Adjuncts acceptable now?

Personally, I try not to wince when someone says “adjunct stout,” but I think that the use of the word adjuncts to describe these ingredients has spread so pervasively in this space partially because there isn't a different word that works really well conversationally. Everything else is either vague or verbiage or unestablished. It's also probably too late to do anything about it within the current context.

Time will tell, but we might be living through a shift in meaning like how ale formerly meant an unhopped beverage. Either that or people will continue to correct other people on this forum for years and years. Or perhaps the longevity of “adjunct stouts” (there, I said it) will be nothing compared to AALs, and this conversation will all go away.

 

The writer Jeff Alworth was on an “Experimental Brewing” podcast recently. He talked of beer culture in different countries. One the
Ink that made me listen more closely was when he talked of adjuncts in Belgium. I knew they used candi sugars. Jeff Alworth started that he often saw cereal cookers in Belgium to do the cereal mash on corn.

 

I've seen Belgian beers with maize in the ingredients list but I don't remember which beers.

 

Same here. He used Rodenbach as an example of a brewery with a cereal cooker.

 

Well, I'll do my best!

 

I'm curious. Platform in Cleveland lists things like chocolate, sweet potatoes, Belgian candy, nutmeg, clove, cinnamon and more as adjuncts on their can. So would these be considered adjuncts due to the sugar/fermentation factor or is the term being misused here?

Genuinely curious. I'm still new to the brewing process.

 

Ouch. I guess I'm guilty of the anti hype movement from the early BA days.

But at the same time, shitty sweet corn flavor is still shitty sweet corn swetness. So in some regards, adjunts of old got their bad reputation based on being put into shitty situations.

I keg "hop" many homebrews and bought kegs, so in some regards, I am adding adjuncts to add flavor to already finished beer. I just never saw the coffee and cinnamon movement as being the same as the corn and rice movement. Which always seemd to cheapen the flavor

Given, I have used corn and rice in homebrews on cream ales to get a cleaner drier finish, which has worked. Those has never tasted aritically sweet like Bud light though. So I think we are still a few years away from a true craft vs. macro difference

 

Not to argue semantics, natural occuring sugars in the fruit in any beer can be eaten by yeasts amd seems like it classifies them as adjuncts

 

they've done it for decades

 

17% of the grist is maize. Not a bad beer for an adjunct brew

I wonder how different it would taste with 100% malt

 

If we use the word "adjunct" for this then what do we call ingredients which specifically need the enzymes from the malt to break down their starch into fermentable sugars?

 

For the reason of the reinheits i guess i feel amything other than water, grains, yeast and hops are "additives" because i drink mostly german imports. I suppose i need to change my train of thought or educate further.

 

but the Reinheitsgebot is little more than a century old except for a part of Bavaria.Before that German (or Holy Roman Empire) brewing was more like Belgian

 

We have beer recipes on clay tablets dating back thousands of years listing the use of dates, grapes, honey and dried fruits being used in the making of beer as well as flowers, seeds and other indigenous spices. So to answer the OP adjuncts and flavorings have been used throughout the history of beer.

Some thoughts about word definitions, vernacular and jargon uses . . .

If a person walks into a lawyers office they are a client and their information is put into a file. If the same person walks into a doctor's office they are a patient and their information is put into a chart. If the same person walks into Home Depot they are a customer and if they ask for a file or a chart will get something completely different.

If I'm talking to a brewer I respect his definition of adjuncts.

 

So the elephant in the room is whether adjuncts (corn rice whatever) are more spendy than straight barley..

 

No, it's that that particular point is not very relevant. The major reasons why industrial pale lagers are cheap are due to economy of scale (production as well as distribution), high gravity brewing and automation.The recipe is the way it is because that's what their customers like- making cost an issue is just a red herring.

 

And I literally had an adjunct professor standing in for a revered professor (out with an illness), where we were being taught the nature of language, persuasion, and precise public speaking. He added so much to the course material that we were already loving as a small class of about 15. It was a broader discussion. He got a full time job......

 

I'm totally guilty of using the term improperly, but language is, if anything, dynamic and constantly evolving. It's a beautiful thing

 

That is true enough but sometimes words with specific and useful meanings get corrupted by outsiders.
The term "malt adjunct" meant a substance which contained fermentable sugars which could only be released by the action of malt.This was entirely separate from substances like sugar which could be used alongside malt as an added ingredient. The amount of adjunct had to be regulated as malt can only convert a proportion of its own weight.At the same time this process reduced the haze component of the malt.
Now,if you use adjunct to mean simply fermentable material,what word do you use when you mean ingredients which need the malt to extract the fermentables?