The US is about the worst place on the planet to find quality beer,
and when you find it it's nowhere near the price of water (unlike
other countries).

That used to be true.

It's still true.

Quality beer used to be virtually non-existent. My comment follows
the boom of the microbrews.. based on the fact that it's available at
a high price.

Now we have a gazillion microbreweries, many of which distribute in
supermarkets and liquor stores, and a lot of the beer is quite good.

Big US breweries lost 10% of the marketshare recently. It's a big
drop, but the US market is still saturated with poor quality beer.
The scarcity of microbrews is why Americans are paying extortionate
prices for quality beer; ~3-4 times that of comparable beers abroad
(where the *large* foreign breweries are cranking out huge volumes of
quality beer at a cheap price). In these superior markets, the price
difference between a microbrew and a mass produced beer is smaller
than that of the US.

Demand for good beer is finally increasing US, but don't expect the
market to improve. Big brewers lost market share so quickly that they
started buying up microbrews in a defensive maneuver. They will keep
some and label those beers their "premium" beer, and let the others
die.

ATM, it still makes sense for beer lovers to import beer to the US.