Mickey's Irish...

Not if I see you first!

And I have a notion to continue the bitch slapping, but, it won't make any difference to you, will it?

Because I'm in your kill file.

Right?

You are nothing but a bully. And all bullies are cowards.

But, of course, you aren't reading this.

Thanks for playing.

Buck

Poke a hole with a pencil and use a straw ;-)

Must have been a while ago, Two Guys closed in upstate NY about 20 years ago. Hum, maybe even a bit longer than that.

Most malt liquors are beer only by applying a fairly broad definition. They contain fermentables other than barley (rice is cheap), and some use wine yeast to get to a higher ABV. Using a traditional beer definition such as the German purity laws (barley, hops, yeast and water) doesn't make someone any of the garbage that spilled out of your keyboard, if you said traditionalist or pedantic I would have to agree.

Picking a sloppy definition and then insulting people who prefer one more in keeping with traditional brewing doesn't impress anyone, at least not favorably. Perhaps you shouldn't mix drinking beer and posting about it.

I think you're wrong. If you rule out any beer that has adjuncts as "beer" you'd miss a heckuva lot of good beer. Huge amounts of amazingly good Belgian beer, a lot of traditional British bitter, etc. As for the wine yeast comment, I don't know of any beer yeast that can't handle the fairly modest requirements of "malt liquor." I regularly brew beer and mead, using beer yeast, that range from 8% to 14% abv. And even if I brew a beer and ferment it with a strain of saccharomyces that is normally used for wine, I would still call it "beer."

Bad beer can easily be made using malted barley, hops, water and yeast. I've done it myself, and I've tasted it at commercial breweries.

Seems like you're doing what you are dissing him for.

Perhaps you shouldn't make assumptions or indulge in speculation about my condition when I'm posting, or you'll tar yourself with the same brush you're ever so concerned that I'm using on myself.

To address the actual discussion, if malt liquor is only beer by "a fairly broad definition," what does that make all the other beers that use "fermentables other than barley," beers like most British ales (a majority use syrups), Belgian ales (many use corn grits, sugar, or syrups, including most of the Trappist ales), and the African variety of Guinness (made with sorghum), not to mention all the different types of wheat beer? Rice, as used by brewers, is not cheap, either; brewer's rice is actually more expensive than barley, and the equipment needed to prepare rice for brewing isn't cheap at all. Capital's Pre-Prohibition Doppelbock was a great beer brewed with rice.

Wine yeast? Plenty of big beers from craft brewers are brewed with wine yeasts, lambics are brewed with wild yeasts and pediococcus and brettanomyces, Berliner Weisse is brewed with lactobacillus... And malt liquors at the big brewers are all made with their regular lager yeast anyway.

The definition doesn't look so crazily broad any more, does it? The Reinheitsgebot, now THAT is narrow; it makes great beer, but it is only one of the world's great beer traditions, and to treat it as THE definition of beer for the sake of argument is disingenuous. (By the way, the Reinheitsgebot specifies malt, not barley, and the original law didn't include yeast.) Beer IS broad, it encompasses many things. To single out one beer type as "not really beer" is an act of snobbery, or ignorance. Root beer isn't really beer, mead isn't really beer, but something made with malted grain, hops, and lager yeast? Yeah, that's beer. And I'll stick with what I said. It's USENET, you can use language like that. Hell, language like that is mild.

Well, and politely, put.

Buck

Brave homebrewer!

Thanks, dhude. I got your back when you need it.

Um, no. All fermented beverages made with grain - even those that contain no barley, like chicha and sake - are beers. You simply chose a narrower definition instead.

Guinness in Nigeria is made with sorghum. Is it not beer?

Malt liquors may taste ghastly, and are more of a fermented alcohol- delivery system than great examples of the brewer's art, but in the end, yep, they're beers. So are the weaker, flabbier industrial lagers made by the same big brewers.

So? German, Belgian, British, and other countries' beers also contain fermentables other than barley. Yes, German too. Blithely ignoring the likes of Bavarian-style Hefeweizens doesn't mean they don't exist.

Um, no. Brewer's rice isn't cheap, and the rice that you get in a Chinese restaurant is not the same as the brewer's rice used in brewing.

So? Is there some rule somewhere that specifies that a brewer isn't supposed to use a yeast that can tolerate a higher level of alcohol during fermentation? What about abbey ale yeasts? What about the strains used to ferment Samichlaus?

The original Reinheitsgebot of 1516 is Bavarian, and wasn't in general adoption in Germany. That "traditional purity law" also didn't mention yeast. So, then, using yeast is in violation of a "purity" law from nearly 490 years ago. Right?

Except, of course, the so-called Reinheitsgebot of 1516 isn't the law of the land in Germany. It's a lovely marketing tool for German brewers, but given the rate at which they're closing down breweries in Germany, it doesn't seem to be particularly successful. The law on beer-brewing in Germany is the modern day Beer Tax Law (Biersteuer- gesetz), and it reads quite differently from the Reinheitsgebot. It allows, among other things, pre-made malt extract, hop extracts, and wheat. It also allows certain agents to be used for clarification, as long as they don't end up in the final product.

Before the Bavarians pressed the rest of Germany into adopting their "purity" laws, wide swaths of Germany brewed styles not at all in keeping with these laws. Remnants still survive: Berliner Weisse, Münster-style Alt, Leipziger Gose.

And I'd sure like to know how it is that Belgian beer, which doesn't bother with Germany's beer-brewing laws, has come to be so highly regarded anyway. I mean, look at those people: unmalted barley, oats, spelt, fruit ... cats sleeping with dogs, I tells ya!

Pedantism at least implies doing some background research in an annoying attempt at being right.

Mixing up one country's - no, make that a region of one country's rules on "tradtional" brewing is no less sloppy a definition. In one broad stroke, it ignores classics of brewing tradition from other countries. Westvleteren's highly-regarded (and notoriously hard to get) Trappist ales don't follow Germany's "purity" laws. Neither do the lambics of the Payottenland. Ignoring such examples in the pursuit of one's own attempts at pedantry doesn't impress anyone, either, most certainly not favorably.

Perhaps you should come back and post about beer when you've broadened your outlook a little. You're not getting anywhere stuck in the mud.

I choose a narrower definition, too-- I call chicha "chicha" and sake "sake." They ain't beer. Neener.

Also malted barley, or just sorghum?

The very definition of beer is broad: an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting cereal grains.

AFAIK, Budweiser is the only mass-produced American beer that uses rice. Others use corn and/or sugar.

Using this definition - fermentables other than barley, and non-beer yeasts - many Belgian beers are not beers. And that's BS.

No, but using the German Reinheitsgebot presents a very, very, very, incredibly, highly, spectacularly limited reckoning of what beer can be - a reckoning that excludes outstanding brewing cultures and traditions in places like the United Kingdom and Belgium.

The Reinheitsgebot does not define beer. It defines a very particular approach to brewing. That is all.

I would argue that your definition is the one that's sloppy. You're radomly picking and choosing what qualifies as beer, and it appears you're doing so on the fly. Because your definitions end up excluding well-established brewing traditions.

-Steve

Latrobe uses both corn and rice in Rolling Rock.

I heard A-B's lawyers tried to argue that Belgian tripels were, indeed, not beers in Ohio's courts. Amazing. They failed.

I would think it probably uses some malted barley but I'm just guessing. What I'm really curious about is whether sorghum is a good tasting adjunct? There's lots of sorghum grown in the US and I've yet to run across a beer brewed with it. Surely homebrewers have done it but I can't think of any commercial examples. Anyone?

There's currently a bit of discussion of sorghum in rec.crafts.meadmaking. Maybe it's roughly in the same category as honey-- people who get it may make "rustic" booze out of it, but it doesn't have a huge commercial potential. (Meaderies, at least in the US, didn't start popping up until the last few years, and mead still doesn't have a huge customer awareness factor.)

Didn't Pabst inherit a beer from Heileman after they purchased the Stroh brands and have Miller brew a "Real Draft Ice Dry Sorghum Light Red Beer (NOW! with less calories than any other sorghum beer)"?

Bard's Tale is making their long-promised gluten-free beer with sorghum, at Flying Bison in Buffalo. Tim Herzog, the brewer/owner at FB, swore to me it actually tastes like beer, although he said the brewing process is ass-backwards. FWIW.

Try your nearest Miller distributor.

Hitman