Category: Front Page

Note: actual the first sentence is not quite right since other yeasts/organisms are used sometimes. This may be Belgium sours/lambics, or Specialty. There’s even a beer out there using yeast culled off the brewer’s beard-PGA

A beer is either a lager or an ale. Some 90% of beers sold in America are lagers. Yet, around 90% of craft beers sold are ales. While the masses have long-preferred the taste of flavorless “lite” lagers, beer geeks have long gone for the more complex flavors typically found in ales. But, all of a sudden I’m craving lagers. Begging New England friends to procure bottles for me. Recently, en route to Boston, I even took a detour to Framingham so I could purchase my first career growler of lager. My newfound behavior is thanks to Jack’s Abby Brewing and their iconoclastic takes on an oft-misunderstood style.

Lagers dominate the marketplace in most of the world. If you can easily name a beer from a country, it will surely be a lager. Corona in Mexico, Foster’s in Australia, Heineken in The Netherlands, Stella, Tsingtao, Red Stripe, Peroni, Beck’s…and, of course, Bud, Miller, and Coors. The world’s ten best-selling beers are lagers and all taste virtually the same. They don’t need to.

Lagers only differ from ales in that bottom-fermenting yeast is used, they are fermented cold, and necessitate a longer brew cycle (lager is the German word for storage). But “lager” encompasses far more styles than you think, running the gamut from helles and pilsners on the lighter end up to schwarzbier and marzens (Oktoberfests) then onto Baltic porters, dopplebocks, and eisbocks on the more alcoholic end of the spectrum.

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Patagonian galls such as these harbor the cold-adapted yeast Saccharomyces eubayanus, a parent of the hybrid yeast used to make lager or cold-brewed beer. A field survey has confirmed that the parent yeast S. eubayanus, which somehow made its way to Bavaria 500 or so years ago, is easily isolated in Patagonia. A Wisconsin team recently isolated the yeast, although at low frequency, near Sheboygan, Wis. — the first time it has been found in nature in North America.
And how did it travel to Bavaria hundreds of years ago? OK, this story from the University of Wisconsin, Madison on the mysterious origins of bottom-fermenting lager yeast is a little “inside baseball” — for the anorak brigade, as the Brits might say — but it is interesting to brewers and beer lovers.

SCIENTISTS FIRM UP ORIGIN OF COLD-ADAPTED YEASTS THAT MAKE COLD BEER

MADISON, Wis. — As one of the most widely consumed and commercially important beverages on the planet, one would expect the experts to know everything there is to know about lager beer.

But it was just a few years ago that scientists identified the South American yeast that, hundreds of years ago, somehow hitched a ride to Bavaria and combined with the domesticated Old World yeast used for millennia to make ale and bread to form the hybrid that makes lager or cold stored beer.

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I didn’t have it yesterday like I wanted because some times life does not conform to our ideas of it or our plans. I had it today and it is sensational. The original whale. When I joined my first beer website THIS is what everyone wanted and I know why.

Ultimately I do not believe in hallucination as truth.
That is a big premise of hype.
The real story goes something like this.
They, the tribe of native peoples, were cooking what they thought was harmless beer
and then it was too late.
They had all consumed the drug.
Imagine that no one around you is in their right mind
and they could not possibly have expected this.
I imagine there was great strangeness.

This beer is a drug. One of the finest.

Thanks @twizzard for the chance to try this great whale.

I didn’t have it yesterday like I wanted because sometimes life does not conform to our ideas of it or our plans. I had it today and it is sensational. The original whale. When I joined my first beer website THIS is what everyone wanted and I know why. Ultimately I do not believe in hallucination as truth. That is a big premise of hype. The real story goes something like this. They, the tribe of native peoples, were cooking what they thought was harmless beer and then it was too late. They had all consumed the drug. Imagine that no one around you is in their right mind and they could not possibly have expected this. I imagine there was great strangeness. This beer is a drug. One of the finest.

Thanks @twizzard for the chance to try this great whale.

There is a whole spectrum of “off flavors” that can plague beer, but there is one flaw that is so common many people feel that it’s an intentional flavor in certain brands — especially a particular brand of Mexican lager.

Beer with the distinct aroma of skunk seems inescapable, but  the realities of the scourge are simple and (mostly) preventable. There are lots of myths and misinformation surrounding skunky beer, but let’s set the record straight.

Myth No. 1: “Beer gets that skunky flavor because … ”

We’ve heard just about every explanation for why you may get a whiff of skunk when enjoying a cold brew, from the ever-popular theory that letting cold beer warm to room temperature will cause it to skunk (not true, and not particularly harmful to beer), to the idea that brewers add the flavor during the brewing process (we’ll get to this one). The truth is simple: the musky aroma has one cause: a chemical reaction that occurs when ultraviolet light interacts with the bitter hop compounds in a brew.

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New gear for the homebrewer!!!-The Professor

Immersion is the world’s smallest lager fermentation device, giving brewers the ability to create world class lagers without a refrigerator. Immersion can bring your beer down to 35º F below ambient in a matter of days and hold it there for as long as it is plugged into the wall. Immersion has the same footprint as your carboy so no additional space is needed to create a lager! Now it is possible to brew a lager in your closet, bedroom, living room, or any tiny corner of your house.

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