posted on 10 May 2010 by tom
The Lager style is one of the most produced and consumed beers in the world. It may be known to you as your father’s favorite or an old stand by, but when it comes to beer, lager is hard to ignore. Often lager is considered to be part of the old guard of beer as it is the chief product of the macro-breweries that dominate the market, but it has a rightful spot in the expanding world of craft beer. Lager is a great bridge for those who are overwhelmed by the countless craft beer choices, as it is something nearly all beer drinkers are familiar with.
Lager became popular after prohibition since new technology made it cheaper and quicker to produce. Traditionally lager was differentiated from other styles of beer, such as ale, because it needed to ferment longer and at colder temperatures. In the 1950s the process of continuous fermentation came about and lager became one of the easiest beer styles to produce. Prior to this breakthrough it took nearly twice as long to produce a lager compared to ale. While continuous fermentation made it easier to brew large quantities for mass consumption it took away much of the distinctive flavor that set lager apart from other beer styles. Most of the American macro-brew lagers use adjunct cereal and rice grains to cut production costs, subsequently creating a heavily carbonated lighter beer with little malt flavor and low levels of bitterness. Thankfully the expansion of craft beers has allowed for a return to the traditional brewing process.
Once you have tried an imported or microbrews lager you can immediately taste how the time provided for malt maturation during the fermentation process creates a smoother distinctive malt flavor. Lager that is given the necessary time for fermentation has greater flavor nuance than its macro-brew counterparts.
Tags: 101, beer, lager
Category: 101, The Beer Blog | Comments (0)
posted on 4 May 2009 by dan
Ah, IPA. What is you, exactly? Loaded with hops? Yes, yes you are. ABV just a touch higher than average? Yup. The darling of the American craft revolution? Indeed. Consequently ubiquitous? Is you ever.
But that’s not the whole story, of course. Trouble is, when you’re the darling of revolution (I’m copywriting that), there’s a lot of pressure on you to constantly impress, and American brewers generally try to impress by going BIGger and BIGger, tesing the limits of the style. Which expanision of style leads to a distortion of said style’s true character. To even begin to understand IPA, we have to go back to it’s roots.
HISTORY
So, where are your roots, then, IPA? Oddly enough, not in America, despite the above-written; even more oddly enough, not in India, either. The India that is the “I” in IPA refers, in fact, to the original beer’s destination.
The legend goes like this: back in the day (the day being the late-18th/early-19th century by most accounts), British brewers developed the pale ale by burning coke instead of wood to roast their barley - coke being neither the soda nor the narcotic, but the derivitive of distilled coal. The new fuel burned hotter and less chaotically than wood and produced paler malts and the paler malts produced a paler ale than any other ale at the time. These pale ales, though, weren’t suited for lengthy sea travel and Great Britain had their colony over in India. How to get them good, drinkable pale ale? Two ways: increase the hop content, which would raise the acidity level, acid being a natural preservative; reduce the sugar by way of yeast, thereby attracting fewer bacteria, but raising ABV considerbly. The result was a high hopped, high boozed beer that the British colonies enjoyed so much, they popularized the style. Now it’s named after them.
IPA TODAY
Of course, the beer the imperialist Britons sipped on would probably shock today’s geeks. The aforementioned obsession with IPAs here in the US, which led to equally obsessive expansion, has delivered us to a point where we’ve obscured the original memory of the style - which doesn’t matter anyway, because the current incarnation itself shifts constantly.
Think of it like this: you go to reorganize your living room, moving furniture here and there and everywhere, and you can’t settle on final arrangement. But you can’t stop, so your living room is in perpetual flux, has no actual design and you’ve forgotten the original. Visitors, though, will recognize all the same furniture, so… it’s still your living room.
Get that?
Like your furniture in that hypothetical living room, there’s still some basic elements you can expect from an IPA. Expect an ABV at least a bit higher than other styles. Expect a good amount of hops - most often boasting pine or citrus flavors - and so expect a bitterness, especially in the finish. Other than that, expect every IPA you have to be markedly distinct from the one before it, which makes it a very cool style still, despite our tendency to overdo it.
Tags: 101, history, IPA
Category: 101 | Comments (0)
