Making fruit alcoholic is pretty easy, but it seems most fruit based hard drinks taste awful or are really low in alcohol, why did beer become the favourite and why don’t we see more options on shelves?
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So, to vastly oversimplify, there are basically two kinds of beer: ales and lagers. If you looked at the family tree of both, there are farrrrr more types of lagers than ales.
The lager method of brewing was only invented in the 1800’s. Industrialization allowed people to really experiment and go all out with lagers. So that’s part of it: it was a common drink, and industrialization was good for selling to the common man. Every company needed its own spin, so lots of varieties came out.
If you took a specific region of the world, dialed it back a millennia or two, and looked at the alcohol of the common man, it’s going to be roughly the same in that region, mostly stagnant over time. It was whatever grew well in the region (wheat, rice, barley) and the brewing method was good for that brewing area (hot, cold). Everyone adapted their brew to be the easiest, most foolproof thing for their region. Now that we have access to everything so it seems like a lot.
Also, back in the day, you could make beer all year, but fruit doesn’t preserve well so it’s more of a seasonal thing. This wasn’t ideal for early industrialization lagers, because farming had not gotten so consistent. If apples were out of season, that was it. Importing from other countries was a long way off in the 1800’s. So more went into making beer varieties than ciders.
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