On the subject of cheap beer, does anyone remember the brand Buckhorn, affectionately known as Bucksnort to me and people I knew who drank a lot of it. It was only 2.50 a case of 24 in 1980, cheaper than pop.

We all graduated college and had decent jobs. We weren’t trying to act working class, we just didn’t have a lot of money, even with steady jobs.

If that’s what you want, well, you’ve got it. But neither are products of character or distinction. Both are products whose main virtue is consistent blandness.

Which, frankly, I concede to Maureen Ogle had more to do with a general American preference for blandness rather than evil corporate conspiracy.

But there is an amazing revival of taste in the US. You can now rather easily buy lettuce other than Iceberg, apples other than Red Delicious, cheese other than Velveeta. And beer other than pale lagers like Bud.

And I, for one, rejoice.

I have doubts that the recipe is the same or that the alcohol content is the same as in U.S. Budweiser. Maybe one of the knowledgeable people posting here could clarify that.

Guinness, for example, makes a specific beer for the French market, and probably others, so the Guinness you drink in Ireland does not taste the same as in France.

I would be surprised if Anheuser didn’t do the same.

There is nothing authentic or traditional about sterile filtering or pasteurizing.

Untrue. Pasteurisation dates from the nineteenth century. People have been pasteurising beer for a long time.

Budweiser is highly looked down upon because it uses rice to cheapen the beer up (I purchase these ingredients. As a raw material, rice is less expensive than malted barley)

No it doesn’t. See Maureen Ogle’s book on the “adjunct myth”. I have no idea why you’re comparing raw rice to malted barley; you have to process rice before it can be used in brewing. Or for that matter why you think your costs are going to be particularly similar to those of Budweiser, which owns its own maltings.

I am apparently wrong on tannin; Budweiser does have tannin in it but it doesn’t come from the beech chips.

Your understanding of brewing in “Ye Olden Days of Bavaria” is as flawed as your article. Beer was the drink of Kings, and while it might have spoiled quickly, it didn’t need to last, it was meant to be drunken early on. However plenty of beers were cellared with great success, case in point, OCTOBERFEST you twit.

I think everyone else has agreed that beer is in fact an industrial product and is meant to be consistent. It isn’t wine. Beer really isn’t the drink of Kings outside Scandinavia.

the reason that Budvar wins in every market other than the US is because everyone else in the world recognises that it is a better product, made with the finest malts and hops that money can buy.

Simply not true as a claim about the relative sales of A-B and Budvar beers. It seems to me that you’ve made at least as many mistakes as I have.

As white collar Tech worker, I would never
drink bud, or let my friends see a bud in my
fridge.

Having Bud Beer around when fully employed and
college is a few years in the past is a statement
that you have not progressed in life and you are
still a man-child. It may also say that you only intermittenly employed, and you maybe borderline
alcoholic.
I agree it is pure snobbery, but snobbery is the fungible currency of socio economic status.

Admiral_Ritt

First point:

No sir it has not. A great many brewers in Britain have been producing beer for far longer than Budweiser. Your assertation that the recipe has not changed is wrong. It most certainly has as has the way it has been brewed. There is nothing authentic or traditional about sterile filtering or pasteurizing.

To qualify as a CAMRA beer, it would first have to be an ale. Then it would have to be unfiltered. Wrong.

Second:
You are correct that Budweiser is not full of chemicals, unlike Miller. It does not comply with the Reinheitsgebot because it contains an un-malted product. Has nothing to do with Barley. Get your facts straight before you print them please.

There is absolutely no tannin contributed by the chips. If there were, the person that brewed it would be fired. The chips are there as a yeast bed in the fermentation tanks to allow the reuptake of diacetyl and other “off-flavors”

Lagers are not by definition filtered. Again, get the facts straight before you print.

Point 3:
Budweiser is highly looked down upon because it uses rice to cheapen the beer up (I purchase these ingredients. As a raw material, rice is less expensive than malted barley) as well as 6-row malt, a variety that is considered by brewers to be of a lower quality due to high tannin content. It is needed though becuase without the 6 row, they could never convert the 30% rice that they use.

They no longer use Saaz hops either.

Point 4:
We can disagree. I think it tastes like tannic water. Whatever.

Point 5:
Wow, that definitely means it’s a good product.

Point 6:
Craft brewers sir are the very essence of brewing history. We are what Bud, Ballantines, Miller, and Coors put out of business.

Your understanding of brewing in “Ye Olden Days of Bavaria” is as flawed as your article. Beer was the drink of Kings, and while it might have spoiled quickly, it didn’t need to last, it was meant to be drunken early on. However plenty of beers were cellared with great success, case in point, OCTOBERFEST you twit.

Beer is an industrial product in your mind, but not in mine or the people who drink my beer. It is such because of companies like AB.

Better and not better? No your talking logistics. I can say that OE 800 isn’t better than Westveleteren 12, just different right?

You obviously know nothing of the burgeoning markets that are opening up in Australia for finely made beer…oh wait, you only know Foster’s hugh.

Point 7:
They did not rip it off. But the reason that Budvar wins in every market other than the US is because everyone else in the world recognises that it is a better product, made with the finest malts and hops that money can buy.

It would really help everyone in the industry if you kept pseudo-knowledge to yourslef…yeah…thanks.

And to take the first verse, and say it is what the poem is about, well it misses the mark.

Houseman was accused of being all gloom and doom. This poem is his apologia for the tenor of his work.

The third verse is probably the one to look to, if one is trying to isolate the meaning, but the bridging passage of the middle, where Terence take the stage is also meet.

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be, 15
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse, 20
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot 25
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where, 30
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain, 35
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet, 40
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure 45
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale: 50
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head 55
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast, 60
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more, 65
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat; 70
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told. 75
Mithridates, he died old.

The poem has always had a fascination for me, as I am both named Terrence, and have been accused of writing depressing things, when I was (by my lights) merely trying to inform.

As for lambics; they don’t work here because they are a “wild” beer, using no introduced yeasts, just those which fall in the tub, or are left behind from centuries of use (which makes them a style going back to before those ancient recipes of Germany).

Since the local yeasts in the states aren’t the same, and no one seems to have been able (or perhaps willing, I’ve not looked) to collect/dry strains for sale, the non-regional lambics, aren’t.

As for the rice/barley cost question… I don’t know.

What I do know is that some sort of “malting” has to be done to convert the starches in rice to sugars. For some sorts of sake this is still done with the salivary enzymes (just as some meads were made by diluting honey, and then taking it in the mouth, and spitting it into the pot).

The very best, so it is said, is that rice which is “chewed” by virgins.

Go figure.

My best beer experience? Hrmn…. I really like Amstel (not light) in L’viv, and there are some good E. European beers to be found in Kiev.

Kvass, while it’s made from bread, isn’t really a beer. Were it to be poured for you, you wouldn’t think it a beer. It’s light, a bit tangy (not sour) and drinks well cool, or cold. There is a very tasty soup made from it.

People do in fact lick the backs of poisonous toads, drink the urine of reindeers who have been eating psilocybin mushrooms and (rather more commonly) set fire to leaves and attempt to inhale the poisonous, carcinogenic smoke, so I have much less confidence than you in this.

A Shropshire pedant writes:

No, that’s Wroxeter. Different kettle of eels altogether.

‘the first known beer recipe is Sumerian—Anchor brewery made up a batch, although i don’t think they followed all of the details in the Hymn of Ninkasa’

OK, so not quite Hittite. But I’d still like to know why Efes is such a terrible beer. I still put it down to the rice (and i suspect that broken rice is cheaper than barley.)

’2) Malt does more than Milton can
to justify God’s ways to man.
…
but Housman went on “Something, Ale’s the stuff to drink/For fellows who are scared to think.” ‘

I think that this backs up the ‘rice’ thesis
from earlier on, but what Housman actually wrote was:

‘Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify Gods ways to man’

The whole verse is rather good, in fact – a defense of beer drinking as opposed to poetry

‘Why, Terence this is stupid stuff
You eat your victuals right enough
There can’t be much amiss, that’s clear
To see the way you drink your beer.
But Oh! to hear the verse you make
It gives a man the bellyache
‘The cow, the old cow, she is dead
It sleeps well the horned head’
Pretty friedship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to graves before their time.
Say, for what were hopyards meant
And why was Burton built on Trent?
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows who it hurts to think
And malt does morew than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to graves before their time
Moping melancholy mad
Pipe a tune to dance to, lad’

No. In other words, it’s filtered.

The type of yeast, and the fermenting temperatures, make it a lager.

I’m with the previous poster who said there are too many inaccuracies to count. However, I don’t really care whether you think Bud is a good beer. It’s matter of personal preference.