It's common to disparage light beers. As craft beers have elbowed their way into American refrigerators and taps, light beers have become punch lines. What few drinkers know, however, is that quality light beers are incredibly difficult to brew. The thin flavor means there's little to mask defects in the more than 800 chemical compounds within. As Kyler Serfass, manager of the home-brew supply shop Brooklyn Homebrew, told me, "Light beer is a brewer's beer. It may be bland, but it's really tough to do." Belgian monks and master brewers around the world marvel at how macro-breweries like Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors have perfected the process in hundreds of factories, ensuring that every pour from every brewery tastes exactly the same. Staring at a bottle, it's staggering to consider the effort that goes into producing each ounce of the straw-colored liquid...posted by flex at 8:14 PM on November 4, 2012 [22 favorites]
...trying to replicate these conditions is extraordinarily difficult for most home brewers. For Brooklyn Homebrew's Kyler Serfass, it took three months of experimentation to crack the code using an old refrigerator he discovered in the basement of his apartment building. "When I saw that fridge, it was like a light shone down from heaven," he said. Serfass made only two cases' worth of his "Budweiser clone," but the duplication was considered such an achievement that it won him a gold medal at this year's Homebrew Alley competition, held at the Brooklyn Brewery.
While brewing two cases of quality light beer is nothing to scoff at, it's a universe apart from shipping the roughly 18 million barrels a year that Budweiser and Coors Light do. "There are things you can't measure that nonetheless impact the taste of a light beer," Kraemer said, adding that certain taste compounds are present in just a few parts per trillion. To assure quality, all of Anheuser-Busch's 137 senior brew-masters taste the raw ingredients -- including the water -- at every stage of the brewing process. If a brewmaster samples beer from a lagering tank at the end of its aging process and detects that the beer has not fully matured, he can dictate that the tank age for an extra day or two before the beer is filtered and packaged. This level of precision exerted over so many millions of barrels of beer is stunning. And while it may not convince you to pull a cheap six-pack off the shelf, it should help you see the brew in a new light.
The company’s shipments in the U.S. have declined 8 percent to 98 million barrels from 2008 to 2011, according to Beer Marketer’s Insights.Probably not.
Could that be explained by this: Craft brewers sold an estimated 11,468,152 barrels* of beer in 2011, up from 10,133,571 in 2010.
I'm a brewer. Not a homebrewer, but a guy who's worked nearly a decare in breweries large and small. I worked in one of the largest breweries in North America churning out 7+ million barrels a year. Now I work for a craft brewery with an annual production comparable to what I used to make in a week. I left to go smaller, and took a pay cut, because I didn't like the culture of the company anymore and wanted to go to a place where I felt I would fit in. To all of you folks who are hating on the big guys, let's set a few things straight:posted by psycho-alchemy at 1:29 AM on November 5, 2012 [52 favorites]
Light beers didn't come to dominate the Global beer market because it sucks and everyone hates them. There was a steady evolution of consolidation in America as manufacturing techniques improved. Where 75 years ago there was a brewery in every region turning out good to great beers that were different everywhere, they were also inconsistent. And there was a lot of spoilage. Americans bought in to lighter and lighter beers. And the breweries who produced them the best had more sales, and the other breweries failed. Light beers weren't pushed down Americans throats, they were pulled from breweries by the demands of Americans.
The devotion of the large breweries to product quality is the ONLY reason that you can get a consistent craft beer today. There was no science put behind yeast and microbiological spoilage organisms until THEY did the research and discovered it. There would be no standards for cleanliness without them. People wouldn't know that diacetyl could be produced by latent alpha-acetolactate after beer was bottled. People wouldn't understand that if you ferment the same yeast at different temperatures, you can get completely different flavors. The big brewers developed the methods to detect and identify spoilage organisms in a brewery. Why does the same type of hop lend different bitterness at different times? Because of what they learned, we know that the alpha acid % is what determines bitterness. Without any of this knowledge, the craft brewing industry would not be anywhere close to where it is today because nobody could brew the strong, complex brews that craft brewers make.
Brewmasters at large breweries have to deal with more problems than you will ever understand. Oh gee, it was rainy in central Canada in March and April. Who cares? Well, since the fields were flooded, barley is going to be planted late, so its not going to come in full. Now you're going to have barley that is low in extract and high in color because it had two weeks less to grow this year and it had to be kilned more to keep the enzymes low. So your lautering efficiency is going to be low and your color is going to be high. On top of that, you're starting to see that your wort fermentability is decreasing and you aren't getting to your alcohol level. So now you've got to find which mash vessel temperature probe is understanding temperature, or which steam valve is leaking by. But you don't have any yeast to brew with anyway because somebody forgot to add the sanitizer to your automated yeast brink cleaning system, and now ALL of your yeast has pediococcus in it. Plus, your filter has broken down because your pressure gauge wasn't calibrated properly and you blew out all your seals, and you don't have a spare set of filter screens because your boss wanted to keep below budget and pushed the purchase of new screens until January of the next year so he didn't have to answer to the board of directors.
The fact is that most people have no idea whatsoever how to do anyone's job but their own. Since beer is something that is everywhere, so incredibly varied in style and taste, and there are thousands of blogs about it, people think that because they've had so much exposure to it that they're experts and it must be easy to do. Do you think that building a Ford Focus is easy? They're all over the place, they don't look that complicated, and they're mostly plastic anyway. I can take them to the Jiffy Lube and those jerks can change my oil in 20 minutes! How complicated can building the thing really be? Or what about flying an airplane? They have autopilot do all the work! All they have to do is take off and land, right? And that's all computers too, isn't it?
Brewing is a career. It's not a hobby, or something you can learn by hanging around your local brewpub a lot. There is so much to learn about the craft that it takes a lifetime to learn most of it. I don't care if you don't enjoy light beer. I don't enjoy it either. But I know where it comes from, I know how smart you have to be to make it, and how difficult of a job brewing is at any level. If you don't respect light beer, then just give up on beer altogether. Switch to wine instead. Those idiots have no idea what they're doing anyway. I mean, it's just grapes, right?
Monopolistic enterprises control the flow of drink in England at every step—starting with the breweries and distilleries where it’s produced and down the channels through which it reaches consumers in pubs and supermarkets. These vertically integrated monopolies are very “efficient” in the economist’s sense, in that they do a very good job of minimizing the price and thereby maximizing the consumption of alcohol.posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:54 AM on November 15, 2012
The United States, too, has seen vast consolidation of its alcohol industry, but as of yet, not the kind of complete vertical integration seen in the UK. One big reason is a little-known legacy of our experience with Prohibition. From civics class, you may remember that the 21st Amendment to the Constitution formally ended Prohibition in 1933. But while the amendment made it once again legal to sell and produce alcohol, it also contained a measure designed to ensure that America would never again have the horrible drinking problem it had before, which led to the passage of Prohibition in the first place.
Heffernan's piece mentions a March 2012 interview in the trade publication Beer Business Daily, in which Anheuser-Busch InBev Vice President Dave Almeida "described in perfect detail how retailers can maximize their profits by replacing craft brews with 'premium' beer—its term for its mass-produced light lager." I looked up the interview, and it is amazing. Here's the relevant passage:The big boys are trying to convince retailers they will sell more total beer if they stop carrying craft beer."Craft is a real threat, but it's also an opportunity," [Anheuser-Busch InBev Vice President Dave Almeida said]…Dave showed research that indicated that retailers that have too many SKUs actually end up selling less overall beer. He used the example of the health and beauty aids aisle in a supermarket, where consumers spend an average of 90 seconds and only buy something 25% of the time, whereas people spend 31 seconds in the beer aisle and buy something 75% of the time. "Retailers that are winning are not invested in craft to the detriment to the category," said Dave. Later Dave and his national accounts team walked me through a deck showing that chains that over-SKU with crafts end up selling less beer and making less profit than chains that protect their domestic premium space.
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posted by hippybear at 7:43 PM on November 4, 2012 [61 favorites]