When is a ‘beer flaw’...not a flaw?

You catch my drift.

 

In a Forbes article on Yuengling there's a brief excerpt which explains the creation of Lager with a business trip to Boston by Dick Yuengling where he noticed the prevalence of Boston Lager. But without a quote or a source it's impossible to know where that inference/information came from of course. I thought it was interesting however.

 

From the article that Patrik (@Crusader) linked:

“Within a few years Dick had updated the packaging, installed new equipment and upgraded his network of distributors, focusing on the nearby Philadelphia market. He found a foothold with Yuengling Black & Tan, a cross between a porter and a lighter, pilsner-style brew. Then another product took off: Yuengling Lager, which he introduced in 1987….”

That is exactly how I remember Yuengling ‘rolling out’ in the Philly area during the 80’s. The first Yuengling beer I remember drinking (and I drank a fair bit of it) was Yuengling Black & Tan. That beer was very popular and sold everywhere I went for a few years (a 5 year duration?). And then Black & Tan was no longer the ‘it’ Yuengling beer. Likely sometime in the early 1990s (e.g., 1990 itself?) the new ‘it’ beer from Yuengling was Yuengling Lager and if you ordered it from a bartender all you had to say was “Yo, gimme a lager!”.

"He had this brilliant idea to make a beer that has a little more color and flavor than the regular mass domestics--Bud, Miller and Coors--but sell his at the same price," says friend and competitor Jim Koch, the founder of Boston Beer, which makes Samuel Adams.”

I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the above paragraph. In my opinion the whole story that Yuengling Lager was a “revival” beer is just that – a marketing BS story.

Cheers!

 

I think the descriptor "apple" needs specified.

That last bit is interesting, but whenever I hear acetaldehyde I always think "Granny Smith Apples" or "sour/green apples".

Do you guys have any resources that describe how concentrations affect the sensory character?

 

At HomebrewCon 2016 I attended a seminar entitled “Beer Flavor – Sensory” that was presented by Amaey Mundkur of Aroxa Company.

During that presentation he mentioned that acetaldehyde amounts are critically affected by wort zinc level and yeast health.

You can purchase acetaldehyde capsules from Aroxa (15 mg capsules) for beer sensory training:

“acetaldehyde

15 mg per capsule

“Acetaldehyde, like emulsion paint or green apples”

Certified spirits flavour standard used to train professional beer tasters to recognize and scale the intensity of acetaldehyde character. Acetaldehyde is produced by yeast during fermentation. It imparts an apple-like flavour to cider, perceived as somewhat like emulsion paint as the concentration is increased. High levels can be indicative of process problems.

Food grade | free from sensory impurities | extensively tested | safe to smell and taste.”

https://www.aroxa.com/spirits/flavours/acetaldehyde/

As can be read above, as the amount of acetaldehyde is increased it will be perceived as “like emulsion paint”.

Cheers!

 

Well, it did turn out to be a success, but Coors beat him to the "brilliant idea" part by a few years with their Killian's Red .

 

Michael, another beer I think is worthy of discussion here is Shiner Bock. FWIW, Shiner Bock tastes similar to Yuengling Traditional Lager for my palate.

Below are some extracts from Wikipedia:

“Shiner Bock – Spoetzl's flagship beer.[5] Bock has been brewed since 1913, almost as long as the Spoetzl Brewery has been in business. However, it wasn't until a few decades ago that Shiner began producing Bock year-round. Bock was considered a Lenten beer, and therefore was only made around that season. Today 73% of the beer made at the Spoetzl Brewery is bock beer.”

And:

“Sales growth

In the 1970s and 1980s, the brewery's Shiner Premium Beer and Shiner Bock accounted for less than one percent of the Texas beer market. In 1983, Spoetzl produced 60,000 barrels of beer; in 1990, only 36,000. Sales improved after Carlos Alvarez of San Antonio[6] acquired the brewery in 1989. Production grew to 100,000 barrels in 1994, and over the next ten years, production nearly tripled. The company now has 120 employees.[6]

As of 2017, it is the fifth-largest craft brewery and tenth-largest overall brewery in the United States.[5]"



I think there are some interesting parallels between Yuengling Brewing Co. (Yuengling Lager) and Spoetzl Brewing Co, (Shiner Bock).

· They both have flagship beers that generate by large margin the majority of their revenue that are American Amber Adjunct Lagers (i.e., Yuengling Lager, Shiner Bock).

· They were both very small breweries but starting in the 1990’s they both became progressively larger companies to large measure due to the popularity of their AAAL beers.

Cheers!

@Crusader

 

Yeah, I always felt that Boston Lager (note esp. the "Lager" part of the name - which, on most US beer labels at the time meant nohting more than a typical AAL) along with Anchor Steam and New Amsterdam Amber Beer (same note as above, for "Amber") had a big influence on the color (and name?) of what those early labels and brewery' promo materials even called Yuengling Traditional Amber Lager.

By '86, New Amsterdam's brewer, Olde New York Brewing Co., was the largest "microbrewery" in the country at 13,000 bbl. (8.5k in NYC, the remainder at F X Matt) - just about twice as much as #2, Sierra Nevada. NAAB was one of the 3 "consumer poll" winners of the GABF in '84 (the year before SABL win).

Along with SABL being brewed in Pittsburgh Brewing Co., - just the other side of the state from Yuengling - Penn Pilsner and Olde Heurich Amber were also being contract-brewed there (Koch even accused them of going to PBC and asking for a clone of SABL). .Philadelphia's Dock Street Amber was a GABF '86 winner.

It's as if the brewing industry had decided that a slightly darker, slightly hoppier beer would best be accepted by a small segment the US beer drinking population. (I always figured the same for Shiner's very lightly colored Bock EDIT - I see Jack brought Shiner Bock up while I was replying...and took some time out to check those barrelage figures for ONYBC).

Yeah, that's another one - although (like Dock Street) labeled an "ale" - briefly, in Coors' Kilian's case.

 

No, I had the standard spike, that is what I got from my flavor memory.

 

Yeah, and from what I remember Killian's was priced more competitively than Sam Adams or New Amsterdam, which seems to be the market Yuengling was targeting. This would have been mid 80s.

 

Yeah I think the upstarts figured out a market segment where they could distinguish themselves from the big breweries, and the older, small and struggling breweries either learned from the these small upstarts or figured out the same thing for themselves. Of course the larger question of how a smaller brewery can compete against bigger competitors is not entirely new.

Letters on brewing. v.1 1900-02

 

Yeah, Killians (by the late 80s, in NJ at least) was priced sort of straddling the "superpremium" (Michelob) and "macro import" (Heineken, Molson) segments ($12-15/cs).

New Amsterdam and SABL were closer $5-6 sixpack (buck a bottle "microbrews") so around $20/cs.

Other entries in the "amber beer" of the 80s were Matt's annual Christmas beer (very similar to NAAB) and Saranac 1888, along with "microbrews" like Catamount Amber, Newman's Albany Amber (bottled version from Matt), Vienna Style Lager (Huber contract), and, among the earliest, 1981's Hudepohl's Christian Moerlein - described in one industry pub as being "dark amber in hue".

 

Recent discovery, Toppling Goliath "Dorothy's New World Lager"

I love this beer. They classify it as a California Common, crack the can and it's as if you've had two handfuls of boiling hot gelatinized corn shoved in your face with a 1725 RPM fan behind it constantly force smelling it into your drying mucus membranes.

This beers dominant aroma and flavor is DMS and they made it good.

Plus every time Ive had this beer ive had great erotic dreams that night.. wait what?