As I sit here drinking a can of Old Style it made me wonder…Why are there so many negative comments about these beers? Have we forgotten our roots? Or is it really crap beer? I know we weren’t all drinking Chimay Bleue right out of high school. I agree 100% that these beers don’t touch a good micro or homebrew, but are they really that bad?
To a degree I agree with you. On a hot summer’s day when I come in from yard work or working on the car a lighter beer can be refreshing. I’ve been known to have a 12 pack of Hamm’s, Schafer, or Pabst on hand from time to time in the hot season.
But recently, after a party, when I had an extra case of Coors Light to dispose of, I noticed that no matter how many I drank, I was never satisfied by it.
It’s not that it’s bad, just that it’s fairly tasteless and without any sort of redeeming characteristics that make you want to have another to see if you missed anything. It can be very refreshing after a hot day of mowing the lawn but so can Perrier. I usually drink the mineral water to rehydrate and then have a quality brew to celebrate when I’m done.
really? i actually find budweiser to be a “quality brew” just not the brew i want to drink often. especially now that it is foreign owned. but if i wanted something refreshing (and not having to drive 8)) i would take an american lager over a perrier. it is like the old commercial of the guy crawling through the desert and comes up to the man who offers him water. “no thanks, i really had my heart set on an ice cold Stroh’s”
Really. If I’m at a social event and Bud is the beer I’m not going to turn my nose up at it. But it really doesn’t do much for me. I’m certainly not going to spend money on it. So when I’m thirsty after the lawn mowing I’ll drink the water. After crawling through the desert I think I’d make the same choice.
+1 on walking past a Bud in the desert. Ole Mil and the Beast serve a purpose, as does PBR, Piels, Genny, etc. I drank more than my fair share of $6.99 cases of Ole Mil Ice, but the quantity you drink out of necessity doesn’t make it any good. When I could afford to buy a decent beer I did.
Bud is piss, it isn’t even their brands best beer. Busch is better. Both are WAY overpriced and a refreshing beer can be bought (or brewed) for the same price. I’m sure good beers can be brewed in the styles, and though there is a place for adjuncts, most macrobrewed commercial American lagers lack any malt, hop, yeast, or spice flavor. If you need some cheap beer to unwind after a long week, by all means go for it, fortunately I do not need to. I’ll take a well drink before a bud any day of the week if no beer selection is available.
I prefer Icehouse to Bud etc and keep some in the fridge always. It is refreshing. However, I think American Light Lagers appeals to the power drinking crowd and the uninitiated more than craft beer.
If I could change things on a national scale my preference would be to beef up the hops and malt in standard America Lagers to produce something more like Czech Lagers. They are still refreshing and the bomb-diggity always.
Yes we have forgotten our roots. And Budweiser did the forgetting for us.
That statement sums it all up pretty well.
Ironic too, since despite it’s lower common denominator kind of appeal, I think that most of us here agree that it is probably one of the most skillfully made and utterly consistent commercial beers out there.
Unfortunately, with all of that skill and the strict QC that goes into it’s manufacture, the one thing missing is any distinctive flavor.
After years of burning out my tastebuds with hop bombs, I’ve found that I can truly sometimes enjoy beers whose flavors are on the lighter side of things if it’s all in balance. I consider Bud to be in a category of beers that lack balance (simply because there isn’t really much of anything to balance to begin with).
I think that AB-InBev makes some good beers, but if I am in a situation where Bud is the only beer around, I almost always opt out.
Even a glass of cheap red wine is far more satisfying to me.
+2
Well said!
Not that I dont like REAL American Lager as I call it
10 gallons
14lbs Pils Malt
3lbs 2-row Malt
2lbs Corn
Mash that puppy up @ 148
FWH with 22.5 IBU of “Noble” Hop (I used Vanguard)
.5 oz at 30 minutes
1.5 oz at 1 minute
Ferment it out with a pile of lager yeast.
I’m not against adjuncts, just against rice.
It brings nothing to the table
Meh, I’ll drink a “BMC” from time to time. But I have to be really thirsty to actually enjoy one. I do not like Light beers and generally won’t drink them unless I am offered one by a host. If Light Beers are our “roots” something went terribly wrong.
Lets also keep in mind that the Standard American lager is a direct result of the most unfortunate and terrible civil experiment in our nation’s history. Really, not a lot to be proud there. Call it “quality” beer if you like, it is basically a “barley-pop” and is made with the same kind of “craft process” as American Cheese and White bread. IMO these types of bland, industrially-processed foods are not really something to be proud about. Food in general is much better tasting and is much better for you when it is locally produced.
The utter consistency is one of the things that bugs me. Sure there’s a lot of science and research in it, but there has got to be more in that bottle than barley, hops, water, and yeast. The beers are not similar, they are exact: every beer is the same color, taste, smell, amount of head. And if they were pure or clean beers I would think they wouldn’t give me headaches.
So you wouldn’t drink a Trade Winds from The Breuery because he uses rice?
I dont think I said that did I?
I am just against the use of rice, if I want to do something similar to that I’d just use table sugar
Cheaper
Easier
Not quite the same though is it? Rice does have a distinct character in beers that don’t over power it. The Bruery’s TT just mentioned has a distinct glutenous sweetness that comes from the rice. Budweiser for all of it’s maligning does actually pick up a crispness from the rice. (It’s far more noticeable in the chip beer) And it’s still ironic to me that the most expensive ingredient in Budweiser is the rice.
Miller does have more of a sweet thing going on as opposed to Bud’s being crisp but I always attributed that to Millers use of corn more than Buds use of rice.
To be fair I’d have to brew two recipes the same using rice in one and table sugar in the other to give it a fair shake
It’s all a matter of taste, I guess. To most of us, the standard American lagers just don’t have much of it.
As for the roots of these beers, I think the use of corn, rice, etc. is interesting. From what I understand, these grains were never used to make the beer cheaper, but were used in the brewers’ attempts to mimic the flavors of the early European lagers, before there was such an understanding of water chemistry in brewing.
A couple years ago I had a rice beer brewed by a brewpub for a nearby sushi restaurant. I thought it was pretty darn good.
The use of rice/corn was really more in an attempt to mitigate the harsh taste and huge protein content of early American barley malt.
Apparently American malt was real crap. Then it stayed around as people developed a liking for it.
Thanks to a comment I made about my early days of drinking, my son sees to it that there is always some High Life in the refrigerator. I think it is not only refreshing on a hot day, but a good way to cleanse the palate for the homebrews I make that have lots of character. . .
It beats eating crackers . .
;D
my dad forced me to try a Narragansett premium lager a couple of years back, it was a beer he grew up drinking in college at URI and then i believe they bellied up. i was really happy i gave it a try, it quickly replaced pabst as my go to american lager…
summer bbqs…90 degrees…humid…sure i can drink an apa but an american lager is pretty clutch…about losing the love though for american lagers, i don’t mind stumbling across something like narragansett or even pabst…but something about supporting AB or MC…i don’t know…
I didn’t start drinking until I was 23. I know, blasphemy and how the hell did I go from not drinking to brewing my own beer? Well, up until that point growing up in rural PA, I had only had what I now refer to as american piss beer (APB) and rum. Turns out, I have a strong disliking for both. So I was convinced I just didn’t like booze until I moved out to California and was introduced to good beer, good vodka and good wine. Then it was straight down hill.
My taste, personally, as this is all we’re talking about here, is that APB doesn’t have any, and what little there is just isn’t very good. Couple that with the huge amounts of carbonation (which I’m not a fan of and one of the reasons I don’t drink much soda.) I like to take small drinks of something and savor the flavor and not have it turn into a frothy mass of foam in my mouth, which APB fails on both.
I can see how many people, even those who do enjoy many different beers (at which point 100% of them will have more body and flavor) which is fine. I’ve even been to wedding receptions in Phoenix in the middle of summer and still gone for the water instead of the Bud. It’s just not for me (un?)fortunately.
I do agree that brewing an american lager with no major flaws is very very hard. The DMS and the diacetyl is quite difficult to get down to controllable levels for us homebrewers, and the big guys have come up with some very interesting industrial scale techniques to help with that. Which is impressive and testament to the quantity they deal with and the amount of time they’ve been doing it.
I also believe that most americans would in fact like different beers if they would venture out and try it. But given the marketing strategies of the big guys (and they’re very good at it) and their control and influence with the distributors, people just don’t try. The APBs are right there BAM in your face and people just go for the old standard, which people are prone to do.