Diplomacy in a Six-Pack

American beer is such an appealing and enduring notion — the wholesome drink of the country’s founders, baseball, summer barbecues — that it’s easy to forget it had to be invented.

In the 1940s and ‘50s, for instance, a trade association labored mightily to reposition beer as a “friendly” all-American beverage, taking it out of the saloon and into the backyard. The group’s “Home Life in America” ad campaign depicted Cleaveresque families hoisting tall glasses in a comically comprehensive array of domestic settings: picnicking at the beach, playing horseshoes, clustering around a taxidermied ram’s head while greeting the “uncle from the West.” The campaign’s slogan was “Beer Belongs.” To whom? To us.

Today, of course, American beer still belongs to America — sort of. American breweries have opened satellite locations in Berlin and Bangalore, India. The grand finale of last month’s Paris Beer Week featured more than 40 French craft breweries, virtually all of which have dabbled in hoppy American-influenced India pale ales. Even in an era of “America First,” our beer isn’t enjoyed just in our backyards. It is a tireless and affable diplomat, beloved abroad no matter the conditions back home.

This globalization is particularly palpable among the sometimes ridiculous, always enthusiastic fanatics known as beer geeks.

A few weeks ago, for instance, I met a South Korean tourist at Bryant Park in Manhattan for a “beer trade,” after he published a listing on a beer-related web forum. (A ritual unique to our times, its archetypal form may be filed under “sometimes ridiculous”: a blind online date between two grown men who have met expressly to swap rare beers.) As far as I could tell, he had spent his weeks in the United States plundering the breweries of the Eastern Seaboard.

We chatted about his mandatory military service and the poor mobile-data connections in New York as compared with Seoul. Now we’re friends on Instagram. He recently posted a photo of a mini-fridge packed with the spoils of his vacation, along with a caption that the app translated as: “It is too small for a beer refrigerator.”

In a sense, this is just a supercharged version of the transfer of commodities and culture that has been taking place in America since the ale-nourished English arrived. Only after Germans introduced lager beers did our taste for fruity ales give way to crisp lagers and their industrialized, Americanized versions.

America’s craft-beer movement, in return, reimagined foreign beers and popularized them. The classic example is the India pale ale: a historically British beer whose evolution has yielded many styles, from the pioneeringly bitter West Coast IPAs of California to the fruit-juice-like New England IPAs of Vermont and Massachusetts. A recent festival of IPAs in Brooklyn showcased beers from Toronto, Barcelona and Sweden, and even some New England IPAs from Britain: British beer reinvented in America and reintroduced to Britain — and then imported to America.

Festivals like these are evidence of a craft-beer culture that, strengthened by social media, cheap plane tickets and savvy importer-distributors, is not so much international as transnational. This culture, more than sheer geekery, was the context for my encounter with the South Korean tourist.

Craft beer easily invites mockery. It can be at once bro-ish and hipsterized. It makes people do crazy things, like wait hours in line for beers that they may only trade or resell and never drink. It can seem like a realm of elites or white men, and it can do much more to welcome women, minorities and the rest of the world’s beer drinkers in all their infinite diversity.

But the world has already welcomed it. My new friend from Korea knew of the same celebrated breweries as I did. We liked the same beer styles. We wouldn’t have met if not for beer. It’s the sort of interaction I’ve had over and over — in Ohio and Japan, with an Italian dentist, a Belgian correctional officer and a young man from Poland. He was opening the Warsaw outpost of Mikkeller, a Danish craft-beer brand with bars — which serve, of course, New England IPAs — in over a dozen countries.

We’re not the Cleavers anymore. America — like American beer — is more complicated. But beer still belongs to us, and we can all still gather around it. What has changed is who “we” are.