Beware of microbrews!
Enjoying a good microbrew may change your preference for beer.
Case in point, there is a microbrew beer store near us and we enjoy hand-crafted microbrew beer. $5/pint
Pabst Blue Ribbon is $16.73 for 24 12oz cans.
It is like comparing a good hamburger to a perfectly cooked Bone-in Ribeye.
What am I to do?
Scotch: Current favorite- The Arran (anything by them), Glenmorangie 12yr Lasanta, sherry cask finished. The Balvenie Double Wood, also like Oban 18yr, and The Glenlivet Nadurra (Oloroso sherry cask finished) among others. Neat please.
About meReal name: Aaron
Location: Farwell, Michigan - near Clare (dead center of lower peninsula).
Occupation:
Healthcare- Licensed & Registered Respiratory Therapist (RRT) at MyMichigan Health, a University of Michigan Health System.
Off Topic channel? Boy, I'd have thought a post on Beer would go in the Beverages > Beer channel. I will move it there and see what happens...
Moving on from the minor scolding above... beer, like anything in life, has tiers and some prefer the nicer end, some prefer the affordable end, and some bounce around between the two.
Lang 48 inch Deluxe Patio Model (burns hickory splits)
PK 360 (burns premium lump charcoal with wood chunks)
28 inch Blackstone Griddle (propane)
Rubs I love:
Yardbird by Plow Boys
Killer Hogs by Malcom Reed
AP Rub by Malcom Reed
Meat Church (any)
Three Little Pigs Memphis Style for ribs
Would love to try Meathead's commercial rub
Sauces I love:
Gates'
Joe's
Pa & Ma's
Killer Hogs Vinegar Sauce
Disposable Equipment I use:
Disposable cutting boards
Tumbleweed chimney starters
Aluminum foil
Aluminum pans (half and full)
Latex gloves
Diamond Kosher Salt
Vice-President of BBQ Security, Roy
He's a pure-bred North American Brown Dog
He loves rawhide chewies
My wife calls me "Teddy" and I call her "Princess" and that's where "mrteddyprincess" comes from.
Don’t you think all the microbreweries were a direct counter to all the large domestic breweries going so far down the light beer, low carb, no taste road? I don’t drink any domestic beers that aren’t from small, craft breweries. Fortunately, Asheville, about a 2 hour drive away, is craft beer paradise, with dozens of breweries within walking distance in downtown. 🍺
...legal to brew beer and wine from home. Then it took about another 20 years for people to get good enough at brewing from home that craft breweries began opening in the 90's. While beer isn't my go to beverage, I do appreciate homebrew and small craft beer!
mrteddyprincess - that is the received wisdom (which I myself once believed), but the historical record is much more complex than that. There is a wonderful book on the history of brewing in America that I'll post about in a separate post below, and the author went into it with that same mindset. She learned that almost none of that turns out to be true. See post below, which I'll put up shortly.
There is always the option of brewing your own. It can be expensive to get started but it doesn't necessarily have to be. For me, I just enjoy the process. The rule is; You have to drink beer when you brew beer!
jfmorris I have found that there are many people who for one reason or another are unloading equipment for next to nothing. Some have lost interest others just can't find the time. It is always my recommendation to start small. Usually after the first successful brew they A: can't believe they produced something sooo good. B: Just enjoyed the ride. My wife and I brewed 14 cases we provided for my step sons wedding and had a ball doing.
I find that home brewer are in two categories - either really BAD (but don't know how bad their beer is because their close friends apparently lie to them), or really GOOD!
I'm in a local home brewing club here that has existed since the late 80's, in one form or another, and my improvement over the years was due to a lot of guys who weren't afraid to tell me my beer sucked at first...
My son-in-law and I brewed 7 kegs of beer for his wedding to my daughter. That was a summer of hard work!
Large Big Green Egg, Weber Performer Deluxe, Weber Smokey Joe Silver, Fireboard Drive, 3 DigiQs, lots of Thermapens, and too much other stuff to mention.
Here’s the thing with regular beers. They have to be REALLY, REALLY COLD. If they are really, really cold, they do exactly what they’re supposed to do: quaff your thirst enjoyably.
If they aren’t REALLY, REALLY COLD, they don’t quaff your thirst and they taste like shit.
Those terms are typically used interchangeably. "Microbrew" has a further definition for which a brewery must have some minimum output to qualify, but that is widely ignored.
I commented above about a great book on the history of beer in America, and here's the full story. The book is called Ambitious Brew by Maureen Ogle. I wrote a review of it back in 2007 for a beer forum I belonged to. Here ya go:
I’ve just read a great book on the history of brewing in the U.S. that I think anyone here would find very interesting. It’s called “Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer”, by Maureen Ogle. It’s a highly readable account, published in 2006 and coming in at about 350 pages, of the history of brewing in this country from the years before the Civil War until 2005. I learned a great deal about things that I thought I already knew, and I suspect many of us would have a similar experience from reading it. I highly recommend it and want to provide a bit of a book review here, so apologies for the somewhat lengthy post. OK, I’m not actually apologizing!
To start, here’s a passage from the author’s foreword:
“…It seemed as if everyone I ran into already knew the history of beer in America, and they were more than happy to fill me in on the facts, which went something like this: Back in the old days, Americans enjoyed an abundance of fine, local beers from thousands of breweries that were artisan workshops where skilled brewers crafted ales using only four ingredients: malt, hops, yeast, and water. Prohibition ended that halcyon age. When beer came back in the 1930s, hundreds of breweries opened their doors. Most were owned by old brewing families who were determined to brew only the finest and purest beers. Alas, their dreams died aborning, thanks to the conniving of a handful of corporate behemoths – most notably Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Pabst, and Miller.
“These Big Brewers scorned honest beer in favor of watery swill brewed from cheap corn and rice. The Big Brewers added insult to injury by using crass commercials, linked mostly to professional sporting events, to sell their foul brew to working-class people. By the 1970s, only a handful of brewers remained and American beer was a thin, yellow concoction with no flavor and even less body.
“Baby boomers to the rescue. In the 1960s and 1970s, young Americans backpacked through Europe and there discovered “real” ales and stouts. They returned eager to try their hand at making those beers at home. In the 1980s, some of the homebrewers opened microbreweries and brewpubs. These new artisans crafted beer of the purest and most flavorful sort – and so real beer was rescued from the evil corporate dragons.
“…As I dug through archives and old trade journals, I discovered that almost every aspect of that oft-told tale of skullduggery, greed, and woe was false and that the truth was considerably more interesting and complex…”
As one who pretty much fully bought in to that “received” history cited above, reading this passage when I idly picked up the book at my local library while my wife was getting her books definitely got my attention, so I checked it out. The story is extremely fascinating and as the author says, hardly any of that “beer legend” is really true, to my great surprise. The history of beer in the US is interwoven with social and political trends that had a deep impact on all aspects of life. These include the post-Civil War rise of national transportation, the advent of industrialization in all areas of the economy, the transition of the country from a largely agrarian to much more urban existence, the direct link between wanton overindulgence in alcohol prevalent in the late 19th century to the rise of Prohibitionist attitudes, the timing of US entry into the first and second world wars, the rise of instant, nationwide communications, the growth of the organized labor movement, shifting gender roles, and much more.
It is truly amazing how intimately involved with all of these things was the role of beer in American life. In particular, the transformation of the “Big Brewers” products to what we know them as today was not their choice to save money; in fact corn and rice were MORE expensive, not less, compared to barley in the late 19th century when those recipes were first formulated in response to the advent of Bohemian pilsners, which swept the brewing world in the 1880s. In the mid-20th century, brewers “dumbed down” their beers because that is what US palates wanted—the evidence from across the board on all sorts of food and drink is overwhelming. The vast majority of US consumers wanted the unchallenging, like Wonder Bread and other national brands catering to the lowest-common denominator, and beer was no different, so brewers adapted to survive. Another compelling aspect is how the decades of Prohibition had bred a couple of generations of Americans for whom alcoholic beverages of any kind held virtually no interest—they’d grown up without it being part of their lives. Thus a large effort to “reintroduce” beer to the drinking public was needed. Yet another is the way that, in the post-WWII years, beer consumption dropped to historically low levels as returning GIs (who had been the biggest consumers during the war years) aged and turned largely to distilled spirits. The 1950s was death to hundreds of smaller breweries because of this economic reality, and the big boys got bigger by comparison because only operations of their scale could withstand that kind of market correction. The rebirth of brewing in this country was part of a national re-awakening of interest, during the late 1960s and 1970s “hippie” years, in food and drink with more robust flavors after years of corporate food blandness, from bread to cheese to wine and a host of others, and this had as much to do with the rise of microbrewing as did the desire of homebrewers to make their marks.
All in all this is a great book that any brewer would highly enjoy. You’ll learn about lots besides brewing, too.
mnavarre That is so cool!! I recall that she posted a gracious reply to my review back then, so I'm not surprised to hear she is that nice in person. I'd love to go to a GABF someday.
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