I’m trying to find out what is the ingredient that makes me sick in the American beers. I can drink imported beers, but what ever it is has caused me to have a medical condition. If I could find out then maybe I can eliminate this in my diet completly. I"m thinking its a preservative or… sonething
You need to be a** lot** more specific about which American beers you are talking about.
That said, if it’s an Anheuser-Busch product, it’s probably rice. AFAIK, no American brew uses preservatives other than hops.
In addition to listing a few beers that do make you sick and a few beers that don’t, what kind of sickness are we talking about. There’s a big difference between breaking out in hives and getting a bad case of heartburn.
For example, I get really bad heartburn from craft beers. I assume that’s the higher hops content. I don’t drink IPAs but even the regular, non-IPA craft beers tend to have more hops then Coors light type beers. I’d spend some time testing it out, but I really, really don’t like heartburn and it just takes a few sips and it comes on fast and furious.
All the swillmeisters on the Board are over in Cafe Society. Let’s go there instead of General Questions. MOved.
samclem, moderator
Agreed…“American beer” is about as specific as, well, “imported beer”.
99% of beers have hops as their preservative, no matter their country of origin.
If you’re talking American macrobrewed light lagers (Coors, Miller, Budweiser, etc.), corn and/or rice can be used in addition to the usual barley. You won’t find those in most proper imports. Note, however, that many “imports” from large companies are actually brewed in the US instead. Also, most American microbrews do not contain corn or rice.
I agree that we’ll need to know what beers, specifically, do and do not cause whatever symptoms you may be having.
Miller uses something that screws with me. Except their Milwaukee’s Best tasted like ass, but the problem ingredient must be too expensive.
It’s the cat pee.
Perhaps corn? Miller brewed products usually have a lot of corn in the mash (well, it’s specifically corn syrup these days, as far as I know.) Miller-branded products themselves (like MGD or Miller Lite) also use isomerized hops extract that keeps it from skunking. But Bud, Coors, PBR, etc., don’t use iso-hops, so if those beers make you sick, it’s not that.
How do you react to Corona? (Which has corn and/or rice)? Or Japanese lagers like Kirin or Sapporo, which have rice adjuncts?
I think it’s something it picks up on the way through the horse’s kidneys.
You’re not drinking Sierra Nevada’s lineup. There’s your problem.
Which American brewer? The two largest American owned breweries are Yuengling and Sam Adams. I think Pabst (and its subsidiary brands) is third. Those three are trailed by numerous microbrews. Anheiser-Busch, Miller, and Coors are all foreign owned but mostly brewed in the US.
Which imports are friendly to your health condition?
Do hops really function as a preservative? Seems I recall hops were originally added to beer because brewers *thought *it acted as a preservative, and it was later determined to be untrue.
A beer brewed and sold in the U.S. can’t have “Imported” printed on the label. This is why Guinness won’t brew in the U.S. for the U.S. market. If it did so, they would not be allowed to print “Imported” on their bottles. Apparently the “Imported” status is worth something…
Yes. Hops are mildly antibacterial, and this helps prevent contamination to a degree.
Brewers thought it was a preservative because hopped beers were observed to last longer than non-hopped beers.
It’s also not just the preservative function but also the flavor. There are some American brewers experimenting with natural yeasts (whatever is in the air) and using other ingredients rather than hops (dandelion is apparently ok fresh but doesn’t travel well). The results vary, but the bittering you get with hops really is pretty good.
Not strictly true but probably true in practice.
The TTB rules on beer labeling require that imports list the country of origin. But that’s about it.
The real reason may be that deceptive labeling can’t be used to obfuscate the origin of the beer. So, using “imported” on a bottle produced domestically may be close enough to trip that rule.
I don’t have access to my references from work, but yes, hops do function as a preservative. At least as far as I remember from all my readings.
And so they brew it in Canada instead, heh.
Wait - Canada is outside the U.S. now? Since when?
I know someone who seriously claims to get sick if she drinks any beer other than Heineken. Her disease is Hipsterism.
Sort of a hijack - but ages ago in college, one of the guys in the dorm was rich (and I mean, really rich family) and said his money came from great-grandpa (a chemist?) who invented a way to put something in American beer that put a “head” on the beer when poured. Apparently the beer here looked, and tasted, really flat when poured until grandpa’s concoction was added.
Needs more tick.