basic polish/danish/SE european/hungarian pale lagers are not in question here. i am quite willing to drink those. they can for sure be bad, but they are generally maltier, heavier feeling and can easily be found with 5.5% up to 6% ABV. also a lot are all-malt.
i dont know by name the sort of regional “good” beers, which are a step up in quality from the big industrial conglomerate names. ie. yuengling/shiner bock/narrangasett lager, etc. i know that these beers have special reputations among the general population, but am unaware of if they actually have a better taste or different style ie. classic american pilsner, pre-prohibition lager, “premium american lager”, etc. they are not being discussed.
however, i am interested in differences in production between say yuengling vs. miller MGD. so yuengling uses adjuncts? sure, not necessarily a problem. isn’t it sort of a slightly darker colour? perhaps adding crystal malt covers up a lot?
focusing on favourite CAP theories and recipes, while certainly interesting, is again not the topic at hand. to change say budweiser to a CAP would necessitate more than one, probably many changes from industrial lager.
tho, what is the appeal of CAP? what are some positive tastes/aspects one gets from using either corn or rice? ive never bothered using any non-malted grain besides flaked barley, wheat and oats in amounts under 10% total.
i do like the sound of that. ive actually never used aromatic malt, does it have an effect like munich? i used melanoidin malt once, and yeah like everyone on the internet says - it’s rough and just not great tasting.
i think this could be a good idea. im just now remembering some of the really ghetto german beers like that “5,0” in red black and yellow cans. its like the absolute last dregs of a mash scoured for maltose repeatedly then sparged one more time to get sugar, the cheapest crap you can get in germany. but its still head and shoulders better than bud or MGD in my opinion.
I think there are too many things people would want to change to choose just one. Better malt. More hops and better hops. A yeast with more character. Less adjuncts. Sorry. I’m probably the one who derailed this thing in the first place.
yeah, i know, i knew that would be the challenge, only choosing one. i really should have made it “choose two things”. then we’d get somewhere.
i think you could really get somewhere though with just all-malt and trying out some wacky yeasts. not sure if changing the yeast would be a major cost issue (organizational is no concern, lets imagine), but a belgian, saison or simply chico strain yeast on all-malt american 2row with the standard 15IBU of budweiser.
Going back and forth with you I am filling my freezer with hops. Edelweiss, Spalt Select,… I need to get brewing. I also have lots of Sterling, Saaz, Hallertau, Magnum, and Crystal on hand. I have enough lager hops to last years. I’m going to have to start throwing old the older hops.
I have all of those in my freezer as well. That Spalt Select might be my new (old!?) favorite. Use them to make a better North American Industrial Lager.
This is a strange thing because when I go somewhere on vacation I like to drink the local stuff. In Mexico I might have Victoria (one of my favorite warm-weather beers) or Negra Modelo or Indio or even Sol or Pacifico. All of these beers taste different. I was in Costa Rica and had Imperial which I found to be bland. The next place we went to I saw a beer called Pilsen and figured it had to be better than Imperial and it was. They were both light, gold fizzy beers but the Imperial was lighter and blander and the Pilsen was fuller-tasting and I could tell that they used a better yeast like 2124 or one of its offshoots. I said to my wife “order the Pilsen, it’s better” and she got one and said “Oh yeah, much better!”. But why? A lower percentage of adjuncts and more malt? A better yeast? A touch of something like Vienna or Light Munich? No idea but the gold lager world is filled with so many VERY SIMILAR beers but they are all very different.
Oh hey, that might just about do it. A bit more depth, better head formation and stability. Anywhere from 2.5% to 5% (or even higher) will do any beer up righteous.
yup, that is a part of my curiosity. i mean i think these beers use somewhat different grists, hops, yeasts and processes to come to somewhat similar end products. its interesting.
for example labatt 50 is the local “actually good” beer around here, and truly it is at least very different. it tastes like a 90s labatt mid-tier product, but clearly has a tiny bit of late boil hop added of some kind and honestly a pretty cool tasting yeast. hard to describe, but you can immediately tell it is an ale yeast. those two differences have made it stick out and stick around while so many old products came and went.
thats the kind of answer i want to see. never used copper malt before. so its a double action, carapils + flavour and colour? cool
The problem with NA industrial lager isn’t that they contain adjuncts, it’s that they have gotten rid of cereal mashing in favor of syrups. Adding fermentables in that way strips them of all the interesting flavors in the grains and what you are left with it boring uninspired beer. One of the reasons that Yuengling (Pottsville) is still a decent beer is for this exact reason. So in answer to your question, bring back the cereal cookers!
excellent, yes. i forgot to stress the HFCS, rather than actual flaked corn, in use I do know about. also read something about malt extract being used by labatt at least since the 80s or 90s.
it always just seems so funny to me, as a homebrewer its hard to understand the scale and decades of progressive “cost-saving” that has gone on to make the most razor-thinly just-palatable “beer”, when a basic brew of 100% 2row malt and 20IBU of hops would seem cheap as anything and potentially even good. i mean the “food” we ate became like that too i suppose, industrialized simulacra of what once was real.
All this talk reminds me that the original Michelob, the stuff I drank in the 0’s and early 90’s, was once a really good beer. IIRC it was an adjunct free lager.
My LHBS called to tell me it had some malts in stock that I might like - Rahr Northstar Pils and Weyermann Barke Pils. The Northstar will go into a CAP with a pound or so of corn. The style has its place in my tap lineup, fairly regularly. So my change is the base malt.
I don’t know if it’s still quite the same beer but the Michelob Lager now is pretty nice. I also like the Amber Bock and for at least a little while they had a few “craft inspired” selections. I haven’t seen either the Lager or Amber Bock around my area much as it was a few years ago, but I know it’s out there.
I too have a soft spot for Yuengling. I’ll take a Yuengling over any of the other big names any day and to fit this into the thread topic, Yuengling does the one thing I could change in the other big names…more flavor/character.
I had a friend that first turned me on to Yuengling (he was stationed somewhere out East in the Army and had it all the time). So his brother brought some back here to Indiana one time. We were at a backyard BBQ and pouring it into red solo cups as not to have anyone else see it or have to share it, like it was some sacred drink. From the first sip, I knew it was something different. It was the best tasting Yuengling I ever had, fresh, clean…mmm. So I set out to brew something like it and I have a clone recipe that is pretty spot on. I add a bit of Munich, if some big names did that, maybe that could be the one thing to improve on. Now we can get it here like any other beer and it just doesn’t seem as special. I prefer mine a bit more when I do get a taste for it.
You guys touched on this already but the process and ingredients are meant for mass production: The syrups, brewing to a higher gravity and then watering it down, I believe most “industrial lagers” use hop extract as well which means the hop content of the beer could be suffering the same way as the adjunct… everything has been stripped of much of its original flavor. I’m not even sure that you say that “Coors uses [this hop] and Miller uses [that hop] and Bud Light uses [NO!] hop” because the extract could be a combination of things that best suits the process to the point where it’s not even identifiable anymore. I am not 100% sure on the hop extract thing but an article from a good 15+ years ago mentioned that. When something good is made for a small audience and is then ramped up to accommodate millions (be it beer or cheeseburgers or BBQ or fried chicken), quality usually suffers in favor of quantity… and it’s hard to fix that.
I went to Ontario to fish with my dad when I was about 19. My dad loved Labatt’s Blue in the brown bottle and with the blue label. May have been his favorite beer. He would say, “If I find it here at home, it’s not as good. It’s in a green bottle with a green label and it’s not the same”. But it absolutely was good when I had it (of course I was 19 so…). I can’t get behind the concept that it was made with an ale yeast but it could have been an off-the-map yeast which gave it a distinct character.
