Bygone beers

And in what year was Pabst producing only 10% of their product line being all-malt lager beers?

Cheers!

 

And I personally believe that to be the case. Brewing beers to best suite their customers changing preferences is another indicator of "quality control" IMO.

Cheers!

 

In the absence of such metrics we are left to consider the written material that exists, for example there is Handbuch für den Amerikanischen Brauer und Mälzer, page 481, where Hantke quotes Max Delbrück, a German authority on brewing, who notes that

Wahl and Henius write on page 699 in their book about the American type of lager:

My takeaway is then that the Bohemian type lager as it was brewed in the US by the turn of the century (being introduced in the 1870s, so having existed for a couple of decades by then in the market) was by then brewed to be less bitter than the Bohemian lager, but still with a pronounced hop aroma and other features such as light color in common with the Bohemian lager.

 

I don't understand - how are you quoting Cochran from his Pabst history and yet don't know this?

Cochran, writing some 50 years after that era, notes in his forward:

The quote about the Pabst all-malt beers is in the chapter "BREWING BECOMES MORE SCIENTIFIC" and is referring to Pabst's newly hired (based on Anton Schwarz's recommendation) J. F. Theurer in 1884. Cochran also notes elsewhere that:

So, the period when Cochran estimated Pabst's all-malt beer was about 10% of their barrelage can be assumed to be roughly the last decade and a half of the 19th century.

Near the end of that period, Cochran broke down Pabst's barrelage by brand:

And elsewhere further noted that "Bavarian – “dark" - introduced in 1882" and "Doppel Braeu - All-malt Muenchner introduced in 1896”.

1897 was during the period when AB, Pabst and Schlitz were the top 3 brewers in the US, with the top position often changing year to year. Pabst that year topped AB's barrelage with 806.5k to AB's 757.3k. Pabst had previous reached the 1 Million barrel mark in '93 and '94.

 

Not a honey-based product (thus "Malt Mead"), likely similar to low and non-alcoholic "malt extracts", "tonics" and other malt beverages many brewers offered during the period leading up to Prohibition.

 

As I stated in my above post: "Below is an extract from the article "The Evolution of North American Beer". The part about Cochran was quoted in that article.

So, sometime between 1885 - 1900. OK.

Cheers!

 

Oh, OK. Wasn't sure due to the formatting, and quotations mark placement and the space between 'graph one and two. (It'd be nice if the "QUOTE" app in the BA top menu under "+" posted longer quotes without cutting them off at 7 or 8 lines with the "CLICK TO EXPAND" notice in blue).

 

In the Michigan I used to drink Drewery's, Goebel's Meister Brau, Carling's Black Lable, and many more I can't remember and in Wisconsin there was Big Walter. In Minnesota we had Pete's wicked Ale and James Page Beer.

 

Interesting mentions of "Light" on both Schaefer and Ballantine

 

You stated: "Seems like they would risk losing existing customers if they changed the recipe."

The 'evolution' of the beer is very slow (i.e., over decades) in very small change increments and is based upon feedback from customers doing taste testing. It is not like when Coca-Cola came out all of a sudden with New Coke.

Cheers!

 

That's not necessarily true. Outside of Bavaria and Baden-Wüertemberg the Reinheitsgebot didn't come into force until 1906. I've plenty of references to German brewers using unmalted grains (or even potatoes) before that. Rice was particularly popular and was the most used adjunct in North Germany in the 1890s.

 

Well, it depends on the brand. There are a number of well documented cases (and many more without a lot of publicly available info) in which a brewery changed the recipe of its flagship beer or, in other cases, replaced the flagship with a new beer. Sometimes successfully (at least, for the brewer's bottom line if not always a pleasing result to the beer geek) - like this example from Spoetzl in the period before their Bock beer became their flagship in the 1980s:

Interestingly, M.Jackson in his World Guide to Beer [1977 ed.] claimed that the "old" recipe “...a full-bodied and dark brew with a character all of its own" was still available locally as a draught-only product labeled "Premium". Of course, at the time Spoetzl was relatively small, 30k bbl. in 1976, #48 out of 52 US breweries.

A failed change, which helped bring down what was for nearly a century one of the top 5 US brewers, was P. Ballantine & Sons' mid-60s recipe change to what was by then their flagship beer, Ballantine Beer (the brewery's ales by then accounting for only around 25% of their total barrelage).

That is documented starting about 2/3's of the way down BALLANTINE IN QUOTES, starting with a New York Times July 2, 1969 quote through to a Joe Owades' comment to the BAA in 1986.

Some other examples of changes in recipes/flagships are Grain Belt and Reading Beer.

 

Yup.

I was responding to the comment that @GentleKnight1 made of “Am surprised! Always thought quality control was a forte for them, but it would seem that by design or "drift", it has changed through the years.” This was a reply to you in post #40 about Budweiser.

Cheers!

Cheers!

 

In the American Handy-Book of the Brewing, Malting, and Auxiliary Trades by Wahl & Henius (1902) (with emphasis in bold by me):

“It was Anton Schwarz who first advised the employment of rice and subsequently of Indian corn, which is so abundant in this country. The stubborn perseverance with which he sought to convert conservative brewers to his ideas and finally succeed in doing and, last, not least, the discovery of suitable methods to scientifically apply them, entitles him to be called the founder of raw cereal brewing in the United States.”

Anton Schwarz developed the method of cereal mashing (American double mash).

Cheers!

 

Here's evidence of brewing with rice in Germany:

https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2007/07/rice-beer.html
https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2014/06/yet-more-german-rice-beer.html

 

I expect we would have met this weekend in Nashville.

Gutted that the NHC was cancelled. At least there's an online version.