Interesting. So adding an anti-oxidant such as ascorbic acid ought to mitigate skunkiness.
Actually, I have a couple bottles of Woodie Gold sitting in the fridge because I can’t bring myself to choke the stuff down.
If it’s as good as you say, I suspect I’m just not a lager guy. No big surprise there.
FTR, what signs should I look for to make sure I get skunk-free beer? What kind of lighting is acceptable inside the refrigerators at the store?
None. To avoid the skunk, buy beer that is in brown bottles inside a sealed case. It’s a burden, I know. 
Nah, even brown bottles let too much light in. Stick with the cans. 
It really is. I can only find decent beer in six-packs.
BTW, if exposure to light skunks beer in under two minutes, how come I can pour and drink a beer in a lit room without it being skunked?
It’s a gradual process that is at its worst when you have a sealed bottle with no place for the skunk to go. In a glass, it mostly wafts away before you notice it.
If you are buying six-packs, take them from the case yourself. Or ask the counter-person to get you some from the back of the cooler.
Good idea!
Thankfully, the six-pack of Anchor Steam I just picked up was in a fridge with broken lights (but the fridge works, or at least hasn’t been opened much, because it was still plenty cold), and it’s in a super-dark bottle anyway, so we’ll see what happens…
There seems to be a little over-exaggerated fear of beer becoming skunked in this thread. I’ve got over 400 beers in my beer cellar (most all designed to age well) and I have only very rarely encountered any that have suffered from light damage from improper storage conditions. Brown bottled beer is extremely resistant to getting skunked (unless you’re storing them on your front lawn). While cans offer the best protection, I think it’s unnecessary and the vast majority of craft/micro brews are not canned.
The characteristics of many of the green bottled beers that are being picked up by some of you are NOT what skunked beer tastes like. If you’ve ever encountered an even mildly skunked beer, you’d recognize the difference. The slight sulfur like tastes in beers like Heineken and Lowenbrau are a result of the strains of lager yeast used.
Yeah, I was gonna say–how come all my beer doesn’t skunk the moment anyone opens the fridge?
I can assure you I know the difference.
Like I said before, I’ve had Heineken in Europe, and have had it in cans in the U.S. and didn’t detect skunk in either case. I’ve had lots of Heineken & Lowenbrau that were fine, and lots that were skunk. I’ve also had cheap ass bum beer like MIckeys & mickeys Ice that were skunky. Both come in green. And I doubt they use the same yeast European beers do. I’m thinking these beers have sat in back room too long, then are put in a cooler under a light too long.
FTR the beer I had when I started this thread was so skunked up my son smelled it in the living room while I was dumping in out in the kitchen sink. That’s about as bad as it gets!
Fine, you had a Heineken that was so skunked it needed it to dumped. Is that what you’re using as a comparison to Heineken sold in Europe and in cans to Heineken sold in bottles in the U.S?
Heineken that is suitable for drain pour (assuming that one stores it properly and it’s not over the hill) is pretty rare. Even those under fluorescent light in package stores with a reasonable turn-over rate should be fine.
We’ve discussed the “Heineken tastes better in Amsterdam” at length on the boards of a beer site in which I’m an administrator. We’ve even gone as far as to have one of the members bring some keg cans back in his luggage and give it the Pepsi challenge with bottled Heineken purchased in the U.S. Conclusion: Beer tastes better when on vacation. Sure, Heineken doesn’t age well and freshness is important. But popular beers like Heineken are shipped here right after brewing in a light free environment and there is no reason it should taste any different. Same conclusion was reached with (yuch!) Guinness.
No. I’m comparing it (and other green glass beer) to beer in brown bottles, regardless of brand and where it came from. Skunky beer from brown bottles, in my experience, is very rare.
Okay, but if you’ve experienced Lowenbrau being skunky about 75% of the time, I have to believe what you’re tasting is either the intended sulfur like tastes of the yeast strain I mentioned or you’re continuing to purchase it at the least busy package store possible.
I simply do not believe this. I lived in Europe for 5 1/2 years, so it’s not the vacation effect. One of my favorite beers there was Pilsner Urquell. Everytime I’d come back to the US and ask for a Pilsner Urquell, I’d be disappointed. It simply did not taste the same, and countless Czechs have told me the same thing (they claim it’s because they keep the good beer for themselves, but I don’t quite buy that.) It’s not some sort of romanticism or anything–the only expectations I had when drinking PU in the US was that I would be drinking a beer I like. It didn’t taste good or right to me, and I don’t think it’s any psychological thing. I’ve simply never had a PU that tasted good to me in the US. Even in Hungary (where I lived), there’d be variation between bars.
Same thing with my Heineken experience. I went into it expecting to taste nasty beer, and I actually somehow liked it. Then again, I may have accidentally had the Heineken dark lager.
Even here in Chicago with the locally brewed beers there’s a lot of variance. I love Goose Island beers, but from one store to another, for one bar to another, there’s variance in the product and the taste. I expect large international breweries to have more consistency in the way their product is packaged and shipped, but if batches of beer in the same city can vary in quality, then surely beers shipped across continents will, too.
I don’t think it matters much where I buy it. I rarely see anyone else buying it. And I always see the shelf/coolers full of it. I don’t think it sells well here. And I don’t think the distributor rotates the old stock out.
This is Wisconsin. We don’t have “package stores”.
They’re called “beer depots”. Get it right!
That would explain a lot. A number of my fellow beer geeks (and myself) who have sampled Heineken in Amsterdam and in the U.S. would not make that mistake.
Not at all. You already nailed the reason for the variance in taste for small breweries like Goose Island. There is a very discernible taste in their offerings from batch to batch. Not only are they constantly tweaking their recipes but brewing conditions change. The quality control measures that the macros like Heineken, Anheuser Busch, etc. use is amazing. They spend a ton on ensuring each batch tastes and looks exactly the same as the others and millions of gallons a year become drain pour.
I was not much of a beer geek at the time. All I remember about it was the Heineken came in a brown bottle. It would not have even occurred to me that Heineken makes a brown lager.
I’m much more of a beer geek (and occasional home brewer) now, and it certainly does not explain the fact that Pilsner Urquell in the US tastes like crap to me and pretty much all the Czech people I know.
You also seem to miss my point that it’s not the breweries themselves I’m blaming for inconsistency–it’s the end retailers. The stores, the bars, how long beers sits out in the open, etc. The effect of even just a little bit of age is plainly evident in any tapped or bottled beer. You go to any of the bars in my neighborhood, don’t bother ordering anything outside Budmillcoors, because it will have been sitting around for God-knows-how-long and will taste like ass. I keep making the mistake of ordering something simple like a freakin’ Sam Adams and it tastes, not skunked, but stale, dead. I’ve given up trying to get anything beyond an Old Style in my hood. If the beer don’t move, it suffers. I know you know that.
Also, Goose Island does not have that much variation in batch to batch–they DO have a lot of variation with how different stores keep the beer, in my experience. I’ll have one bottle from one store, and you could smell the Amarillo and Cascade hops from across the room and I’ll have another bottle, from another store and presumably the same batch (judging by the expiry date), and something’s off.
Apparently, I’m not crazy. According to this, the domestic Heineken comes in a brown bottle. I would have thought that even in my pre-total-beer-geek days I would have recognized the difference immediately between a dark lager and a pilsner-style lager. This also offers support (at the end).
