This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue here with our American stories.

And up next, a story on one of America's favorite beverages. Here's our own

Monty Montgomery with a story. We Americans enjoy our beer. In 2018, we consumed about 6.8 billion

gallons of it. And by far the most popular style we drink is Pilsner.

Here's Tom Akitelli, author of Pilsner, How the Beer of Kings Changed the World,

with more. Pilsner is the dominant style of beer in the world, and has been for well over

100 years. All the major brands you can think of, Budweiser, Bud Light,

Miller, Miller Light, Heineken, Papps, are based on Pilsner or imitations of the Pilsner style.

They're everywhere. They're, you know, every grocery store, bar, gas station, bodega, you name it.

It's Pilsner.

It was first made in a small, what was then a sort of a mid-sized city of the Austrian Empire called Pilsen. And what's now to the Czech Republic, the local aristocrats in Pilsen, who had the right to brew and sell beer locally. They were getting tired of their

beer, their local beer, getting beaten out of the marketplace by beers from Bavaria just over the border.

So the aristocrats and Pilsen are like, we're tired of losing market share to these guys, these Bavarians making these lighter, better beers.

So we gotta co-op what they're doing, right?

So you can imagine, you know, they literally have meeting after meeting,

memos and manifestos about how to compete with Bavarian beer

and knock it out of the marketplace in Pilsen.

So what they do is they hire a Bavarian brewmaster named Yosef Grohl

who uses Bavarian know-how, Bavarian recipes, Bavarian techniques.

In other words, just sort of imports German technique and style over the border

and makes this beer for the burgers for the aristocrats of

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