Beer containing fish?

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...apropos of which, I'm rather irked by the latest Bud adverts that claim their pisspoor excuse for a beer is made with only "natural" ingredients, while showing pictures of fields of barley gently swaying in the breeze, etc.

I half wonder if there a complaint to the advertising standards bods would be worthwhile, on the grounds that "hop extracts" are not a natural ingredient, but I suppose the Anheuser-Busch lawyers have probably dealt with this one in advance. :-(

It's even worse - more pernicious and misleading - than all that "fresh beer tastes better" nonsense they cooked up last year (the very idea that a product that has been filtered and sterilised to within an inch of its life is in any way "fresh"...)

d.

I could never be accused of being a true defender of what CAMRA subtly always calls "international bully-boy & rice beer brewer, Anheuser-Busch" but I am fairly sure that for Bud they actually use whole hops (or maybe pressed 'pellet' hops which are IMO about as good & used by many very respectable brewers with good reason) Bud even use decent varieties so-called 'noble' hops from Germany and Czech Rep (or same varieties grown in US, some on their own farms IIRC) what they don't do is put enough of them in the beer to taste (c.10-12 IBU, just about the point when a trained taster can notice the prescence of hops IIRC!). They also use weird bits of beechwood to clear the beer, and a shed load of rice to thin it out, not great.

But yes, I think the 'born-on date' & freshness bit is a bit rich, because fresh watery flavourless alcoholic stuff is still sh*te compared to a decent pint, regardless of whether it was brewed yesterday or a year ago. Still for me, fresh *decent* beer is best in general. cheers MikeMcG

I understand your point, but I'm happy to understand the short-hand of "natural beer" to mean "a beer produced with very little in the way of additives, preservatives, flavour enhancers, clarifiers, sweeteners, head-retention aids, artificial co2 or n2, etc, etc."

I think 'natural' in terms of food has come to mean "relatively un-mucked-around-with" e.g. natural yoghurt, (which would still be produced under temp control & use a cultured bacteria; but would be simply produced from milk & the right bacteria).

Likewise I am happy to accept that the word 'organic' in terms of food & agriculture now has a distinct meaning to the one understood by a bio-chemist. cheers MikeMcG

OK, I'll take your word for it.

...and surely the way they make the beer (ie do everything possible to remove any vestige of flavour) renders the hops pointless anyway.

Yes - strangely, they don't mention rice in the advert.

"A bit rich" is putting it mildly! Such a campaign would make sense if it were a real ale they were talking about, but you might as well claim that UHT milk tastes better when "fresh".

I doubt anyone would be able to tell the difference between a pint of bud brewed yesterday and one brewed a year ago.

Indeed, can't argue with that.

d.

There actually isn't much that's natural anyway of course - pick an apple from a tree and eat it ? But apples have been genetically modified over the centuries as have most crops and even hops and barley! (They called it plant breeding but that's just a slow version of GM!) Among natural contents in foodstuffs come ergot , salmonella , botulism , e coli and so on.Much less now because of technology but.............

I was at a brewers' dinner once a few years back (at the table next to us, the Morland brewers were sorrow-drowning their brewery's closure by GK) anyway, the first course was served with day-old Bud (what were they thinking of?!). Oddly, it had quite a lot of flavour - very green, sulphury, yeasty sort of flavours but not much else. It was still overpowered by the mighty melon :~)

Re bud & brewing skill etc, I have heard quite a few brewers talk of how difficult it is to brew a beer as finely defined, clean & consistent as Bud.

IIRC Rooster's Sean Franklin also once kind of spoke of Bud in positive terms, I think saying that he aimed to brew his beers to be clean tasting & simple (in terms of malt & yeast character) , so as to focus the drinker's tastebuds purely on the aromatic / fruity nature of the hop character.

Not that these brewers would really wish to brew these Bud-like beers day-in-day-out, or worse still drink them, but as an exercise, Bud-u-like is oddly a very difficult thing to brew.

One thing I would say about the freshness/born-on tag is that I think a beer which is so clean, simple and one-dimensional as Bud, that it would actually show the effects of age, poor storage conditions, oxidation, etc sooner & more noticeably than a stronger flavoured ale or stout might. cheers MikeMcG

Interesting isn't it - Sean manages to produce beer after beer with character on a relatively low budget and A-B with a mega budget can't produce one decent item.

It's not *that* interesting. A-B *can* produce a decent beer, and in past has test-marketed some beers actually tasting of malt and hop. Market reaction was luke-warm. Reason? A-B has a huge mass market of drinkers that simply don't care about malt and yeast character. That market has pushed A-B's annual brewing volume to over one hundred million barrels (American measure - something like 120 million hl) annually. Beer drinkers looking for malt and hops and yeast character will ignore beers with "Anheuser-Busch" on the label, even if the A-B name is strongly de-emphasised.

This is a behaviour quite typical of A-B's home market, the U.S. It happened to competitor Miller too; in the early 1990s, Miller test- marketed a pale ale, a stout, and an all-malt lager under its Miller name, labelling this trio as "Miller Reserve." The beers flopped. Again, beer drinkers looking for distinctive flavours avoided the Miller label like the plague. Miller's core market of drinkers don't look for distinctive flavors anyway.

Huge global brewing companies like these have gotten a very clear message from the market, then, haven't they, and the message is simply "don't bother appealing to the desires of beer drinkers who focus on taste and character." For every one of those drinkers, they'll find thirty who will buy their boring, weak-flavoured mass-market lagers. In the U.S., the combined market for domestic beers with character is served by more than 1300 breweries. They hold less than four percent of the market. A-B holds fifty percent of the market. Miller owns 18 percent. That pattern tells the big brewers all they need to know. Just as an aside, some of those 1300 small U.S. brewers are making some cracking good beer, including cask ales and lagers that compare well to the better beers to be found in Germany.

In the U.K., real ales are also clinging to a declining market share, as the mass market turns to crap lagers and nitrokeg ales. It's not as dire as in the U.S. (yet?), but the big brewers seem to be pushing for that, don't they?

And now to return to the "clean" character of the big brewers' beers: do not mistake bland, boring mass-market beers for poorly-made beers. A-B's beer making process is extraordinarily painstaking. It is not at all easy to make what they make - a clear pale lager with simple, clean flavors, hardly interrupted at all by matters of malt and hop character. Be that as it may, I'm not sure that this is the model smaller brewers, including the likes of Rooster, want to try too hard to emulate.

Mmmm, good interesting stuff Don (tis you is it not? :~) I don't think many quality UK brewers really are trying to emulate Bud.

But A-B's near complete grasp of the brewing process to consistently brew & package a clean and fresh beer to a very tight & difficult spec, using (some) decent ingredients *is* understood & admired by some brewers.

For that beer to be so lacking in interesting flavour is IMO not admirable.

cheers, MikeMcG.

Tis indeed.

I dearly hope not.

That is the point, isn't it. A-B have a thorough mastery of process. That mastery is used to produce what they believe their notion beer drinkers want. You and I - and numerous others, particularly the self-selecting participants in certain Usenet newsgroups - are not in line with A-B's notion of beer drinkers.

For you and me and numerous others like us, who express some degree of interest in and passion for good beer, yes. A-B have long since given up on beer drinkers like ourselves - sort of. In the USA, rather than brew and market distinctive beers not lacking in interesting flavour, A-B have taken the alternative route of buying equity in two regional craft brewers, Redhook and Widmer, in the Pacific Northwest corner of the country (Washington and Oregon). In exchange for that equity, Redhook and Widmer are granted access to A-B's huge distribution network. Thus, and A-B distributor has some beer with interesting flavour on offer - well, moderately interesting, anyway - alongside the bland A-B megalager products.

A-B's American efforts are currently focused on making beer even less flavorful than regular Budweiser: Michelob Ultra and Budweiser Select. Both are highly attenuated and have no malt character to speak of, and are targeted at drinkers wanting low-carbohydrate beers. The other new wrinkle in A-B's line up is Bud Extra, a combination of Budweiser and something resembling Red Bull - yes, a combined energy drink and light lager beer. Imagine filling a glass with bland lager, then dumping it down the sink, then filling it with Red Bull, and you'll have an idea of what the stuff tastes like. Bloody useless is what it is.

You'd be surprised. Imagine, first, s**te lager of this sort, but still fresh, so no detectable off-flavours. Now, let a year go by. The one detectable flavour you'll get is oxidation. So now you have crap lager with a stale flavour behind it. Ah well, at least it tastes of some- thing.

In article , dgs writes

Best idea yet.

Not really - there are laws against putting toxic material down the drainage system you know.