Adjuncts acceptable now?

IOW, it's not the ingredients, but how they're used. That's how it's always been, from a brewing point of view.

From a marketing point of view, however...

 

Adjuncts have never bothered me.

If it is not a detriment to the beer then it's fine with me.

 

Tell that to the many Reinheitsgebotophiles (both here and abroad) or even the old Brewers Association "craft" definition that allowed "...beers which use adjuncts to enhance rather than lighten flavor."

 

I think where the disapproval started with the term began when the craft beer revolution in the 2000s was ramping up. I always think back to the movie Beer Wars where Sam Calagione is talking to a group of diners at a beer dinner and explaining to them how the macro brewers use "cheap adjuncts that neuter the flavor of the beer." The key word there is "cheap." It costs less to brew a beer with rice and corn than it does with barley or oats. He also calls the macro beers "industrial lagers" which creates a sense of craft, or artisanal if you will, vs. mass-produced, thus creating the stigma OP is talking about. Then, somewhere down the line, people just started simply assuming the word "adjunct" meant anything added to the beer besides malt, hops, yeast or water which, as previous posters have stated, is incorrect. It's even to the point now when I'm talking to beer nerds and they use the word "adjunct" to mean any special ingredient I don't bother correcting them because it's gotten so out of control at this point, why bother?

 

I'll make sure to tell them as they're grinding the chit malt to mimic the undermodified malts of old .

The BA part, as you surely know, is pure gobbledygook.

 

Ahhh... might have predated that period:

 

That's the "craft beer mythology" in a nutshell; pure marketing bs.

And I think you mean 'ramping up again ' .

 

I think you guys nailed what are probably the strongest roots of "adjunct" becoming a dirty word. What's funny though is these are more based in politics and marketing than the beer. German Reinheitsgebot (Purity Law) was historically enforced more for political and economic reasons, than for any benefit to beer. Centuries later fledgling US craft brewers, (e.g. Sam Calagione, Greg Koch (Sam Adams), Greg Koch (Stone), Tony Magee, etc.) and the Brewers Association hitched the marketing of their beer onto the same concepts of quality and purity surrounding Reinheitsgebot and vilified the beer adjunct. In fairness to the craft beer pioneers the way big brewers used adjuncts was to lighten flavor [which appealed to a wider audience of drinkers] and was the opposite of what they were trying to do with their beer; but their marketing unwittingly distorted the definition of adjunct. That distortion only now starting to be corrected [among beer geeks, the vast majority of "normal" people don't care.]

 

Apart from everything else,rice is not as cheap as malt.Though its use does allow you to brew with cheaper domestic barley.

 

Adjuncts are unmalted grains (such as corn, rice, rye, oats, barley, and wheat) or grain products used in brewing beer which supplement the main mash ingredient (such as malted barley), often with the intention of cutting costs, but sometimes to create an additional feature, such as better foam retention, flavours or ...
Adjuncts - Wikipedia

 

I disagree - there was always a small "anti-adjunct" strain among US beer consumers and brewers that long predated the "craft" era. See New York Times 1881 Article - "How Lager Beer is Made" or the series of Letters to the Editor from 1908 which includes statements like:

"With but three exceptions (I know of but one positively) I am told, and I believe it to the a fact, that the American brewers all use in the brewing of their beer the ground up hulls of corn, to which some other deleterious and cheapening substances have been added. The corn used has had all the starch and glucose taken out of it, which is used in making corn sirup, cornstarch and glucose, and the remainder, with some other stuff which is carefully kept secret, is ground up, put into bags and sold to brewers and used them to cheapen the cost of their product, age it quickly and “scientifically” and hurry it along to its market."

The few all-malt beers brewed and marketed in the US in Post-Repeal era made note of the fact that they did not use adjuncts and typically proclaimed their superiority over the standard US adjunct lagers and ales of the period.

And articles on Maytag's Anchor Brewing Co. that predate the existence of any other US "craft" brewer also noted the lack of adjuncts:

 

QUOTE="moshea, post: 5731281, member: 148148"]Adjuncts are unmalted grains (such as corn, rice, rye, oats, barley, and wheat) or grain products used in brewing beer which supplement the main mash ingredient (such as malted barley), often with the intention of cutting costs, but sometimes to create an additional feature, such as better foam retention, flavours or ...
Adjuncts - Wikipedia[/QUOTE]
Unmalted grains contain starch but cannot be used for brewing on their own.The starch needs to be converted into sugars and the spare malt enzymes do this.
Both components benefit,the adjuncts mop up excess enzymes which cause hazy beer and sugars are made available for the yeast.Adjuncts should be more than just added ingredients.
I see the word Reinheitsgebot bandied about. It is easy to forget that before 1906 most of Germany was free to use whatever it wanted in brewing.Rice,corn no problem.That's where Adolphus Busch probably got his ideas.

 

Ok... no argument from me there. Reinheitsgebot outlived it's economic necessity centuries ago, but the idea of inferior ingredients carried on and certainly existed long before the modern US craft beer movement. I think the Brewer's Association with full support of US craft beer pioneers popularized and weaponized that anti-adjunct sentiment though.

 

I think you've hit on something there. I would change the OP's question to: "When did the Reinheitsgebot switch from a marketing tool for those in American craft who aligned themselves with it TO a thing that American craft would rebel against in their marketing?" Seems like a major shift of association in a short time span. Maybe I'm drastically oversimplifying it.

 

Based on OP's definition of adjuncts, then yes, these extra ingredients they are throwing in beer seem to be acceptable, especially now that Goose Island has resorted to using extracts in their latest BCBS variants.

 

Technically a flavoring, but I draw the line at artificial flavors. No skill involved in adding chemicals at the end of the brewing process.

 

Sigh. I respectfully acknowledge that your forecast was correct...

 

No more --- or less --- "skill" that adding flavoring extracts or syrups that are derived entirely from the natural source.

 

And, as Jace Marti pointed out in his letter to the BA in response to this, enhance v lighten is not a good v bad thing. In the 19th century, Schell's (along with many other American brewers of the time) used corn to lighten the beer in order to be able to make German-style lagers using American barley. That it is used (along with rice) to lighten the color and flavors well beyond that did not make the original Schell's recipe "bad".

 

Adjuncts are fine if they add something worthy to a brew. Ex: Oatmeal adds body, Rye adds a spicy characteristic, etc.

The way Macro brewers use adjuncts (or at least how I view it) is because it's generally cheaper than having an all malt grain bill. I don't believe Budweiser uses Corn and Rice in their grain bill because it adds something worthy to the beer but then again, I've been wrong before.