American Beer Film

locally-made and available, Brooklyn filmmaker Paul Kermizian and four friends hit the road to visit a button-busting 38 breweries in 40 days! In the 1970's, there were only 50 major beer bottlers in the U.S. Today there are over 1,700 individual brewmasters throughout the country bottling their personal experiences as tinkerers, closet brewers, cooks and you-name-its have become the most recent captains of industry; others might better be described as drunks! All their stories about beer and beer-making are inspired: crazy ingredients, brewing in basements, starting from scratch, sampling the wares, fighting the big three brewers, and of course, the perfect cure for hangovers. And speaking of hangovers, camera. From Maine to Oregon, they must sample at least five pints of the best beer in America each night for over a month! That adds up to a lot of drinks, drunks, chucks, cheeseburgers, naps and new belt notches. Can our fearless filmmakers get to New Orleans before cirrhosis sets in! In the true, ahem, spirit of Central Standard, American Beer amusingly shows how much more interesting, inspired, and rewarding America is once you tap into a keg of our subculture and, well, flush the mainstream! Richard Sterling