Communist beer must be schitty by definition.
I won't share my personal experiences from the times of the Communist occupation of the Baltic states, although I have something to recall, even though I was young and undemanding back then, and even though The Baltics were - beer-wise, I mean - the most privileged colony of the USSR.
I'd better refer to a less subjective source: a Soviet book of 1974 in Russian I downloaded and read recently, which contains Soviet State Standards for some 60 beers from three Soviet republics: Russia, Ukraine and also Latvia (from which, the latter, I originate from). Most of the beers in there are modified knockouts of European traditional styles: Pilsners, Bohemian Dunkels, Bocks etc. The main distinguishing thing is that each and every style is "optimized" in the sence of replacing Barley malt, because of economy, with considerable doses of adjuncts: mostly Rice, but also Raw Barley, Maize, Soybeans, Beet Sugar etc. The only classic all-barley-malt beers in the book are those grandfathered from the pre-occupation times, like the Pilsners of Riga (annexed in 1940 from Latvia) and Lwow (annexed in 1939 from Poland). It seems the Politbiuro allowed people on the newly-occupied territories, accustomed to real lagers, to keep enjoying their favourites (those grandfathered beers were hard to come by in the stores, however) while the Ruskies themselves were deprived of even such a luxury and their beer of choise (90% of the Soviet brewing output actually) was Ziguliowskie Piwo, a bastardised Wiener made of up to 50% Raw Barley fermented with Aspergyllase.
When in the 1970s there happened a Barley crop shortage in the USSR, the government had to purchase a large batch of brewing grain from Denmark. The quality of the Danish grain was so immensely higher than the Ukrainian Barley the Soviet breweries usually employed, they had to create a specific beer to brew from it - the Senču Alus ("The Forefathers' Beer"), distributed exclusively in the occupied Baltic Stastes. It was nothing more than a simple-and-nice all-grain Hellesbier, but it was a rarity on the Soviet beer market. The rest of the empire had to be content with the 50%-Adjunct Ziguliowskie, so the Ruskies used to travel to Latvia from Russia by car or by train to get back home some crates of the rare "real beer" from there.
Etc.
Please let me avoid the titanical topic of the GDR brewing - I hope there are people here who could say more on the subject than I can. To hell with the centuries-long German brewing heritage and Reinheitsgebot, they said. To hell with the capitalist brewing economy, they said. Then they had East Germans seeking for West German brews on the black market and paying several times their retail price at home. As it happens everywhere the Communist/Socialist markets exist.
I wish those Leftie-beer brewers and Astra-promoters to get somehow back into the USSR and to spend there some 20 or 30 of their most productive years, being limited to at best 3 kinds of "optimized" beer at their local stores. I also whole-heartedly wish them to experience fist fights in kilometer-long cues for anything other than the Aspergyllase swill. That's the true Communist way of drinking beer, it would be a shame to not let them enjoy it.
.
