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Here's my new favorite...
American breweries didn't start out with the intention of making bland beer. They do that now, because we're so brainwashed, we won't drink good beer. In the beginning, it was all about the bottom line. Hops are expensive, and so is two-row barley. Rice and corn were comparatively cheap, for good reason. The greedheads at Anheuser-Busch and other companies realized that advertising, not flavor, drives beer buying in the US, so they took nearly everything except water and alcohol out of their disgusting products, knowing most of us would buy them anyway. For most consumers, it's all about getting buzzed. They don't care at all about flavor. If they did, it would be impossible to sell things like Mickey's Wide Mouth or Colt 45. The macrobrew industry is all about pandering to clueless consumers who only think about price and cute commercials.
Kev, when it comes to beer, there are people who make it and people who BS. Guess which category you're in? You don't know the first thing about it.
Jeese even the beer thread is turning ugly. Come soon spring.Sent from my Note II
Oh come on fellas , this was just getting good . Grinning here .DustySent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Kev, sorry I got a little crabby, in spite of your gentle manner. You know I love and admire you and secretly think of you as my mentor and role model, and your knowledge of motorcycles is unexcelled. I hope you still love me, and that you will overlook my momentary snippiness. Nonetheless, Bud is not a serious beer. Okay, you worked at a brewery. That's fine. I notice that company's brews get some reviews that suggest their products are undistinguished brews that only do well locally--not uncommon for breweries trying to cash on the microbrew fad--but I will ASSUME that means you actually know how beers are designed, and that you weren't just wheeling kegs around or dumping sacks of yeast into vats. Most brewery employees don't know anything about designing beers. I've known ladies who worked as receptionists in doctors' offices, but I wouldn't let them operate on me. Still, I'm sure you know what you're doing. Still, not everyone here has your expertise, so I will point out a few things.Designing a beer is easy (if you know how) but not simple. There are a ton of factors. You start with a flavor you want to create. It's something you imagine on your own. Then you have to decide what kind of beer it is. Lager, ale, barleywine, imperial stout, whatever. That puts you on the path to the right yeast, grain, mashing procedure, choice of hops, etcetera. Every choice matters a lot. If you cheap out at any stage, you ruin the beer. If you're not familiar with the effect of each grain, you can't choose the grains for yourself, so you can't really design beer.A good beer may have several grains in it. Each grain will contribute something meaningful. For example, roasted barley makes stouts dark, and it can impart flavors similar to chocolate and coffee. Crystal malt contains sugars yeast can't ferment well, so it provides sweetness to balance the bitterness of hops. Oats contribute protein so a beer has a nice texture and head. Rice hulls make gummy grains drain better so the wort comes out of the grain when you rinse ("sparge") it. Rice--a big component of bad American beer--contributes alcohol but not flavor. Selecting the grains takes thought. You can't just run out and get the cheapest six-row barley and cut it with rice and then expect a beer with character.When you do the mash, the temperature matters, as I'm sure you know. Because of your background, I will assume you know what malt is, but I will tell the others. It's grain that has begun to germinate. It contains more than one enzyme that break down starch, which yeast can't ferment. They turn it into sugar, which yeast turn into alcohol. As a highly skilled brewer, you know that different enzymes work best at different temperatures, and they affect the final product.You have to decide on the wort's specific gravity. Heavy wort makes stronger beer. One of the easiest ways to make a beer cheaper is simply to put more water in it. Measuring the specific gravity during fermentation will tell you how far along the process has gone, and it will tell you when you're done. As you clearly know, one of the bad raps Guiness gets is that it's too heavy. In fact, it's a low-gravity beer, and it's not high in calories.As you could tell us, I'm sure, different beers are treated differently after fermentation. Many ales are ready to serve right away. Lagers are not. They have to be "lagered," which means "stored" until the yeast takes all the rough edges off the flavor. This is accomplished using chilled containers, and for a quality beer, it takes weeks. The less time a beer spends lagering, the worse it may taste. Lagering costs money, so it's a good place for a bad brewer to cut corners.The yeast makes a big difference, too. White Labs and Wyeast--I am sure you are very familiar with their products--sell many, many varieties of yeast. Some have been cultured from yeast taken from well-regarded breweries. They do different things. There are ale yeasts and lager yeasts. There is champagne yeast. Some make beers taste like vanilla. Depending on the choice of yeast and fermentation schedule, you can get flavors like apple or banana. Some yeasts settle out. Some don't. Hopping is a complicated business. A good beer will have hops added to it at least twice. The wort is boiled before fermentation, and this takes a long time. A couple of hours. You add some hops early in the boil and some hops late. You can add hops after the boil, too. Some hops are added for bitterness, some for flavor, and some for aroma. If you go to Dan Listermann's site, assuming it's still up, or Morebeer.com or one of the other brewing sites, you'll see that there are dozens of different hops, and you have to know how every hop tastes. When I design a beer, I know I can choose from things like Saaz, Centennial, and Amarillo hops. Some taste like lemons. Some taste like pepper or grapefruit. My best lager uses a combination of Crystal and Nugget hops. I'm sure you are familiar with them.Cheap beers use very little hops, so they have almost no character, and they lack bitterness to balance the sweet, soapy taste that comes from the cheap grain. According to the Wall Street Journal, between 1950 and 2004, typical American beers declined in IBU from somewhere around 20 to somewhere near 10. For the others, I will not that "IBU" is a measure of bitterness. A good IPA may run around 50 IBU. A quick check reveals that Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA comes in at 120. I don't know where a real pilsner like Urquell fits in the scheme, but it's way higher than crap like Bud and Coors, which have hop levels that are barely perceptible. In addition to lacking flavor and bitterness, Bud has almost no aroma, except for the sour apple smell that comes from the yeast. There is no reason to avoid hopping a pilsner. Steinlager is known for its bitterness, and it's a wonderful beer.When the folks who make bad beer choose to use rice, corn, or cheap barley, they are not trying to make good beer. That's the last thing on their minds. They're just trying to make money. No one at Anheuser-Busch sat up all night trying to figure out the right balance of rice and barley. They looked at prices. They didn't try dozens of different hop schedules to see which one was best. They used whatever was available, in the smallest (cheapest) amounts possible. They ended up with a product that couldn't legally be sold in Germany as "beer," due to the reinheitsgebot or purity law. Brewers don't even consider corn and rice "grain" for brewing purposes. We call things like that "adjuncts," and it's pretty clear why.In the many online brewing forums, you probably won't find any respected brewers asking how much rice or corn to put in their beer in the hope of equaling Bud's quality. Bud is what they started brewing to get away from. I have designed all sorts of beers. Stouts. Wheat beers. Amber lagers. Lagers the color of honey. Ales. A nice tripel. They all came out great because I did what brewers are supposed to do. I designed with a flavor, not a price point, in mind. I didn't use the cheapest junk available and then try to compensate with commercials featuring animated frogs and women in bikinis. I think most knowledgeable beer drinkers would see things my way. After all, they financed the microbrew revolution, and there had to be a reason.I haven't brewed in a while, and the ethanol farce has jacked up the cost of grain, but when I did brew, the cost in materials was somewhere near 40 cents per 12-ounce serving. I paid boutique prices for tiny quantities. I feel certain that when Miller orders ten thousand tons of grain, they get a much better deal, so even after paying overhead, it's safe to say that they can make decent beer profitably without continuing to cheap out at every conceivable opportunity.If, in light of all that, you still say BudMilCoors is real beer, well, you're entitled to your opinion, and maybe you will want to go into your own ideas and talk about the beers you've designed. But maybe you can see why I disagree, and why "bulls___" is not really a fair word to use to describe my take.
:bow
If, in light of all that, you still say BudMilCoors is real beer, well, you're entitled to your opinion, and maybe you will want to go into your own ideas and talk about the beers you've designed. But maybe you can see why I disagree, and why "bulls___" is not really a fair word to use to describe my take.
I will strive to be a better Kev wannabe in the future.
I will take that, even if it's sarcasm. I am not proud. :BEER:
American breweries didn't start out with the intention of making bland beer. They do that now, because we're so brainwashed, we won't drink good beer. In the beginning, it was all about the bottom line. Hops are expensive, and so is two-row barley. Rice and corn were comparatively cheap, for good reason. The greedheads at Anheuser-Busch and other companies realized that advertising, not flavor, drives beer buying in the US, so they took nearly everything except water and alcohol out of their disgusting products, knowing most of us would buy them anyway. For most consumers, it's all about getting buzzed. They don't care at all about flavor. If they did, it would be impossible to sell things like Mickey's Wide Mouth or Colt 45. The macrobrew industry is all about pandering to clueless consumers who only think about price and cute commercials.It's ignorant to call BudMilCoors a "style." That's like saying driving a car with one primer-colored door is a style. It lends legitimacy to a scam. No one in his right mind would try to brew this crap at home or in a micro-brewery, any more than a chef would try to make Wonder Bread or Pop Tarts. I made my own lawnmower beer once, as an experiment, but that's all it was, and it was a thousand times better than Bud.
i tend to agree. isn't this the point of the "beer thread" to show off what fancy beers we drink and to introduce others to our favorite beers. (theres one down here, i think its called blood and honey by revolver. its pretty good ) and yes coors light is a beer. but to call it a beer is like saying both a yugo and a ferrari are cars.the economics of beer is interesting. beer is getting more expensive. due to the two major companies buying out everyone. but also, light beer. light beer is a joke. why would i pay the same amount of money for less beer. light beer is about 3.2 % while beer is 5 %, so your calories are about 100 for a bottle of light beer, 140 or so for beer beer. one would then probably, im guessing drink more light beers, cause they think they can since they are saving calories, or they think they should since they dont feel any sort of buzz. and they would have been better off just drinking a normal beer instead. but whatever. it is funny when you go to a place that has like 100 beers on tap and a guy will walk up and ask for a budmillercoors. surprisingly a guinness stout does not have more calories or higher alcohol than your average beer.i prefer half guinness half cider myself. :BEER:
note that i said "about", and perhaps i cited a bad source. the calories are right, however light beer is approx 4% alcohol.
The purpose the Reinheitsgebot was not primarily to maintain the quality of beer. One of the main purposes of the Reinheitsgebot was to stop breweries from using wheat and rye, which were considered more valuable grains, so that the price of bread would not be driven up. The law stopped the production of many types of beer that had previously been enjoyed in Germany, but that used other grains and ingredients that were not allowed.
And looking and looking . Grinning here . This should stir the pot . Is Sake wine ?DustySent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
and a lot are about 4.2, but ASSUMING THAT can be dangerous as some are not, for example Bud Light Platinum is 6%, which is the same as some malt liquors.
