LAGER FRENZY!

Rice in lager gets an image overhaul in the LA Times

Posted on October 3, 2009 by Andrew

Uhhm, I'll have a nice cold glass of rat poison, please.

For years ‘industrial’ lager has ben ridiculed for adding rice and corn as adjuncts to provide extra sugar for fermenting. The beer purists locked into Reinheitsgebot have accused brewers of cheapening the brew, watering it down for commercial gain, and generally being evil. All-malt is the best seems to be the general opinion.

But this week there was a story in the LA Times that describes how some craft brewers are experimenting with rice and corn ales. The horror! Well, not really, the Times’ story is nicely balanced piece describing how rice can be used for giving flavour, rather than taking it away.

“Yes, rice gives beer a light body,” says Brian Dunn, owner and brewer at Great Divide Brewing Co. in Denver. In 2007, the brewery released Samurai, an unfiltered rice and barley ale, to retail outlets. “But it’s also crisp and refreshing, and has a little fruity character that really comes through.”

Also quoted is Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew, a book exploring the history of brewing in the US, who says “Craft brewers treat rice almost as if it’s rat poison.”

According to Ogle, the anti-rice sentiment is traceable to the early craft brewing revival in the 1980s. “It was all about, ‘We’re only using four ingredients, we’re not like those industrial brewers making watered-down, cheap beer by using adjuncts like rice.’

“The mythology is that these giant beer makers began adding rice and corn to their beer after World War II to water it down, but that’s simply not true,” she adds.

The American brewing industry was built in the late 19th century by first-generation German American immigrants such as Adolphus Busch, Adolph Coors and Frederick Miller. Although these men, craft brewers themselves, initially re-created the full-bodied beers of their homeland, many Americans had not developed a taste for the malt-heavy style.

“They needed a domestic ingredient that would make the beers more effervescent, bubbly and lighter,” Ogle says. “Rice and corn did that — it was a desired flavor, not inexpensive filler.”

Posted in Beer, Brewing, ingredients, Lager loathing, US lager | Comments Off

The debt lager owes to Guinness

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Andrew

Guinness led the consortium to launch Harp lager

Lager and ‘container draught’ (later developing the slightly catchier name of ‘keg’) were the two great opportunities for British brewers in the early 1960s. They had been the fastest growing elements of the British beer industry, but it was the creation of draught lager that finally gave lager the mass-market breakthrough it had attempted for nearly 100 years.

At the start of the decade, lager and draught each accounted for no more than 3% of the total beer market. Lager had been brewed on a regular basis in the UK since at least 1879 and draught had been developed by Watney Mann before the Second World War and developed after by Flowers’ under the ‘Keg’ brand name.

In 1950, slightly fewer than 100,000 barrels of lager were drunk, most of them imported. By 1959 and the introduction of Skol by Ind Coope, the total had risen to 500,000. By 1960, 550,000. During this time total beer consumption was stagnant and the brewers knew that if they couldn’t shift total consumption, they would have to try and shift consumption patterns.

It was Harp, brewed by a consortium of four brewers headed by Guinness, that began the major shift in consumption away from cask-conditioned ales. Guinness began development of its new lager in the late 1950s with the purchase of The Great Northern Brewery in Dundalk. The German brewer, Dr. Herman Muendar, was not overly impressed by the brewery and described it as “like an alchemists’ kitchen”

Harp lager was first brewed in June 1960 and quickly saw success first in Ireland and then a year later in North West England and then national. By 1962 it was the second biggest brand – neck and neck with Carlsberg – but still behind Skol. It was brewed in the UK by Scottish & Newcastle, Mitchell & Butler and Courage.

Initially Harp lager was bottled and did reasonably well, but it was the launch of Harp on draught in 1965 that saw sales really take off. According to brewing historian Martyn Cornell Harp wasn’t the first keg lager, but it was the first one to solve the problem of overfrothing, helping lager elbow its way into the UK.

From the 2% share of the beer market in the early sixties, lager grew to just under 10% by 1971, topping 50% by 1989. Ironically, this was also the year that Harp dropped out of the Top 10 beer brands in the UK. Just 10 years later, seven of the top ten beers in the UK were lagers.

Posted in Beer, Brands, Brewing history, Harp, Lager, UK lager | Comments Off

Light in more ways than one – US lager’s missing ingredients

Posted on September 16, 2009 by Andrew

Beer and Philosophy. Two subjects that go together surprisingly well. Or not surprising really if you’ve ever spent an afternoon or an evening putting the world to rights over a beer.

The two subjects also go surprisingly well together in a book of the same name, Beer and Philosophy: The unexamined beer isn’t worth drinking, edited by Steven D. Hales.

What has this to do with lager I can hear you asking? Well, if philosophy is all about the examination of our human lives and how we experience them, then questions such as ‘How on earth can people brew Budweiser with a straight face’ are extremely relevant. And Beer and Philosophy doesn’t disappoint, with some interesting background on what goes into US lager – or perhaps that should be what doesn’t.

What makes beer good or not good is one of the themes and crops up repeatedly in the book. Is a beer good because I like it, or do I like it because it is good? Also, it questions what makes a beer good.

Quality in, quality out

The chapter entitled ‘Quality, Schmality’ looks at ‘goodness’ by considering what goes into US lagers in terms of the type and quality of malt and the amount of adjuncts and hops. And the authors reproduce an interesting table that shows that since 1915, the amount of fermentable material has fallen consistently. The amount of hops in US beer fell by 60% from 1935 o 1990. The table by the way comes from a paper entitled The all-American beer: a case of inferior standard (taste) prevailing?