Yes, and there's a worldwide legal fight between A-B and Budvar (the brewery still producing real budweiser) over the name. Budvar _has_ won in some contries.
Budweiser, by the way, used to be a beer style, not a brand.
Rice and other adjuncts were also added because of shortages during WWII, and because of a deliberate marketing decision: the big breweries thought that lighter beers would appeal more to the largely female wartime workforce. They just didn't switch back after the war.
I wouldn't drink it either, and I live in the US. Quite a few americans are obsessed with the stuff, I think it's wretched.
Of course, it helps that I get free beer from work. It's good to be the brewer.
Well, yes, it is about the water. Water is amazingly important to different beer styles--it's why you get pale ale in London and brown in Newcastle. Mineral content difference. And no, darker doesn't necessarily mean better, and lighter colored is not equal to watered down. There's more grain in our amber ale than our porter, for example.
Don't know about polyethylene glycol, but propylene glycol is used as a carrier for flavors. You find it in, among other things, Pyramid Brewing's Apricon Ale
Everything can be beer related, if you try hard enough.
Homebrewing, you'll always get sediment in your bottles unless you force carbonate in a keg and then use a counterpressure filler. The sediment is left over from the bottle-conditioning (yeast eating priming sugars). You even get it in some commercial beer--take a careful look at a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale one of these days, they bottle condition (or at least used to). Besides, filter equipment that does the job is bloody expensive and annoying to maintain, even for brewpubs and micros. Ours comes from Italy, and so do all the spare parts (can you say three weeks brewing downtime because the bleeding sight glass broke?)
Yep. We added it by the flaskful at filtration. That's not one of the scary stories, btw. Ask me about the Orange Soda Breathing Incident, or the Dangling Pink Cheese Incident, or the Wading-Through-Caustic-Hop-Sludge Incident, or even the Great Blackout of 2000...
Hoppy is much better. The beer's better, the food's better, it's cleaner, they let me work in my Utilikilt. All good things.
'Fraid not...I never was in the packaging side. I do know that the oxygen content is pretty high (old, tired bottling line) and some of the off flavor may come from the iso-hop extract they use to bring the bitterness up to spec. Another reason I don't drink the stuff.
Well, for real DMS go for Rolling Rock. DMS=dimethyl sulfide, for those who don't know. As mentioned, creamed corn/cooked veggies flavor.
Budweiser _does_ contain more malt than rice; otherwise they couldn't sell it as beer. If you want me to go into six-row malt vs two-row malt I will, but it's long and tedious to explain, and I usually need hand gestures to do it.
My idea of lawnmower beer is an IPA, but hey...everyone has their favorite.
Well...
You can get into incredibly fine divisions when splitting beer into styles, to the point of one-to-one style-to-individual-beer. Having said that, you're pretty much correct. Kind of. Pale ale _is_ a style, but it's also an overarching category. Lager is just an overarching category. Pale ale can be divided into pale, India Pale Ale, bitter...it goes on and on. Bud is the prime example of American Pilsner, aka "American light lager".
Great American Beer Fest style guide is a list of just how nitpicky brewers can get. My entry this year fits in #61, Imperial Stout.
I'm sure it was better than Pyramid's. Not to run down your beer ( I always encourage homebrewers--you're the next generation of professional brewers) I used to brew there, and I can confirm that Pyramid Hefe is probably the worst I've ever had. It's quite telling that none of the brewers at Pyramid drink the beer produced there. Not even when it's free.
As for Bud, here's Budweiser Rant #1. Budweiser is technically perfect beer. Technically. It tastes exactly the way the brewery wants it to, no matter where in the world it's brewed or where the ingredients come from. It tastes the same way every time (I wish I could be that consistant, we'd sell more beer). I think it tastes like crap, but Anheuser-Busch _wants_ it to taste that way, and it does sell fairly well...
Because homebrewers of today are the professional brewers of tomorrow. At least, that's how I got started. Now I brew for a living. At the moment (17:00 pst) I've got 450 gallons of proto-brown ale on the boil. You need people who are enthusiastic about beer in order to brew--it doesn't pay enough to encourage people to do it. Homebrewers are still the best source for that.
There's a Heinlein quote for this, from his short story, "Lifeline" I'm kind of surprised I haven't seen it here before...
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
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I have 10 megabit fiber-to-the-home. I _don't_ have a TV. I get the few shows I watch via bittorrent. So there.
Yes, and there's a worldwide legal fight between A-B and Budvar (the brewery still producing real budweiser) over the name. Budvar _has_ won in some contries. Budweiser, by the way, used to be a beer style, not a brand.
Because they've got _really_ good chemists, _really_ stringent quality control, and workers who follow instructions _exactly_.
I wish my brewery could be that consistant, but I think we make better beer instead. Fair trade.
Rice and other adjuncts were also added because of shortages during WWII, and because of a deliberate marketing decision: the big breweries thought that lighter beers would appeal more to the largely female wartime workforce. They just didn't switch back after the war.
I wouldn't drink it either, and I live in the US. Quite a few americans are obsessed with the stuff, I think it's wretched. Of course, it helps that I get free beer from work. It's good to be the brewer.
Well, yes, it is about the water. Water is amazingly important to different beer styles--it's why you get pale ale in London and brown in Newcastle. Mineral content difference. And no, darker doesn't necessarily mean better, and lighter colored is not equal to watered down. There's more grain in our amber ale than our porter, for example.
Yes, I brew for a living.
Don't know about polyethylene glycol, but propylene glycol is used as a carrier for flavors. You find it in, among other things, Pyramid Brewing's Apricon Ale
Everything can be beer related, if you try hard enough.
_Vacuum Flowers_. Michael Swanwick. Earth gets consumed, but has problems with wireless range and doesn't finish absorbing the orbital habitats.
Homebrewing, you'll always get sediment in your bottles unless you force carbonate in a keg and then use a counterpressure filler. The sediment is left over from the bottle-conditioning (yeast eating priming sugars). You even get it in some commercial beer--take a careful look at a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale one of these days, they bottle condition (or at least used to). Besides, filter equipment that does the job is bloody expensive and annoying to maintain, even for brewpubs and micros. Ours comes from Italy, and so do all the spare parts (can you say three weeks brewing downtime because the bleeding sight glass broke?)
Yep. We added it by the flaskful at filtration. That's not one of the scary stories, btw. Ask me about the Orange Soda Breathing Incident, or the Dangling Pink Cheese Incident, or the Wading-Through-Caustic-Hop-Sludge Incident, or even the Great Blackout of 2000... Hoppy is much better. The beer's better, the food's better, it's cleaner, they let me work in my Utilikilt. All good things.
'Fraid not...I never was in the packaging side. I do know that the oxygen content is pretty high (old, tired bottling line) and some of the off flavor may come from the iso-hop extract they use to bring the bitterness up to spec. Another reason I don't drink the stuff.
Sacramento, CA Hoppy Brewing Company Much better brewery than Pyramid, much smaller, much more fun to work for.
Well, for real DMS go for Rolling Rock. DMS=dimethyl sulfide, for those who don't know. As mentioned, creamed corn/cooked veggies flavor. Budweiser _does_ contain more malt than rice; otherwise they couldn't sell it as beer. If you want me to go into six-row malt vs two-row malt I will, but it's long and tedious to explain, and I usually need hand gestures to do it. My idea of lawnmower beer is an IPA, but hey...everyone has their favorite.
Well... You can get into incredibly fine divisions when splitting beer into styles, to the point of one-to-one style-to-individual-beer. Having said that, you're pretty much correct. Kind of. Pale ale _is_ a style, but it's also an overarching category. Lager is just an overarching category. Pale ale can be divided into pale, India Pale Ale, bitter...it goes on and on. Bud is the prime example of American Pilsner, aka "American light lager". Great American Beer Fest style guide is a list of just how nitpicky brewers can get. My entry this year fits in #61, Imperial Stout.
I'm sure it was better than Pyramid's. Not to run down your beer ( I always encourage homebrewers--you're the next generation of professional brewers) I used to brew there, and I can confirm that Pyramid Hefe is probably the worst I've ever had. It's quite telling that none of the brewers at Pyramid drink the beer produced there. Not even when it's free. As for Bud, here's Budweiser Rant #1. Budweiser is technically perfect beer. Technically. It tastes exactly the way the brewery wants it to, no matter where in the world it's brewed or where the ingredients come from. It tastes the same way every time (I wish I could be that consistant, we'd sell more beer). I think it tastes like crap, but Anheuser-Busch _wants_ it to taste that way, and it does sell fairly well...
Because homebrewers of today are the professional brewers of tomorrow. At least, that's how I got started. Now I brew for a living. At the moment (17:00 pst) I've got 450 gallons of proto-brown ale on the boil. You need people who are enthusiastic about beer in order to brew--it doesn't pay enough to encourage people to do it. Homebrewers are still the best source for that.
There's a Heinlein quote for this, from his short story, "Lifeline" I'm kind of surprised I haven't seen it here before...
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."