Adjuncts acceptable now?

Personally I don't object to what BMC put into their beers. If they made a delicious lager with some odd mix of grains I would drink it. I just don't find their beers very exciting or interesting, and that's why I don't usually drink them.

 

Hate to break it to you, but beer brewing is a giant chemistry experiment, with or without adjuncts and extracts.

The mashing process to break down the carbohydrates, fermentation, pH levels, hop alpha acid levels, water chemistry, carbonation, etc.

 

Here is what I was able to find for the end of 2016 (caveat: I am not a commodity trader, so you'll need to vet the source & data to confirm this is what it seems to be).

From the USDA
rice: $11.03 / cwt (~ $5.01 / bu)
barley: $4.68 / bu (commodity price; not malted; no idea if this is 2-row, 6-row, whatever)
corn: $3.29 / bu

 

I understand that, but for the most part all the ingredients and processes involved in the production of the actual beer are natural. Monitoring of levels is not the same as adding artificial chemicals for flavoring.

 

There are also such considerations as brewing a beer with enough body that adding coffee does not make the beer too thin.

 

OP is both wrong and right. He's wrong that maple syrup, coffee, vanilla, etc., are adjuncts, but he is right that it has been far more acceptable and commonplace to use oats, wheat, rye, and even corn in craft beer. So...yes?

 

Good job on the raw grain bulk prices. That is true, my question was what happens on the brewery level.

AB has said they get top quality rice that can be more expensive than malted barley, so I won’t argue that.

The next part is as a home brewer.

I can buy a 50lb bag of North American 2row for ~$40 at my Homebrew Shop. $0.80/Lb. That is for a bag, one pound is $1.09.

Flaked Maize is $1.59/Lb. What makes it more expensive? It is first degermed, then steamed, then run through heated rollers to make it into flakes. More process = more cost. Then you consider that flaked corn has less volume for the brewing, yes it can be more.

The traditional brewers would use grits (degermed?) and then gelatinize them in a cereal cooker. More time and energy reduces the savings.

Even looking at bulk quick oats on the web, I see a 50 lb bag is $67, or $1.34 per pound.

The local craft brewery is spending more on flaked corn than on flaked oats. Malted barley is even cheaper for them buying in bulk. Imported malts are more expensive.

Without knowing what a large brewery is paying for grits and their processing costs in the cooker, can we say that it is cheaper to use corn? Or rice? Or that Oats are more expensive?

 

Adjuncts have never been "unacceptable" in of themselves, but rather how they are used and whether their use leads to an inferior* end product. Simple.





* which is wholly subjective, and therefore not simple

 

When have adjuncts not been acceptable? Good beer is good beer. Budwiser and the like are bad because they're bad beers, not because they have adjuncts. This isn't 16th century Germany; we're better than that.

 

Purity is for losers

 

In what way is Budweiser a bad beer? It is the beer of choice for millions of people ,it just happens not to be yours or my favourite .
16th century Germany had no Reinheitsgebot. It was confined to just what is now a part of Bavaria.Germany did not exist until the late 19th century and RHG became law in 1906.

 

MillerCoors and, so by extension, likely the Pabst brands they brew, uses corn syrup - dextrose or maltose, depending on brand - rather than grits. Could cost more per brew for the ingredient itself but saves on energy, time and other process costs, etc. (no cereal cooker necessary).

Even Coors Banquet, once the second most common US adjunct lager which used rice, now lists "dextrose" as its only adjunct. For a period in the 1970-80s, they said they used both rice and "refined starch" (apparently corn based).

https://www.millercoors.com/beers/great-beers

 

Randy, when American breweries started to use adjuncts like corn & rice in the later 1800's it was to dilute to high protein content of North American 6-row malt (the common type of malt used in the US); the principle reasons were to create a clearer product (i.e., eliminate chill haze) and to increase beer stability. It is true that utilizing adjuncts (corn & rice) also resulted in beers that would be lighter in color and body as well.

Cheers!

Cheers!

 

While adjunct usage did address those problems, too, they weren't the principle reason, according to George Ehret (above) or Adolphus Busch:

Or the United Lager Beer Brewers of New York City & Vicinity [1881]:
“(Adjuncts) are not employed for the purpose of cheapening the beer produced, but for making desirable variations in color and flavor – the addition of any of these substances making a lighter-colored beer than malt alone, and one varying the flavor. Those brewers who use them believe they thus make a better beer, and know that it suites the taste of their customers – an object with all successful manufacturers. None of these substances are cheaper than malt, unless it be the corn-meal or prepared corn.”

 

But if your lighter coloured beer does not look good it won't be popular. Adjuncts permitted the brewing of appealing looking beer from lower quality local barley.

 

I thought I would add a couple of excerpts from Ernst Hantke's 1896/1897 book Handbuch für den Amerikanischen Brauer und Mälzer.
.
From page 479:

"The beers brewed in this country in their general character follow the European beers and are through the differing production methods and materials used more or less different from the European beers, although in very rare cases they correspond with the original type. The best way to distinguish these beers is between:

"American lager beers and Export beers" which in color, flavor and aroma come close to the Vienna beer, however they differ from those through a higher degree of attenuation and better keeping qualities.
"American beers of Pilsner character", which are generally similar to the previous type and merely possesses more hop flavor.
"American beer of Munich character", which in color and malt flavor, as well as aroma is similar to the original Münchener, but in fullness and other properties is different from those."

On page 530:

"In general for lager beers of the American type without a pronounced hop flavor is used:

circa 0.6-0.75 pounds per barrel when the original gravity is below 11.5% Balling
ca. 0.75-1 pounds per barrel when the original gravity is between 11.5-13% Balling
ca 1-1.25 pounds per barrel when the original gravity is above 13% Balling
For beers of Pilsener character, where the hop flavor should be clearly in the foreground, 2-3 tenths of a pound more per barrel is used than was noted above for regular beers."

Another excerpt from the same time period, this one from the book Amerikanische Brau-Industrie auf der Weltaussellung in Chicago from 1894:

Page 53
"The wholesale price of the beer is different in the different parts of the country. In New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Chicago and some other cities, which I visited, a barrel of the regular 12-13 degree beers cost 5.5-6.40 dollars, the 14 degree beer 6.74 up to 7.50 dollars."

And an excerpt from the 1882 edition and English translation of Thausing's The theory and practice of the preparation of malt and the fabrication of beer, with especial reference to the Vienna process of brewing:

Page 448
"in Austria, the worts for Schenk beer, seldom contain
more than .10 to 11 per cent.; those for common stock beer 12 to
14 per cent.; and those for export stock beer, 15 to 16 per cent.,
by the sacharometer, and this holds also good for the American
beers, except that the Schenk beer is somewhat stronger, as it
contains from 12 to 13 per cent."

To get a perspective on things one might also look at the table in Wahl and Henius work.

Hantke's typology of American bottom fermented beers hints at the fact that lager beer by that time had become divested from its roots in Bavarian lager beer brewing to some degree, so that a category of "lager beer" more akin to Vienna lager than Munich lager had emerged, whilst a separate Münchener style simultaneously existed in the marketplace (joined by other Bavarian inspired styles and or names such as Kulmbacher, Erlanger etc.). That is something which I find to be interesting.

In Schwackhöfer's book he references the brewing by Schlitz of a 13% "Lager" beer (which happened to be all malt), a 12% adjunct beer and a 14% Export. I would imagine that this would be a fairly common template for an American brewery at the time, a "lager beer" brand around 13% similar to a Vienna lager (though more attenuated through the use of infusion mashing and use of adjuncts), a 12% or so paler or paler adjunct lager brand (called Bohemian or Extra pale), and possibly an Export lager with a slightly higher gravity than the "lager beer" though still in a similar vein to it, then possibly a Münchener, Bavarian, Kulmbacher etc., which was possibly all malt and likely higher gravity than the lager beer brand of the same brewery to help emphasise the malt and give it an old world feel.

There might also be a slightly difference in gravity and hopping rate inbetween a brewery's keg beer and bottled beer, with the bottled beer being slightly higher gravity (higher alcohol potential), more attenuated (higher alcohol) and more hopped (preservative) for keeping purposes.

 

And there is the below discussion from the article entitled The Evolution of North American Beer by Kihm Winship:

“In 1899, in testimony before a Senate committee investigating adulteration of food products, a New York City brewmaster testified that he used only malt in 75 percent of his beers, but that he made another beer with the addition of corn grits. …

Later he testified that all-malt beer was a superior product but the chill haze (i.e., enzymatic proteins in solution that appear as a haze or cloud when the beer is chilled) convinced some consumers otherwise. "The ordinary beer drinker or any person not conversant with the reason of that cloudiness may reject the beer for the reason that it does not look right; it does not appeal to the eye." The addition of corn to the mash provided more starch for the excess enzymes from the malt to work on and thus decreased the amount of proteins in the finished beer, solving the chill haze problem cheaply and effectively.”

Cheers!

 

That's why I specified "in the 2000s" rather than the 90s

 

It's just semantics, but I'd answer LarryV's question with, "Yes, but..." instead of "No." The things LarryV mentions most certainly are "adjuncts" as the term is generally accepted in the English language. Brewers tend to apply the term much more narrowly in the way that MNAle describes. Brewers, as they use the word, really mean "malt adjuncts" (apparently the original term before it was misleadingly shortened) or, perhaps better yet, "fermentable adjuncts." I think it would behoove the industry to employ the more accurate terminology in order to avoid just this type of confusion. If anybody is misusing the term "adjuncts," I'd say it's brewers and those who defer to them (to the extent they exclude "flavorings" from their lazily limited definition), not the OP.