Fernseh-Pils-a-thon 2013

Sorry Felsen, not really with you on this one. Still to this day the imports (into Germany) play a very small role in market share and has not really affected the industry negatively as the Brauer Bund once prophesied. Not only that but the largest imports are clearly from Czech Republic which also brews according to RHG.

We could get into a long discussion on RHG, but we did that a few times already here and the middle of this thread. In summation, I believe that most folks here will say the brewing according to RHG does not necessarily equal great beer, just as pre-mixing Dragonfruit or Energy drinks in your pilsner doesn't make a good beverage (side jab, left uppercut - sorry couldn't resist ).

 

I have had some correspondence with, and have interviewed, a number of brewers in Bamberg and environs. I think a campaign that involved their voices -- and stories -- about the Brauereisterben and the loss of these wonderful traditions would be a good start for a grassroots campaign. I think involving an entity like Weyermann, who has a big stake in keeping these places afloat by supplying them with malt, might be the central "figure" we could rally around. We'd also need some policy-maker/lobbyist-type folks to work on the legislative side (maybe an economic development agency from Bavaria/Franken). I do international marketing for economic development agencies, so I could handle the creation of content and get the ball rolling there. We'd need boots on the ground getting signatures and stuff as well.

I'm ready to do this.

 

You might consider contacting the Bayerische Brauerbund, they may already have something in the pipeline or possibly can shed light on what did not work in the past.

 

True. Germans are always good at telling you about what doesn't work.

 

One I hear the most is: "So einfach ist/geht das nicht, Herr Burgess."

 

It seems that I have been misunderstood. Let me address the Reinheitsgebot just one more time. The point is that the RGH puts the power to brew in the brewmasters hands, not in the hands of the greedy accountants upstairs in their office counting the money. We have seen time and time again cheap adjunct beers being produced around the world by truly expert brewers who are not allowed by their corporations to create a great product. I myself have been through this and it is no fun. Adding things like formaldehyde, ascorbic acid or propylene glycol to the beer went against everything that I knew, but that is what I was told to do. The processing aids used in Germany like PVPP are filtered out of the final product. What you get is indeed very pure. A lot of people like to argue that the RHG does not necessarily produce a great beer and these people are correct. Others say that you can create great beers like fruit lambics and stouts which lie outside the RHG. This is also very true. It is therefore not a question of technique, rather a question of intent. And the problem there is that the intention of the accountants in the front office is to make profit, not great beer. We see the effects of dumbing down the German Pilseners by saving on ingredients. Do you really want German brewers to start using high fructose corn syrup instead of barley malt? And that is just the tip of the iceberg. I have a list of over 100 adjuncts and processing chemicals that I have used during my career around the world. Needless to say, in a number of countries, I never drank my own beer. P.S. Herr mjtierney, the gun club in my village was just using air rifles to shoot at little targets. You shoot upstairs and you drink downstairs.

 

One of the funny things about the people that are vocally against the RHG is that they're overlooking the forest for the trees.
While the RHG might prevent things like fruit lambics and spiced beers...they keep things like Bud Light from happening. Fruit lambics and spiced beers make up less than 1/4 of 1% of beer sales while Bud Light (and horrid Chinese adjunct beers like Snow) dominate the beer landscape. To me it's far more important to keep those "beers" away than to encourage a few zany recipes that are already being done well enough elsewhere.
I had no idea about the Braumeister thing. While I'm not sure I totally agree with it for the US landscape, we do have waaaay too many homebrewers opening breweries that seem to have no idea what they're doing.

 

No doubt. I just think about how adjunct-laden beers have borderline taken over the world...and people buy tons of them. I think the RHG keeps that whole thing in check and it's one less worry. It certainly isn't quality control. I've definitely had some bad RHG beers and I've had many a Belgian beer that defies the RHG at every turn that I loved.

 

I actually wish it came down to cheap swill, but I'm not sure it does. Bud Light isn't that cheap, especially considering the R&D, advertising, and manpower that goes into it. I kinda wish people were buying Hamms and Falstaff instead of Bud Light.
I think macro light lagers are far worse than cheap swill because they made the general public think that's what beer is supposed to be. "I don't like those heavy/dark beers - I heard they have like 8000 calories and are as strong as moonshine" kind of stuff. It has taken 30 years of craft beer to finally open some eyes that beer isn't naturally bland. While there are bad/cheap beers in Germany, I think the RHG has generally protected it from going into the beer dark ages like the US went through between the 50's and 80's. I know there are definitely more factors than just adjuncts that caused that, but I think we got set way back

 

I really agree with Herr Domingo. There are some terrible RHG beers and some wonderful ones way outside of it. Now back to the topic at hand: Fernsehpils. How did we get to this? You know, it was not too many years ago that national brands were nonexistant in Germany. The movement for national distribution was spearheaded by the Pilsener breweries like Krombacher, Warsteiner, Bitburger and most importantly of all, König. König wanted a "König-City" bar in every major German city. That did not quite work out, but what did work was the change from the Euro Bottle to the NRW Bottle. This little, poorly-known fact put a lot of family breweries out of business. After the big guys decided to switch to the new bottles and have showy custom crates printed, the retailers no longer wanted to take beer in Euro Bottles, because it meant sorting them out all the time. The beauty of the standard rust coloured crate and Euro Bottle was that the empties could go back to any brewery to be refilled. Now, everything had to be separated. So a little family brewery not only had to replace all its bottles and crates (the NRW bottle is taller and thinner), it also had to refit or even replace its bottling and labelling line. Many could not afford this. I personally sorted bottles for weeks at a brewery that went to the NRW Bottle after resisting the trend for a couple of years. Since this strategy worked, it has continued to the Ale Bottle, Bavaria Bottle and other permutations like the Hasseröder Bottle. Some brewers have even gone back to the old Stubbi Bottle or even the Swingtops. In any case, the change from standard size Euro Bottles and crates to all this diversity was bad for the little brewers who could not afford to adapt. A lot of them attempted to just tough it out and keep the old packaging. Most of them failed. Just imagine how your old, fat, scratched bottles in an unlabelled rust coloured crate looked like next to a flashy hot-red König Pilsener case! That König must be Premium beer ...........

 

And it all comes full-circle...

http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20140710/PC0301/140719971/1477/

(Headline of the [SC "craft" beer mecca] Charleston newspaper: "Radler Suddenly the Rage in Charleston")

 

AKA DIPA

 

http://stochasticity.com/beers/grapefruit-slam-ipa