It's cheaper to fool people into thinking they are drinking a full bodied beer by making it stronger than by making it more flavoursome. So they use "Brewing candy" as a fermentable sugar. Thus the average "lager" in the UK is 5% ABV, as opposed to the average bitter being 4 - 4.4%. It's cheaper to make 5% nonsense than a decent tasting weaker brew.

However, please note, I am not saying that the US make lousy beers that are strong. Their beers are good, but imo, they are stronger than they need to be to encourage me to drink a lot of them.

I suspect that this is because, until recently, I am fairly sure they were prohibited from saying what the strength of the beer was and so, given that they don't have beer duty (ie a tax related directly to strength) so there was nothing to be gained by making a flavoursome beer that was weak.

keep to the Fen Causeway

All beer is about bladder-envy imho ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken