The Brigade Beer Blog

Sooner or later, it had to happen. Anyone who has followed my Twitter or FaceBook posts have noticed that I don't post selfies.  I post pictures of my books on an iPad that is sitting next to a beer.  Yes, I promote my books while simultaneously promoting some of my favorite places to hang out and their beers. 

Those places make their own beer. So, in other words, good beer.  Places like brew pubs or tap rooms (tasting rooms) at breweries.  Places that don't skimp on ingredients and in fact brag about those ingredients. If you ask them about a beer that interests you they not only let you sample it first, they may launch into a long speech about how it got made.

They are places where beer snobs such as myself feel at home.

When I travel, for meals I look for brew pubs so I can not only sample their beer, but experience the good pub grub they offer. I like to vacation where I can enjoy my hiking passion as well as hit beer festivals. So, I've been to the Great American Beer Festival a number of times. I’ve visited my favorite, the Oregon Brewers Festival, so often that I now also go to volunteer (can't drink while doing it, but they give you free tokens to get beer after you’re done).

So it was only a matter of time before I would feel obligated to blog about beer.  As a beer snob, it meant I'd also rant against Mass Produced Beer (Bud, Miller, Coors, et al).

Unlike the beer lovingly brewed at the above-mentioned places, Mass Produced Beer (MPB) has little taste, color, aroma or body. It is often brewed with inferior ingredients, as well as includes “things” that do not belong in beer.

Have you heard about adjuncts?  Adjuncts are ingredients that sound okay, but in effect are shortchanging beer drinkers. They are used to save the brewer money by using cheaper ingredients. For example, Bud uses rice as an adjunct while Miller uses corn.  In other words, instead of using all malt, they'll cut it with the adjunct so you get half the taste and body. It's why if you drink a good beer and then follow with an MPB it suddenly tastes like you are drinking water with battery acid mixed into it. 

My theory about why the MPBs began doing this is that shortly after prohibition ended, the brewers decided they needed to try something to make more money. Since the American public was thirsty for beer after a long drought they didn't notice that they were now missing out on taste.

After the brewers were safely on two feet and making money hand over fist they decided they didn’t need to go back to making a full beer. Instead, they decided to spend a little more on advertising and keep shortchanging beer drinkers.

I’m always noting to friends how the MPB have great TV ads, but lousy beer. They sound good, but taste bad.

German brewers came up with this same scheme centuries ago, but beer drinkers revolted. Urban legend says that some brewers lost their heads over this, but I have a feeling that’s just some beer drinker embellishing the story a bit (after a few beers). Politicians eventually got on board and passed the famous German Purity Law to prevent this catastrophe. The law states that brewers may only use four ingredients: water, barley, hops and yeast. 

Some MPBs also use other ingredients that you won't find in good beer. Strange ingredients like emulsifiers, corn syrup, and who knows what else?  Trying to find out what they add is like pulling teeth. Soon, like most foods in the US, they'll be forced to tell us what's in the beer.

Some MPBs use advertising to trick customers that their ingredients are not evil, I mean, less than beer pure. You have seen it and probably not noticed. Something like admitting one of the ingredients is rice, but downplay that it is used to produce a less tasty product.  They just mention it along with the other ingredients and hope you don’t question its inclusion. Similar to how your wife may mention something about the weather this weekend and under her breath mention that her mother is coming to visit. Go ahead, wrinkle your nose, it really is just as bad.

So if you have fallen for MPB’s ads and think you are getting a great product, then educate your taste buds to real beer.  Spend an extra dollar to purchase a beer with taste, aroma, body and color.  However, if you are a teenager and just want to get drunk behind the barn with your friends, well, go ahead and buy the cheap MPB (illegal in the US by the way) and leave the good stuff for us adults.

We at The Thurber Brigade wanted a much longer blog, one that included talking about different styles, types of hops, etc., but some of the non-beer drinking editors insisted we tame the length. Likewise, we could have mentioned more about adjuncts, emulsifiers, et al, maybe even been balanced and mention why MPBs include them, but hey, if they can spend billions on advertising lousy beer, they can afford to write their own blog defending lesser ingredients. Oops, sorry, got carried away again.