lol euros

Just adding to the hopslam love. If this is really an off year I can't wait to try it next year.

who you callin a euro buddy

new fav, st bernardus abt 12

flying dog raging bitch!

The local beer bar (Papago Brewing for those in Phoenix) had a Firestone Walker promo tonight as part of AZ beer week. Their 15th anniversary and §ucaba (used to be called Abacus but evidently someone else had the trademark for that) are excellent beers. If you get a chance to try/buy a bottle of either I highly recommend it.

I've had two of the lost abbey beers recently and both have been outstanding, do recommend either judgement day or lost and found.

i was really disappointed the last time i visited their brewery a couple days ago. turns out they use a lot of additives and corn products in their beer. i mean it tastes phenomenal it just kinda irks me to see such a good brewery focused on making outstanding beer do that.

Wtf you serious? Sigh

What's wrong with using corn in beer?

I went to a chili cookoff at the Victory brewery last year. Like heaven on earth.

Additives is my only complaint, although I'd be curious to know which ones.

Beers like bud light, coors, miller, etc are made using mostly corn products. It's basically cheap fermentable sugar and if you use too much corn product you will get beer that trends towards that yellow smelly fizzy crap. Most craft brewers would agree that using anything other than malt, hops, yeast, and water is the foundation of good brewing, although recently people have been playing around and adding spices and fruits and it's been generally accepted as people are making creative beers with unique flavors that you simply cant find in any malt.

Using this corn product is akin to cheating or cutting corners. Although now I question how many breweries need to use cheap product like this in order to make a profit.

An employee caught me glumly staring at a huge sack of dextrose (or dextrin i forget) monohydrate from some corn company. It is essentialy a bag of coagulating sugar that you can dump in to increase the body of the beer add fermentable sugars.

I asked him why they used it and he said primarily to raise the gravity of the beer (which measures its weight compared to water, unfermented beers with a higher gravity generally have more fermentable sugares which result in more alcohol). Basically it's a cheap way to up the sugars but no additional flavor is added to the beer.

I'm goin through a porter phase atm. I'm trying Smuttynose Robust Porter right now, but not digging it's flavor despite hearing good things. It's not overly coffee/chocolatish but there's something unpleasant goin on.

Flying Dog Porter is on deck...

you may have an off bottle. The smuttynose porter is very good normally. Where do you live as more recs will be based on that

Found this lager recently, fairly amazing imo



There's a pub <5min walk from mine that has a selection of over 250 beers. The place is tiny so it's a hidden gem

I'm in CT. Selection for porter's is kinda low. I'd like to find some HiLL Farmstead (supposed to be great). Founders would be nice too, but they don't sell in CT.

Anyway, I think part of the problem is I've been drinking a ton of IPA's for a long time, so now a porter kind of throws my taste buds off....premature negative review most likely.

How about food coloring that will change the appearance of a beer without affecting the body or flavor? Weyermann has a few of those that they've engineered to be within the Reinheitsgebot, so even traditional breweries that say they obey the 1500's German Purity Law can use them, and they don't have to list it as a coloring agent. If you're looking for a beer that is 100% four ingredients - malt, hops, yeast, water - you can probably buy it off the shelf, but you're much safer just making it yourself. Brewers, large and small, care about selling beer, not selling ingredients. If there's something that'll turn a tank more quickly, they'll use it. Bonus if its an engineered or "natural" product that can be omitted or labelled as natural.

Those beers are made using mostly barley products. They do use a higher percentage of rice-based products than other beers, but they generally stay away from corn.

Corn - and rice - fermentables are cheaper than barley, and that's definitely a big reason that big brewers use them. However, they also have definite flavor impacts that must be taken into consideration. They don't have much of a color or carbonation impact at all, though, so saying that using corn or rice leads to fizzy (highly carbonated) or yellow (pale color) beer is just flat-out wrong.

I would strongly argue that most good American craft brewers would say exactly the opposite, as would most Belgian brewers. Again, the strict adherence to a few narrowly defined ingredients is a holdover from medieval Germany, and not a practice that other continental brewers cared about in the first place. The second you put orange peel in a wit like Hoegaarden, you're breaking the "malt/hops/yeast/water" practice, but nobody seems to think that makes **** beer. And since the craft explosion in America starting in the late 80s/early 90s, US brewers have played with all kinds of ingredients, including corn and rice. The nice thing about fermentables from corn and rice is that they are close to 100% fermentable, meaning they add alcohol to the beer without any residual sugar. Big brewers use this to replace barley and maintain their alcohol strength; craft brewers use this to make higher alcohol beers that aren't cloyingly sweet or filling. If you've had a Tripel that is beautifully warming, spicy, and finishes dry, its been made with a fully fermentable sugar like dextrose, AKA corn sugar.

Again, this isn't recent. Before hops were cultivated, adding fruits and spices was the only way to offset the malt sweetness of grains. Ask the Scottish how long they've been putting heather in beers, and I doubt you'll hear, "Only recently."

Again, the type of grain used by the brewer has different effects, and is used to achieve different ends. True, if AB is buying rice syrup or whatever, the ends is most likely cost efficiency. A brewpub using 5% dextrose in their DIPA is doing it to dry the beer out, not save money. They're likely losing money on that beer no matter what.

Patently false. Putting that into a beer would reduce body, making the beer thinner. Alcohol is less dense than water, much less beer. Adding in sugar is increasing fermentable sugars, which get converted to alcohol, which will thin the body of the beer.

Again, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. 100% fermentable sugars do up the alcohol, but they also have other effects on the beer. In the hands of a poor brewer, they can make a thin, tart, cidery prison hooch. In the hands of a great brewer, they can turn a beer that would be heavy and cloying and unenjoyable into a refreshing, sublime beverage.

If you're ever in Santa Rosa, stop by Russian River and get a pint of Pliny the Elder, and then tell the bartender how much you hate the corn sugar in that beer.

TSC,

I'd be surprised if Lost Abbey put anything into their beer that you would object to as an additive. Again, lots of stuff brewers use is natural or innocuous, and labels like, "additive" go back to the Reinheitsgebot, which originally didn't even include yeast. A special carve-out was made for wheat, so if you were transported back to 1300s Germany and had a beer made with wheat, they'd call that an additive-laden beer.

SABMiller uses a hop-derived bittering compound that mimics hops but doesn't skunk when exposed to sunlight, which is how brewers can sell things like High Life and Corona in clear glass. I'm much more skeptical of that stuff than I am of "additives" like coriander in Blue Moon.

I trust your advice

rundownhouse, curious what books you've read/where you get your information?

also do you homebrew?

RDH is a commercial brewer, I believe.

Gonna take his word on it then, what company?

Anheuser-Busch, I think it was.