Rice vs. Corn Syrup in Beer

Coors > bud by a mile, InBev had to do something. Monsanto may be involved as well.

 

I don't know if corn is worse for the environment than other grains but I do think its true that corn has gotten a bad name of late.

This is because of books like the Omnivores dilemma where Michael Pollan describes how cheap corn is and how it has come to be in so many products as a result. He uses the example of a meal at Mcdonald's where the drink is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, the bun contains corn and the burger was made from a cow that was raised on corn, which is bad for cows since they prefer to eat grass.

 

Well, the day that brewers use soy is the day that I will avoid those brewers any way I can. Probably not fermentable so I have nothing to worry aboot..

 

No reviews since 2015. Maybe, thankfully, it is gone.

 

Too late. Apparently because of the various grain shortages and rationing during WWII, "soya beans" were used as a brewing adjunct, as noted in this page from the 1946 ed. of the MBAA's THE PRACTICAL BREWER:

¼ lb. per barrel, tho' - that quantity makes SNPA look like it's as sugar-loaded as a kid's breakfast cereal, comparatively.

 

Because you didn't think I'd like it, or because you found it good too?

FWIW -- I haven't tried Heineken's new Zero alcohol beer -- I have the feeling it's another unfermented wort beer... but I'll give it one chance.

 

If they just add wort, it is Speise. Actively fermenting wort and yeast is Krausening. The first depends on yeast in suspension, the second adds active visble yeast.

Small point, but a difference.

 

No attributes for that quote?

 

They dispose of the rice grains. The only part of the rice that goes into Bud Light fermenting tanks is the sugar extracted from the grains. There is no difference from using a syrup and using raw grains. In both cases processing gelatinizes the starches and extracts the sugars. The only question is this done on brew day or sometime before.

You should really be asking yourself if you'd like to eat a big bowl of corn syrup or a big bowl of rice syrup.

But even then both are just sugars. And you don't get any of it left in the bottle regardless if it's Bud Light or Miller Lite. The yeast breaks down the dextrose from the corn syrup just as readily as it breaks down the sugars from the rice.

 

We saw that today and we are trying to clear it up.

We use dextrose as a bottle conditioning sugar but it is sourced from potatoes that are non-GMO. I know years ago some of the dextrose would come from tapioca. We did try some malt based dextrose but we couldn't find any that didn't affect the flavor too much (big malty finish).

 

What a relief! Everyone knows that corn follows the dark side but potatoes and tapioca are aligned with the light side.

In seriousness, I appreciate the correction of the record, but the fact that other companies are scrambling to disassociate themselves from corn or, if that's impossible, to spread the blame for using corn shows just how effective those Bud Light ads were. Silly as this all is, the national conversation with respect to beer has shifted markedly in just a day or two.

 

It is a bit funny to see how the US brewing industry vilified syrups and sugars even though the use of such ingredients would surely have been beneficial in achieving the desired dryness and lightness which they have been touting and striving for for decades upon decades. Just goes to show how bad an image such ingredients have had I guess (and of course the turn of the century health scares involving glucose or prohibition-era homebrew/bootleg brew probably contributed to this image).

 

Well, some members of the industry did - the ones, usually, that didn't use them - (AB in the current case one of the notable exceptions). Nearly a century and half ago:

"Some … substitutes for barley malt are used by a portion of the… members of ‘The Association of the United Lager Beer Brewers of New York City and Vicinity'…Corn, not malted, but in the form of glucose ... are used, in proportions varying from 5 to 20 per cent. (Glucose is a liquid form of grape sugar.) The brewers who use any of these substances propose to discontinue their use whenever... any one … establish as a fact that they are adulterations, or are deleterious in beer.”

 

Right, that part should have been worded less definitively, since as you point out there were differences of (publically stated) opinion on the topic.

 

I picked up a sixer of Heineken 0.0 last week on a whim. For what it is, it's not bad IMO. You have to keep your expectations in check of course. It's passable as a light beer, has some mild bitterness, and does not taste like grape nut soda to me.

 

I would have paid to be a fly on the wall in Miller Lite HQ on Monday morning.