public has now developed a taste for it, somehow equating it with "good".
The classic "world class" brewers continue making less hoppy brews, the Rocheforts, Westmalle's, Chimays, and Erdinger's of the world, but these brews are much more difficult to reliably produce than any IPA, wherein the hops completely stomp on every bacteria and other negative factor which may ever affect the brewing process.
