What was your gateway craft beer?

60 Minute

 

Tuborg and Carlsberg were both using adjuncts in their beer until the turn of the millenium. So the recipe must have differed in some other way. Perhaps the percentage of adjuncts was greater, the beer a bit more attenuated and the hopping reduced somewhat. That would be my guess at least.

 

in honor of how many times i seen this ? I put mine in my bio, if anyone really cares, and I doubt anyone would. every one's journey is different.

 

Interesting - I guess I (like most Americans) assumed any Continental European beer of the era was all-malt.

Early ads for Tuborg (complete with a Owades photo, IDing him as the "Assistant to the President") claim that they used US-grown two-rowed barley malt "...the same variety used exclusively in Europe. Only one other US brewer uses as much 2-rowed malt" (Referring most likely to Anheuser-Busch) and all imported hops, water similar to the Danish brewery's and a "pedigree strain" of yeast (oddly, they don't claim it is Carlsberg's yeast).

Finally, they note they achieved "...authentic European character...but have brewed it to American tastes and for American life-styles..."
- wording which usually suggested adjunct usage vs. all-malt recipe. So, yeah, you're likely correct with the supposition:

 

Denmark has been brewing with adjuncts for quite some time. I posted this image in another thread;



Still today if you look at the ingredients list of plenty of non-Carlsberg Danish beer brands they will list "råfrugt" (from the German word rohfrucht, i.e adjunct). The official reason that Carlsberg gave for ditching adjuncts was that they wanted to eliminate the possiblity of GMO corn being used since that's been a big controversy in Europe. Even so, more regional Danish breweries haven't followed suit for now at least.

Here's a 1960 article from the Journal of Brewing comparing Danish and German brewing where on page 495 it reads:

"Denmark
Malt adjuncts and soluble chill-proofing agents are allowed and artificial carbonation is practised. Maize was the usual adjunct, up to 30% being used, and tannic acid and enzyme treatments were employed in the lager tank and at bottling."

So it's possible of course that the percentage of adjuncts didn't differ, but it sounds like there was a range to it, so that perhaps certain brands used less than a typical American brand at the time, and perhaps Tuborg was one of those brands. But that remains speculation.

 

It appears that Carlsberg brewed a number of different recipes for their beers branded "Carlsberg" and "Tuborg", depending on the market. M. Jackson's first US edition of The World Guide to Beer [1977] says of the United Breweries' beers:

...which may explain only why I thought the imported versions were all-malt (though I don't recall any US ads for the either beer specifically making the claim). Previous to the Carling licensing deal of the early 1970s, the US also got imported Tuborg (in NYC area, it was distributed by Liebmann Breweries, brewers of Rheingold - a bit of trivia, but one I always found interesting).

 

I didn't go into too much detail when this thread was first posted, so may as well give it another shot since its been resurrected. The OP asked:

I'll have to answer that from a non-craft beer point of view, being that I came of drinking age before craft beers had really taken off (except in certain localities). But from what I do remember, I always knew that some beers were not created equal, even back in the 1970s. That's mostly because I'd go shopping with my dad to be the 'muscle' when we threw parties, and I saw so many beers that we never bought- dark, bock, German, English, etc. Naturally I wanted to explore some of that 'uncharted territory' and would try to nudge him in that direction, but he never bit- too heavy, too expensive, guests wouldn't drink it, yada yada...

So, yeah, it was in my head that as soon as I was able to buy beer for myself it wasn't going to be my dad's "old man beer" . And I still remember, at the age of 17, the first beer I ever got in a bar was a Heineken Dark. The first sip was definitely a 'whoa' moment- "those guys don't know what they're missing!" It became a regular thing for me immediately.

My first craft beer was different- New Amsterdam a few years later- but I think that first Heineken Dark answers the spirit of the question better.

 

I'd say the trifecta of Troegs/Victory/Weyerbacher in the late 90s in the Hampton Roads are

 

March 2008. Tampa Area. Citrus Park Publix. 60 Minute IPA 6 pack. So good that it made me look up other craft beers which led me to Oldsmar Tap House where I discovered Lagunitas & The Chronic. Game. Over.

 

Rauchbier Spezial was mine. I was lucky enough to find this in Bamberg this past summer.

 

I didn't drink anything but Macro beers until Spring of 2017 I went to the NE for a bachelor party on the mountains. Ending up staying in Burlington and eating at Prohibition Pig on the way up and that was my first introduction to Heady Topper, and the others up there. The rest is history...

 

Honestly like with anything I tend to think "if i'm gonna drink x i'm gonna drink good x" So pretty much from the get go I started with craft beer. Probably stuff like goose island, sam adams, or new belgium because they tended to be about a $1-2 cheaper than everything else. Then I found out three floyds was down the street and the rest was history

 

I would have to say the beer that converted me to craft was Tropicalia from Creature Comforts. I drank some Sweetwater in the mid to late 90s(I thought it was great to pair Sweetwater Blue with the blueberry weed I was smoking at the time) along with a few imports here and there but I usually stuck with Coors. That wide mouth can was as gamechanger for throwing them down.
I remember a customer giving me a SNPA around that time and taking a few sips before throwing the rest away. I was anti IPA until a few years ago when a buddy showed up with a cooler full of Jai Alai and Tropicalia on an annual fishing trip. Standing around a bonfire downing those turned a page for me. I wasn't positive but I'm pretty sure they caused one leg to become shorter than the other as I stumbled my way back to the bunkhouse. I have been hooked since then.

 

Yeah, "Tubie Dark" wasn't great... nothing like the stouts, porters & dark lagers I've had over the 35 years since I've been out of college... but thinking back, it definitely opened up my mind to, and got me curious about, other styles of beer, darker ones in particular. So it stands as one small but significant pinnacle in my own beer-advocate history.

 

Had Founders Breakfast Stout in Stout NYC on 33rd in Manhattan before a NY Rangers game at MSG.. I am forever changed since that fateful day

 

Bell's Two Hearted. Game changer.

 

I was a Budweiser/Heineken/Guinness drinker in my teens and early twenties. Shifted to whiskey/bourbons. My brother brought a Goose Island Coffee to Christmas perhaps 15-20 years ago and that was the first time I had a solid craft beer. Stayed with whiskeys/bourbons, but shifted back to beer a few years ago, and I'm 650 beers into my journey (still have to enter 250 beers here).

 

Sierra Nevada "Pale Ale".... Lagunitas "IPA'

 

For me it was Sierra Nevada Pale ale. It was on tap at a bar I went to regularly. It was also a high ABV for that time (most bars just had Bud, Coors Light and another macro as their tap list), so I tried it. It was different from anything I had ever had. It had flavor and good flavor at that. I didn't know what was happening. It soon became my regular beer at that bar and it's been a regular beer for me since the 90s.

 

This was my story as well. What particularly locked it in was honeymooning in Nova Scotia, Prince Edwards Island and New Brunswick. The beers there were eye openingly good. I don't know if they're still brewed (I could never find them in specialty bottle shops which dealt with wines and imported beer in the 70s) but Keith's and Sail were two names that stuck, accurately or otherwise, in my mind as particularly good.

Regarding craft beer per se, I had given up drinking at the very start of the movement but Pete's Wicked Ale, Arrogant Bastard and Hennepin were my early faves when beer consumption returned.