cacao nibs… Vanilla beans, malted barley, oats, wheat are also added and lactose
Huh, I would have guessed a “Cadbury Egg flavored beer” just would have meant “lots and lots of corn syrup and a bit of cheap cocoa.” That actually sounds drinkable (and so, so much better than the eggs).
It’s so weird that the two trends in beer right now are that and super-hoppy IPAs. (I have to laugh at some of the smaller brewery “variety packs” I see at Costco, where they mix up the IPAs with… some hopped-up pale ales. More and more breweries seem to be doing that.) I think I’ve gotten to the point where regular beer tastes like carbonated water to me, as it’s neither super-hoppy nor super-sweet.
I mean, who gives a heck? There are a ton of small breweries (of which Goose Island isn’t) trying to do something different. Some are good, some aren’t. I’m not going to begrudge people having options.
I got back into multimedia and web development, as beer brewing is 99% cleaning and scrubbing. The only way to make great beer is to keep your tanks, your hoses, your equipment spotless.
Being a brewer may pay well, but it’s backbreaking work.
the flavor/ingredient combos are essentially endless at this point. had my first beer with truffle in it this past week (3 Sons Brewing). any rich beer like this Cadbury egg beer should be 10%+ because you can’t drink much, equivalent to eating fudge. Same with smoothie sours as it’s drinking a fruit shake.
In general I’m ok with the trends as one can seek out their preferences in this golden age of choice. foeders, wild ales and crispy bois are easily found in most major cities now while still being able to enjoy the kettle sour/hazy ipa/pastry stouts.
There’s a brewery here in San Diego that does a PB stout. They also do one with horchata.
I like both, but only once in a while. I pretty much only keep pale ale on hand at home for myself. My wife also likes if we have some Modelo on hand for taco night. It’s good super duper icy cold.
The last time I bought some stout was the one below. It’s very dry and average alcohol. Came in a mixed case I had delivered to my house. I like it, but I doubt I’ll buy more, especially with the weather warming up.
And yet not even all old German styles abide by it. Both Gose and Hefeweizen were given exceptions. The Reinheitsgebot was as much about excluding from the market beers from Belgium, other parts of Germany, and Britain that did not traditionally use hops or included other ingredients as anything else. And the “anything else” was mostly about controlling grain prices to keep bread affordable.
We call it a purity law, but it was very much not about that. It wasn’t rooted in a definition of beer that even the Bavarians were abiding by at the time (or since).
A lot of these things are good for one small glass. They’re basically novelties, almost no one drinks more than one and they have few repeat customers. It’s why they rotate around a baseline. Most pastry stouts and other gimmick beers are a fairly routine base beer. It just get’s iterated on a quarterly schedule. People get excited about the new flashy thing, buy it all up. And it’s gone immediately. When it comes back it’s a different beer, cause few people are looking for more.
Very occasionally one hits well enough to become a regular occurrence. Many of those a big brand team ups like this, driven by brand recognition.
Larger breweries, like Goose Island (owned by AB/Inbev), are hot to get in on the trend. And Goose has a history there with their barrel aged Bourbon County stout. Problem is big companies tend to produce too much, keep them around too long, or bring the same ones back too often and too many times.
Goose’s sales reps and distributors are still trying to shift peppermint Bourbon County brewed six years ago. They have to restrict access to the regular version to shift the flavored ones (buy three cases of these and I can get you more than one regular…).
Barrel aged beers are losing steam these days, so many are shifting to novelty pastry stouts, sours and rotating IPAs.
Actually no. Aggressively hopped and biter IPAs went out of style nearly a decade back. The trend for north east/hazy ipas has actually pushed both IBU counts and ABV down. The biggest grower in the craft beer business is sessionable, moderately hopped “juicy” IPAs. Essentially better filtered (and thus more stable), lower ABV versions of the NEIPAs that the nards are all into.
They still use a shit ton of hops in the brewing. But add them later in the process, often with a lot of dry hopping going on. That leaves them significantly less “hoppy” in the traditional sense (as well as in terms of lab testing).
Time was a typical IPA in the US was at least 60 IBU and 8-9% abv. These days they tend to run 20-40 IBU and abvs range from about 6.5% to just under 8.
You used to be able to sell these things just based on having the highest ABV and IBU count on the menu. A 140 IBU beer at 10% was a guaranteed money maker. These day’s it can be actively difficult to move anything that’s above 8% and 75 IBU outside of certain markets. Those certain markets seem to mostly be in the Midwest.
In the US it does not. Unless you work for like Budweiser or a Union brewery. Ongoing scandal in the craft business over exploitive labor practices. My friend works a canning line for a big contract brewer. Makes more than most independent brewers and brew assistants.
One of the things about barley is that only its malt has the enzymes needed to convert starch into maltose during mashing. And it is very true that the Reinheitsgebot was about keeping wheat and rye out of beer, since there was a real risk of farmers selling to brewers and not bakers in the 16th century. The elector of Bavaria was not all that interested in restricting imports at the time*, but there were reports of poisoning due to unscrupulous brewers. Thus most other helper additives were forbidden.
The edict from 1516 is interesting, as many, many myths have arisen around it. Many are as false as Gambrinus, but some are surprisingly true.
I did have the German market in mind, where unions are strong. My old job. Now, opening a small craft brewery is going to be more risky, but currently the market does ensure good profits. I might have made much more had I gotten my Braumeister degree, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was more in love with multimedia, and this newfangled thing called HTML.
*Most beer consumed by the middle class in Munich, Augsburg and other Bavarian cities was imported from Einbeck until the 18th century. Bockbier was originally a term for the good stuff out of Einbeck. But really, beer was a niche drink in Bavaria until the Bavarian electors gave up on trying to establish vineyards in and around Munich, and the city moved to beer brewing in the 18th century.
Other malts do as well, though in deferring amounts. The key thing there is malting, not barley. All grains (and basically all seeds) have such enzymes, otherwise they could not unlock the stored starch to sprout and grow. It’s that sprouting during the malting process that provides the enzymes.
Other grains are seldom malted. And while pretty available these days, they’re more commonly used in distilling. So in most cases, both traditionally and in modern practice malted barley is used to fuel conversion during brewing. It isn’t strictly necessary, and barley-less mashes have become a bit of a runner in US craft.
That doesn’t really bear on whether other grains should be used in brewing though.
Like I said even the Germans didn’t really follow that particular rule or frame work. Not before, not during and not after.
but currently the market does ensure good profits
I hear it’s going very well in Europe.
But here in the US beer sales are falling over all. And while craft remains a growth market competition is a bit insane. There’s just so many breweries operating, every little town seems to have 6. Few of them seem to make beer that’s worth while, or has much market beyond the hyper local. The bulk of them are basically competing in the restaurant market via a tasting room or brew pub model.
There are a lot of breweries, including major ones, going under the last few years. And a whole hell of a lot of consolidation going down.
I think the low pay in the industry is partly to blame. Brew staff do not stick around. They leave to start their own breweries, or to jump to a place that they can own a piece of. Nearly every brewery I’ve worked with below 50 state scale has lost their core brew staff five times over.
