You know, Miller owns and manufactures (dare I say ‘brew?’) Milwaukee’s Best (AKA: The Beast), Coors is the same with Keystone, and Anheiser Busch likewise with Natural Ice (AKA: Natty Ice). Some people say that all these beers are exactly the same as their parent companies’, just four dollars cheaper at the counter. Other say they are not. I say, unless it’s a genuinely GOOD beer (microbrew, e.g.), then it’s all shit anyways and I might as well pay the lowest dollar. Have there been tests conducted regarding the differences in these fine beers?
And also, does anyone know what is exactly IN these beers? I don’t know why the FDA doesn’t have coverage of alcoholic drinks and require the regulation of their ingrediants, considering that they are so widely consumed in this country. Why doesn’t the ATF consider having “Nutrition Facts” or ingrediants listed on each can or package? Especially with these cheap beers, I can only wonder what kind of shit and bile I am ingesting each time I crack open a can and enjoy the one of the “most premium” beers in the world. Anybody got the inside track? I appreciate all replies. Thanks.
They’re not the same. I’ve been to beer festivals and taste tests. The reason a brewers cheaper beers taste similar to their “premium”( :rolleyes: ) brands is because they tend to use the same strain of yeast. Other ingredients and processes differ, though.
Miller inherited Milwaukees Best when it bought out Gettlemen Brewing. One of the things I don’t understand is, Milwaukees Best Light has more flavor than regular Milwaukees Best. Now, I don’t really care for either of them, and I am not a light beer drinker, but my taste buds detect more flavor in the light version. Which tells me they’re using extenders to enhance the otherwise dismal taste.
There are (at least) 2 reasons why mainstream beer is so mediocre.
First, over the last 25 years the Miller Lite nazis (and their ilk) have successfully changed the tastes of American beer drinkers. This was a stroke of business genius on their part. Light beer has less alcohol. In order to get even a slight buzz, light beer drinkers have to guzzle more of the stuff. This means more beer is sold. Even regular beers are made to at least seem lighter, with less bitterness. This sucks, as good beer should be a little bitter.
The second reason is, cost. Many brewers have gone from a natural aging process to a chemical fermentation. This speeds up the time it takes to brew beer.
But it produces inferior beer. The idea to switch to this method is one of the reasons Schlitz is no longer the largest brewer in the world. Their loyal customers noticed the change, and left! Before they changed it, Schlitz was excellent. Full bodied with nice bitterness and a good long after taste. Anyone who tried whats selling as Schlitz now days would think I have rocks in the head. But you should have tried it before they changed it’s formula!
My advice is to get a better paying job and drink the good beer that’s out there, because there simply isn’t going to be any good cheap beer made ever again!
Yeah, I agree with you about the general beer-manufacturer conspiracy, considering it makes perfect sense. But that must only apply to the bigger, more popular kinds of beer, like Bud or Miller or Coors – the regular ones, not the cheap ones. The cheapies are sold under the pretext of having MORE alcohol, like Natty Ice, whose label boasts its percentage at 5.9, which is more than Bud’s 5.0, or PBR/Hamms’ at somewhere around 4. I think they’ve made light beer is also maybe just that you CAN drink more of them (think: frat party) simply because there’s not much too them. Try doing that with a nice thick stout – you’d be fuller than a stuffed thanksgiving turkey.
and I knew about this chemical fermentation process, and so I wanna know what kind of junk is in that brew. Anyone know?
I was also unaware of chemical fermentation, do you have a link? I know that compressed CO2 is used instead of the longer process of natural carbonation, but I didn’t know that a chemical (non-biological) process could convert sugar to achohol.
I thought some lite beers were actually stronger then the regular ones.
By an almost 100% majority the opposite is true. The main way to make a beer lighter is by removing the element which contains the most calories. That element is alcohol. Search for “beer alcohol content” on the web and compare the alcohol content of name brand regular beer with light beer. The light beer always has about 25% less alcohol than it’s regular counter-part.
During my visit to the Miller Brewery, I asked the tour guide the same question as the OP. I was told that both Miller’s premium beers and their cheap stuff were brewed with similar standards of quality. The only difference, I was told, is the yeast used in the process. The yeasts used for High Life and MGD provided a more valuable and expensive product simply because they were popular (read: “budweiser clones”) and the yeasts were proprietary, trademarked, secret formula, organisms.
The yeasts used for the cheap beers were not as popular, so they were priced less. The tour guide told me later as an aside, that there were also some shortcuts taken in aging but that he personally preferred the cheap stuff.
Another reason the cheaper beer tastes different is the breweries use cheaper filler ingredients. “Real” beer has only 4 ingredients:
Yeast - for fermentation
Hops - for bitterness and to preserve the beer
Malted barley - for flavor and the starch/sugar for the yeast to process into alcohol (roasting the barley produces different flavors)
Water - … for obvious reasons
To cut costs, the cheaper beers use fillers like rice or corn products in combination with lesser amounts of barley to supply the sugar available to the yeast. When you do this you lose alot of the beer flavor because rice doesn’t really add any flavor to the end product.
Also, there are differences in the yeast strains used. Obviously there are better, more expensive strains, and cheaper less tasty strains, but the cost of these doesn’t necessarily play into the overall cost of beer. This is because yeast is a perpetual organism, and the yeast from the first batch of beer is used to jump start the next batch of beer, and so on. So, brewers don’t have to constantly keep buying yeast. They just develop their own strain they think is good and then keep culturing it. There are some Old World beers that have been using the same batch of yeast for centuries.
What makes a yeast more expensive than another? Do they have to pay royalties to some company in Germany or Czech Republic? Once you’ve got some yeast – any breed – you can continue propogating that breed for the same price as any other breed. I can’t imagine that they’d buy something that they’d easily make, given the original strain.
Argument’s moot anyway – for common stuff, nothing beats Blue. And if I’m willing to go to the special store, nothing beats Negra Modelo. Except maybe a Guiness. Or anything from Dragonmead. According to my mood. Damn, at the very least, anything but American piss-water (and yes, I’m a United Statesian).
Gosh, when I was sent to Oklahoma City a few years ago, all they had available cold was that 3.2 beer (said three-two). They sold it everywhere, except liquor stores. You could go to liquor stores and get “real” beer – just not the same brands as sold cold in non-liquor stores (which was good for me). Only that it’s sold warm, by law.
These are the reasons I have been given by folks in the beer distibution industry. I cannot vouch for their absolute truth.
The ingredients and alcohol content are not listed for two reasons, which I will call Marketting and Prohibition Leftovers.
Marketting : The big brewers do not want to tell you the alcohol content, and they have powerful well funded contacts with the government. With the alcohol content obscured, people will not be able to use this as a discriminatory factor in their purchase. This allows more profit to be made by selling lighter beers with less alcohol. Note that light beers generally do not remove the alcohol after the fact. They simply use fewer sugar containing ingredients (Barley Malt, corn sugar, and rice malt being the most common) thus giving the yeast less food and less alcohol produced. In addition, the sugars that are present are often fermented out more thoroughly by different yeasts or diffent processes, thus giving fewer carbs in the result, and requiring even less original malt.
The big brewers also do not want ingredient of nutrition labelling to allow them to put whatever they want in the beer. Note that typically nothing really bad goes into even cheap beer. Bad chemicals are expensive! Mainly they just don’t want to openly promote that they use lots of rice and corn in their beers, which are much cheaper than barley malt.
Prohibition Leftovers: And while the brewers do not want to list acohol content, neither do the nanny factors in government. The fear is that open listing of alcohol will lead problem drinkers to intentionally choose the highest alcohol beer. Which seems silly to me as the real problem drinkers know what to drink through trial and error and young drinkers have the bladder power to get plenty drunk on light beer.
And the government also has no desire to label nutrition for beer. It would show high levels of many nutrients in many micro beers that they fear would counter the image of “Alcohol=Bad”.
This diatribe has been brought to you by the “Big Gov-Big Beer” Conspiracy Website.
I took the Busch brewery tour in Merrimack, NH. That’s one of the major producers of Natural Light. The Natural Light was in the next tank over from the Budweiser, and the same pipes ran to both. It seems like it would be a lot of extra work to make anything different other than the yeast.
I don’t think it’s quite simple greed as you guys seem to think.
First of all, the initial reason for the use of rice and corn in brewing US lagers wasn’t cost, but to dilute the native 6-row barley. Standard European lager brewing techniques didn’t work so well with native barley, so the immigrant brewmasters diluted their grist with corn and rice. They still brewed it to similar hop levels and gravities as the European brews they started with.
Second, Prohibition and World War II are mostly responsible for the lightening of body and hops in large-scale US brewing. Prohibition closed down the vast majority of brewers, leaving only those that could stay in business making non-alcoholic products. World War II caused those same breweries to aim their wartime beer production at the domestic market, a large part of which was made up of women, who preferred a lighter beer than what was popular at the time.
Here are a few articles talking about this, and reproducing the recipes of pre-prohibition US lagers:
This one lists the BJCP beer style guidelines for brewing competitions. Note the differences between the standard American lager and the Classic American Pilsner.
http://www.mv.com/ipusers/slack/bjcp/styleguide01.html
On one of the other side topics, I think the reason that beer doesn’t have to list the ingredients or nutritional facts is because it’s not considered a food or drug, and therefore isn’t regulated by the FDA, but instead by the ATF. That’s probably it. The main reason they wouldn’t want to do it voluntarily is because their beer recipes are probably the breweries’ main source of competitive advantage, not their brewing processes.
I would like to echo kanicbird’s request for more information on this. I’m familiar with force carbonation but haven’t heard of a widely-used process to accomplish primary fermentation without yeast.
I think pkbites has the general gist of what happened, but I wouldn’t call it a chemical fermentation (whatever that means). My understanding is that the company moved to an accelerated fermentation schedule, accomplished mainly through higher temperatures for the fermenting and conditioning processes. I also was told that Schlitz’s accountants are the ones who demanded this change, overruling the brewers.
Higher temperature fermentations are indeed faster but do not produce as clean of a product. Schlitz customers noticed the change and stopped drinking it. When Schlitz realized its sales were plummetting, it reverted back to the original system, but it was too late. Beer drinkers typically do not give second chances.
As to how today’s Schlitz compares to the old one, I don’t know. I think the label is owned by Miller nowadays, and I would imagine it’s gone through even more changes.
Regarding the OP, breweries have to submit each beer’s ingredients to the ATF for approval. So even though we consumers don’t know what’s in it, at least the good folks at the ATF do.
And FWIW I’m an ex professional brewer, and I’ve never heard of any abhorrent chemicals being put into commercial beer. The most unusual I know of are sulfites (in amounts small enough to avoid labeling requirements), ascorbic acid, and papain. Rumors about formaldehyde being put into foreign beer are almost completely false, although apparently some non-exporting Chinese breweries might have used formaldehyde in their mash at one time.
Some people might also be surprised at the amount of corn, rice, sugar, and soy that some beers have. Generally, the presence of any of these ingredients in large amounts indicates a cheaper and lighter beer.
A fun experiment to try is to buy anywhere from 3 to 7 different mass market cheap lagers and set up a blind tasting from unlabeled cups for your friends. Give everyone a pen and paper to make their guesses. After they are done, get a friend to set one up for you. You will be amazed at how hard it is to correctly identify them, even if you have been drinking one brand your whole life.
That’s not to say they all taste identical, because they definitely do not. But they are close enough to make it difficult. And be sure to pick out which of the bunch you like the best before their identities are revealed, because you will likely be in for a surprise.
I also suggest sticking with either all “light” beers or all “non-light” beers, because the difference between the two is readily identifiable when tasting them side by side.
Traditionally, lagers(from German ‘lagern’; “to store”) were aged in caves for months, where the remaining yeast had time to remove undesirable compounds like diacetyl, as well as drop out of suspension, leaving the resulting beer clear and smooth. This process can be dropped to about 5-6 weeks with some modern tweaks(i.e. higher temp. diacetyl rest), but it’s still the same basic aging process.
Nowadays, through industrial magic, they can do a continuous flow process whereby the beer is put into contact with much more yeast than it would in the traditional lager aging process, removing the diacetyl and other compounds in a matter of hours. Then they either centrifuge the beer or filter it to remove all the yeast. Presto, lagered beer in 8 hours, not 8 weeks.
Whether or not this makes a taste difference is debatable. Nobody to my knowledge has ever made a non-macrobrew by this method, so it’s hard to tell if the taste is a result of these types of processes or the ingredients.
Oddly enough, I took some classes from a professor at Cornell whose specialty specifically is developing ways to analyze beer “sensories” (as they call them in food science from time to time). His research concluded that the same brand of beer was extremely consistent regardless of where it was brewed (most of the very large US breweries brew in different locations, with different water sources, different farms for purchasing grains, etc.). The brewmasters are very highly skilled–it’s HARD to make a product that is simultaneously consistent and very bland. Strong flavors are easy to get. Anyway, he did find that a trained taster could distinguish among brands of major US beers and that this did correlate to polyvariate chromatography of the beers. Even my relatively untrained palate can distinguish a few of the brands from each other. The premium sub-brands are distinct from the ordinary brands, mostly because they have more malt and less adjunct. However, in comparison to the wide variety of beer styles, they are still very homogeneous.
