Virtually every country has a bestselling or iconic national beer brand. Yet, with the sole exception of Ireland's Guinness, every label represents the same style: light, crisp, clear, Pilsner lager. But this modern beer is just as much a product of globalization, invented and reinvented around the world.

Here eminent food historian Jeffrey M. Pilcher narrates the brewing traditions and contemporary production of beer across Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, and Latin America—from the fermented beverages of precapitalist societies to the present. Unique local products, often homebrewed by women, were transformed into homogenous global commodities as giant brewing factories exported their beers using new refrigeration technology, railroads, and steamships. Over the past half-century, the global concentration of the brewing industry has spawned a reaction among those seeking to return brewing to the local, artisanal, and communitarian roots of the premodern alehouse, but microbrewers have often been driven by the same capitalist quest for profit and expansion.

Based on a wealth of multinational archives and industry publications, Hopped Up explores not only how humans have made beer but also how consumers—from nobility and clergy in the past to those raising a pint today—have used beer to make meaning in their lives.