Pre-Prohibition Lagers

Just like Pilsner Urquell, nothing has changed.

 

Last summer they also announced the revived brewing of it at A.C. Coors (their small brewery within a brewery in Golden) on their main website, including this bit of nonsense:

https://www.millercoors.com/node/1406

Colorado would enact State Prohibition in 1916 and, nationally, Wilson had used the Lever Act to prohibition all brewing after Dec. 1, 1918 in order to save food. Before that Wilson had made 2.75% to the maximum alcohol content in beer as of Jan. 1, 1918. So, even if Coors continued to brew after Colorado prohibition (contrary to the announcement, below left), the "last few batches" wouldn't have been a 5.5% abv beer.

 

I seem to recall enjoying Batch 19 the one time I had it.

 

How does all of this translate to Bud Light's recipe? I'm specifically thinking about this clever commercial from the super bowl a year or two ago.



Where they mock Miller/Coors for using corn syrup but show a huge barrel of rice in the background at the very beginning. Is that flaked/whole rice or is it also broken down into a syrup? I'm pretty ignorant on this subject, but also very curious.

 

AB in the US still has cereal cookers in their breweries, and use them for the "milled rice" (husk and bran removed) they use in Budweiser, Bud Light and some other of their beers. AB used to claim to be the single largest purchaser of US rice (probably still is). Some source say so-called "Brewer's Rice" is broken grains, but AB has often claimed their rice isn't.
See my page RICE IN BUDWEISER for 100 years or so worth of AB anti-corn rants touting rice.

I've read that when they first started having Labatt brew Budweiser for the Canadian market (early '80s) a few of the Labatt breweries, with no cereal cookers, did use rice syrup. Now that both are ABInBev breweries, not sure if that's still the case.

 

Okay, so if that's the case, does the fact that they aren't using syrup translate to a better quality product? Bud Light is just awful, but on paper, will you get a better product using whole rice instead of corn syrup assuming you are using both for the same purpose?

 

Better is such a subjective term here. To large measure a factor is: what is the brewer trying to accomplish with a given ingredient/process?

Rice in brewing can come in a number of forms:

· Rice Syrup (I am only familiar with Rice Syrup Solids)

· Flaked Rice

· “Milled Rice” which requires the cereal cooking process

· Others?

I personally only have experience in brewing with Flaked Rice (to brew a Classic American Pilsner beer).

Generally speaking what rice ‘adds’ to the resulting beer is very little (none?) flavor but provides a qualities of:

· Lightening of the color of the beer

· Crispness

· Dryness

· Lighter bodied

All of the above are often what is wanted in an AAL beer.

Let’s further discuss Rice Syrup Solids:

“Product details

Adds gravity without impacting color or flavor. Lightens body and dries the finish. Use up to 15% for American or Japanese-style light lagers.”

https://www.northernbrewer.com/products/rice-syrup-solids-1-lb

I would suggest that brewing with “milled rice” and conducting the necessary cereal cook would provide exactly the same ‘effects’ as detailed above for Rice Syrup Solids. A brewery may choose one format over another based upon considerations beyond how it impacts the resulting beer (e.g., business marketing reasons, cost impacts, production issues,…).

Cheers!

 

You may already be aware of this but AB does brew beer using corn syrup as well. For example Busch, Busch Ice, and Busch Light are brewed using corn syrup.

Cheers!

 

Did some more digging into this since sources say that "Brewer's Rice" is broken grains and yet AB, while sometimes saying they use Brewer's Rice, also has advertised how expensive/high quality their rice is, some secondary sources have called it "sushi-grade", etc.

In that infamous Bloomberg Businessweek story, The Plot to Destroy Amercia's Beer (about InBev's takeover of AB) an AB employee is quoted:

Led me back to a post by AB's Peter-Wolfe. (Previously worked in their raw material lab and currently listed as an "innovative brewer" at AB - Bend, OR - 10 Barrel.) Maybe all that most people will ever need to know about the rice in Budweiser.

 

That ad was brilliant from an effective marketing perspective, but within the beer industry was seen as an incredibly underhanded, dishonest, and cut-throat. It successfully tapped into an anti-corn undercurrent in society today (e.g. HFCS, GMO concerns, etc.), but it required exploiting public ignorance with careful deceitful suggestions and omissions. For example, the average person sees that big vat of corn syrup and associates it with all the bad things they hear about high fructose corn syrup, even though the products are very different and the latter is never used in Miller/Coors products. Beer adjuncts get fermented out the end product so it doesn't really matter what adjunct is used, but again the average consumer doesn't know that. Furthermore, as Jack pointed out AB makes plenty of beers with corn syrup themselves, which they conveniently don't mention.

 

Funny thing is, while MC's FMB's and flavored beers (like Leinenkugel's shandies) typically used sucrose as the sweetening agent (not as an adjunct), many AB products DO use HFCS - like their "Best Damn" hard sodas and even the Bud Light Chelada which has the footnote on AB's TAP INTO YOUR BEER:

Other AB FMBs and flavored beers do list "Cane Sugar" as their sweetener.

I'm not so sure that there are a lot of people in the industry that'd agree with that... (Ignoring those beer drinkers who can taste "the corn in Budweiser", etc.) But, apparently Coors admitted that drinkers could tell the difference when they dropped the corn starch from Coors Original and went back to only rice adjunct in the mid-1990s.

 

Fair enough...I could have said that differently/better, but in my defense the subtle taste effects of corn vs rice adjuncts was not the intended target of that Bud Light commercial.


If society believes corn = bad, and commercial shows Miller = corn, then society will believe Miller = bad.

 

Randy, there is zero doubt in my mind this was the intent of AB’s Bud Light advertising strategy. But apparently is didn’t work so well in terms of boosting the sales of Bud Light; below is something I posted in a past thread:

Results of AB spending millions of dollars for Super Bowl advertising:

“America’s top-selling beer was off 8.8 percent in the four-week period since the Super Bowl, deteriorating significantly from its previous sales trend and plunging the brand farther into the red for 2019, according to Nielsen all-outlet and convenience data through March 2.

The results offer the first comprehensive look at Bud Light’s performance since it spent millions airing a series of TV spots taking aim at Miller Lite and Coors Light for using corn syrup as an ingredient.

And instead of winning over drinkers with its promises of “transparency,” the opposite appears to be happening: Since the new campaign launched, Bud Light sales volume is off 9.2 percent, compared to down 6.7 percent in the 12-weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. The brand’s share of total beer also worsened, down 1.2 points of share versus down 1.1"

Cheers!

 

Well, give 'em break - AB's been working on that for over a century :

--- 1901 Pure Food - Congressional Hearings

 

@JackHorzempa Do you know how Coors Light or Miller Lite sales did in the same period? I understand light beer sales have been slowly dropping for many years. If Bud Light dropped more than competitors then clearly it was a bad strategy. If Bud Light dropped less than their competitors that can still be a "win" for them.

 

No, I don't have that information.

Cheers!

 

The MillerCoors blog entitled Bud Light sales plummet post #corntroversy with that same Bud Light sales info noted:

 

Well then, it appears Bud Light's marketing strategy was... silly, silly!

 

And the commercials shown at the Super Bowl cost millions of dollars to broadcast. Needless to say but they broadcasted these sorts of commercials many times after the Super Bowl. Cheaper then per time slot but they ran them so many times (it seems to me) that the aggregate cost must have been high as well.

I wonder if anybody(s) in the AB Marketing & Sales department lost their job over this?

Cheers!