Writing about beer is a tough gig. You have to spend your evenings in bars doing research. You have to figure out what to do with the sample bottles breweries send to you. And, occasionally, you have to spin a trip you were going to take anyway into a single-minded beer odyssey made for the purpose of expanding the minds of readers.

This particular beer journey, which concluded last week, led us to Bree Louise, a pub just behind Euston Station, in London’s Camden Borough. It’s a place where they take beer seriously.

These words are being written from row 22 of a flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, connecting to a widebody bound for Germany. The plan is to visit one of the world’s great brewing towns.

The destination: Bamberg. A compact, medieval-styled, eye-gougingly quaint dorf full of narrow half-timbered houses, cobbled streets, and, oh yeah, a ridiculous number of breweries for a town its size.

These days, we confidently assert that Americans know beer. More people than ever can rattle off the differences between an IPA and a stout, the way they’d differentiate a pinot grigio from a merlot in the wine world.

Sometimes, a cold beer is the best thing in the world, like when you’re working outside on those midsummer days when the rising heat blurs the air over the blacktop, and it’s so humid it feels like you’re walking through pudding. At times like that, it’s easy to conjure fantasies of a frosty, sweaty bottle, freshly popped, a cool, dense mist wafting seductively from its mouth…

Sorry, we’re getting a little wound up here. Whew.

It is tempting to describe classic European beer styles as immutable, their hallowed characteristics chiseled into marble. But that simply isn’t the case and never has been.

Sure, styles like porter and Dunkel go back a couple hundred years, but a quick look into their histories shows that these classic variants of beer are merely benchmarks in the evolution of the beverage, porter turning to Irish stout, Dunkel to Helles.

In the beer world, everything is, ahem, fluid.

Among enthusiasts, the term ‘craft beer’ is a dichotomy. It’s a celebration of brewing’s limitless creative potential, but at the same time the label is a constraint, a narrow beer VIP room into which only a few highly priced, extremely strong, violently flavored beers may pass.

The hop flower is a key ingredient in beer. Its flavor and aroma balance the sweetness of the grain, and hop bitterness gives many beer styles their allure and distinction. Like any plant, hops have their differences, and when making beer, brewers select from that palette of hop varieties to achieve the appropriate characteristics of taste and smell. Let’s talk about these differences, because we have a column to turn in.

The biggest names in craft beer can now be found pretty much anywhere. This hurts the craft beer lover.

Craft beer is a mature segment of the beverage industry. It’s no longer a place for mavericks, corporate outcasts and visionaries. Nowadays you’re more likely to find venture capitalists and investment groups funding breweries than gatherings of friends and community. It sucks, but those days are done.

The history books overflow with terrible ideas, and up near the top of the list, right after ‘invading Russia in the winter,’ sits prohibition. The USA’s decade long attempt to combat drunkenness by outlawing liquor proved a colossal folly of social engineering, and obliterated American beer as folks knew it.