Trends

Don Russell puts its this way in his weekly Joe Sixpack column:

You don’t drink organic beer because it’s healthier for you than conventional beer.

You drink it because it makes you feel better about your choices as just another depersonalized consumer in the world’s mammoth industrialized food production chain, a system that devalues labor, rapes the environment and enriches multinational agriculture conglomerates.

You might also insist that it taste good, but then supporting sustainable agriculture may already make it taste better to you.

Russell then examines if the fact that Anheuser-Busch is testing an organic beer, Wild Hop Lager, means a trend could be emerging. If A-B gets involved in organic then the ingredients available to those looking for organic beers will become much more easy to obtain – and we could see even more organic beers.

Just so they taste good.

Anheuser-Busch will become the U.S. importer of Tiger Beer from Singapore, the two brewers jointly announced.

The St. Louis Post-Disptach points out that although Tiger Beer isn’t well known in the United States, Anheuser-Busch may be eying the brand’s performance in the United Kingdom as an indicator of its potential. Sold there for more than 30 years, the brand has become the most popular Asian imported beer brand in the U.K. and Ireland.

Tiger Beer is the third new import that Anheuser-Busch plans to add to the portfolio of products sold to its wholesalers. Last month, A-B began importing beer from its Chinese subsidiary Harbin Brewery Group to Los Angeles and Honolulu. Next month, it will begin importing the beers of Dutch brewer Grolsch.

We can’t really call the latest round of commercials from Miller Brewing, the “Great Taste Trial,” much ado about nothing because there’s all kind of advertising money involved, they’ll be seen by millions and they’ve generated plenty of additional publicity.

However, as our old editor liked to ask: Is there a story here?

Basically Miller claims Bud Light increased its bitterness by nearly 11% this year, reversing steady declines of bitterness over the last 15 years. Light beers in general, including Miller Lite, have decreased their bitterness. Miller also says Bud Light’s carbonation level rose this year by about 4%.

Now the St. Louis Post-Disptach asks beer experts if drinkers can taste changes that were measured in laboratories.

“It seems they want to make something out of nothing,” said Michael Lewis, professor emeritus of brewing science at the University of California at Davis.

Brewers constantly tweak their recipes.

“Beer is a natural product, and agricultural products shift from year to year, much less generation to generation,” said Keith Lemcke, vice president of Chicago-based Siebel Institute of Technology, which trains brewers. Any minor variations Miller might have found couldn’t be detected by consumers, he said.

Lew Bryson stands up for malty beers:

This is probably my fifth or sixth direct rant about hopheads. I apologize, but only a little, and only because it might be boring. But there’s just so much more to the whole beer palate than the variety of flavors available from hops, and the enthusiasts, the people who should be reaching out to the future craft beer drinkers, largely aren’t getting it. They’re impassioned about the one flavor/aroma component of beer that is least likely to entrance newcomers: bitterness. Their passion is beautiful, but so narrow. Love beer, not just hops.

An engaging argument, although it hardly seems fair to lump hop flavor and hop bitterness together.