Brewmaster Jim Bicklein at Anheuser-Busch brewery, St. Louis
Nearly every beer made in the world today is a pale, effervescent lager. All of the other styles together amount to barely more than a rounding error in terms of total volume. Among connoisseurs of beer, an icy can of lager is the ultimate object of contempt, and there is some justification for this. In the past century, beer companies have been happy to debase the pilsner style by stripping away flavor, replacing quality malt with cheap sources of fermentable sugar, even stuffing them with additives, flavorings, and colorings. Breweries should be ashamed of some of the products they’ve put out to market.
But there is another side. The people can’t be wrong all the time; there’s a reason people drink gallons of this sparkling liquid. It refreshes and it quenches. Mass-market lagers—the Budweisers, Heinekens, Pacificos, and Sapporos of the world—are simple beers with lots of effervescence and a kiss of sweetness. Even drinkers who love IPAs may hanker for a cold one on a hot day. These mainstream brews have less flavor than most styles, but that’s by design, not mistake. Breweries like Anheuser-Busch care as much about the consistent quality of their beer as any brewery on earth because they have millions of fans who want their Bud to taste exactly like a Bud. ■
THE STORY OF how mass-market beer came to be is much like the stories of mass-market everything: The industrial revolution made it possible to produce beer on a giant scale, and this led to mass marketing and mass distribution and the practices of standardization and preservation. In this way, beer isn’t much different from meat or bread or cheese. The development of mass markets make it possible to manufacture and distribute a product cheaply, putting it in front of the largest number of people possible. Tailoring products for huge populations, in beer as much as in other product categories, necessarily means appealing to the center of the bell curve, where most people’s tastes congregate. When made to serve the median palate, a product loses its thorns and idiosyncrasies and becomes a more generic, blander version of itself. More or less, that was the story of twentieth-century beer.
The numbers tell a part of the story. Thanks in part to Prohibition, the U.S. offers the starkest example. In 1950, after breweries had had 17 years to recover, the four largest American brewing companies (Schlitz, Anheuser-Busch, Ballantine, and Pabst) produced a hair more than 20 percent of the country’s beer. By 2000, the four largest (Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors, and Pabst) made 95 percent of it—and all of that production comprised mass-market lagers.
But it’s perhaps even more telling to see what happened in Germany over the same period. Germany is considered a diversity success story in which the total number of breweries never declined below 1,234. Yet production shifted dramatically to serve mass markets there, too. In 1958, the four largest German breweries made just 12 percent of the beer. By 2000, it was half, a number that jumps to two-thirds if you expand the group to include the top eight producers. In Germany, these are very different markets, and Germany’s largest beer company makes Jever and Radeberger, classic pilsners. The point is, even in the most diverse country, mass-market beers are the norm.
This phenomenon repeats itself in country after country. It’s fun to play a game where you think of a country and try to name the big national beer brand. The Netherlands? A softball: Heineken. Denmark? Seems tougher, but give it a second and you remember Carlsberg. Australia? That famous television ad springs to mind—Foster’s. It’s true even in countries where you might not expect national brands, like Turkey (Efes), Thailand (Singha), or Kenya (Tusker). Labatt, Tsingtao, Stella Artois, Panama, Brahma, Kingfisher—the list goes on and on.
Skunk Alert. Although it’s been mentioned elsewhere, here’s a reminder: Beer should never smell or taste like skunk. It is an article of faith among European brewers that people will only buy beer from green bottles, but these are vulnerable to a chemical change that happens when light interacts with a hop compound. At least half the green-bottle imports I’ve purchased have been skunked, and I now have a hard rule against buying them. Perhaps an educated populace unwilling to buy the beer will compel companies to switch to brown bottles or cans.
The process of consolidation doesn’t always lead to identical beers across all nations. In the nineteenth century, American brewers softened the roughness of local six-row barley with corn and rice in their grists, an indigenous twist that led to national brands using corn and rice—even when they’d long abandoned six-row barley. In a similar story, Indian beer was for a long period made from inferior barley—high-moisture, variable kernel size, coarse—largely grown as livestock feed. It was also cut with rice, but since it still wasn’t very good, breweries made it strong to get the job done more quickly. Japanese beer developed in a different set of circumstances that included cultural expectation. People appreciated a more austere product with the quality of kire—literally “cutting,” meaning sharp and refreshing. So Asahi developed a very dry beer made crisp by rice that transformed the market. Japanese beers are consequently extremely crisp.
But while Coors, Beck’s, and Foster’s aren’t identical, they have a great deal in common. This is another effect of the mass market—the beer is made to travel well. As the twentieth century rolled along, traditional styles vanished or became marginalized, supplanted by a ubiquitous yellow lager that can be found in every country where beer is legal. ■
MASS-MARKET LAGERS descended from pilsners, which they still resemble. Both are translucent golden and sparkling, topped with frosty white heads. Very often, people don’t even know enough to distinguish them. Yet the distance between Pilsner Urquell and Budweiser is not incidental. Pilsners are full-bodied and hoppy (if not always bitter). They may be rich but are not sweet, and the malts have articulation and definition: grain-y, bready, toasty. Mass-market lagers aren’t as intense and are rarely anywhere near as hoppy. One could leap to the conclusion that they’re more like helles lagers then. Well, no, that’s not quite right, either.
It’s not that mass-market lagers have less flavor than other styles. Rather, it’s that the flavors are more processed and harder to distinguish. Sugary sweetness is a hallmark of mass-market food—manufacturers load products full of the stuff to make it more beguiling. The public embrace of sodas increased their expectations of sweetness, and now products like tomato sauce, salad dressing, and coffee drinks have teaspoons upon teaspoons of sugar. Over the twentieth century, beers also got sweeter while at the same time bitterness units slowly eroded. The standard supermarket beer bears the mark of that decline in the form of a generic dulcitude of a kind that is so common in foods. It doesn’t have the specificity of the malt flavors found in pilsners, in which you can taste the type of grain used and the way it was kilned. Beyond their sugary flavor, mass-market lagers are heavily carbonated (which has led to a popular view that beer is “gassy”) and lack much hop character. It is usually very difficult to get a bead on the nature of the hop type, beyond a sense of its minor contribution to bitterness. Finally, these beers are built on a lean chassis to make them both less filling and less caloric.
Not every mass-market lager is the same, of course, and in a lineup one begins to notice certain differences. Some are fuller, others more watery; some are sweeter, others drier; some have a discernible corn flavor, and some have little more flavor than a glass of club soda. Following are three different types of mass-market lagers and their characteristics.
Back in the 1870s, Americans led by Adolphus Busch began to cut their beers with rice and corn in an effort to temper the huskiness of native six-row barley. American barley left unsightly proteins floating in the beer, making it unsuitable for golden lagers. That evolution led to an indigenous variety of beer that has long outlasted the constraints of American barley: Most American lagers have, for more than a century, used corn or rice as a part of the grist. Their ability to lighten beer’s body without adding a lot of flavor have made them popular worldwide. Rice is converted cleanly into alcohol and dries a beer—critical for the palate of Japanese beers. Corn also lightens the beer, but adds its own flavor that helps define American lagers like Miller and Coors.
“Cheap” Adjuncts. To many drinkers, corn and rice are “cheap fillers” that breweries use to slice precious pennies off the cost of a barrel of beer. We have to score that claim “mostly false.” When breweries first started using them, these grains were more expensive than barley. Even now, commodity prices bounce up and down, and rice is more expensive than barley; corn, which might have been cheaper a decade ago, has trebled in price since 2000. The flavors of these grains help define a beer’s taste, and breweries are more interested in maintaining a consistent flavor profile than using the cheapest grains at a given time.
Some mass-market lagers are made exclusively with barley malt. This is especially true of German lagers, which follow Reinheitsgebot and use only barley. All-malt beers are a bit fuller and may have more distinctive malt flavor—though not always. In the realm of mass-market lagers, this is a fairly rare type.
In this category of beers, the “light” refers to body and indicates a low-calorie beer. In the 1960s, Joseph Owades, working at the Rheingold Breweries in Brooklyn, discovered an enzyme that helped yeast consume starch. The resulting beer, which had fewer carbohydrates, was lower in calories. Rheingold released a product called Gablinger’s Diet Beer in the late 1960s based on Owades’s research. In 1975, Miller released its own light beer, and that was the one—propelled by the memorable “tastes great, less filling” ads—that launched the trend. It was slow to develop, but light beer eventually took over the American market and now three of the four bestselling beers are Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Lite. In 2013, regular Budweiser nipped in front of Miller Lite to retake third place.
With almost no body and a tiny wash of malt flavor, light beers have even less flavor than regular mass-market lagers. Hopping is generally below the threshold of flavor. The beers are low alcohol (the big three are all 4.2%), highly carbonated, and inevitably described as “crisp,” an accurate enough description; there’s little else to say. Light beer is made to be drunk ice-cold, fast, and with as little attention as possible. ■
What about “Dry,” “Ice” & “Triple Hops Brewed”?
Beer companies have always polished the apple. They boast of “finest ingredients” or “Rocky Mountain spring water.” Sometimes these are more than slogans. “Ice” refers to the process of freezing the beer and removing water to make slightly stronger beer like Icehouse and Molson Ice. Other times the claim is a hazy blend of marketing gloss and real technique, like “dry” beer, which can refer to highly attenuated beer or to nothing at all. Then there are the completely meaningless slogans like “triple hops brewed” in which standard brewing practices are hyped as something extraordinary.
My lovely and insightful wife, while watching a commercial for Miller Lite in a “vortex bottle,” coined an extremely handy axiom I’ve come to think of as Sally’s Rule: Never buy it if the brewery is trying to sell you packaging instead of beer. Cans in the shape of bow ties, cans that tell you the temperature of your beer, cans shaped like kegs—it’s amazing how often I have to invoke her rule.
I WASN’T really sure what to expect when I arrived at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis. This is a company that sells so much beer it needs twelve breweries across the country to fill the orders. The St. Louis flagship is the country’s second-largest brewery and produces more beer in a year than all the craft breweries in the country combined. My mind conjured images of mash tuns as big as warehouses, fermenters the size of oil tankers, all in industrial tones of cement and steel.
I was being naïve. In fact, the St. Louis facility is probably the most beautiful brewery I’ve ever seen. Built right around the turn of the twentieth century, it was originally a classic gravity-fed system, five stories tall, lit by a soaring atrium and a central column of open space that reaches from top to bottom (an early communications system). Chandeliers crafted for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair curl and twine down long chains in the shape of hop vines. Column finials are detailed with golden leaves and fleur-de-lis, and wrought iron railings, painted crisp white, protect you from stepping out into the open shaft of light.
The operation is vast—mashing happens in one building, lautering in another—but all the pieces are human sized. In terms of scale, it looks like many other much smaller breweries. The way Anheuser-Busch pushes 15 million barrels of beer through this plant every year is not by using titanic equipment, but by choreographing a dance with an intricate matrix of many vessels all working at once. “There are three brewhouses, six of these mash vessels per brewhouse,” brewmaster Jim Bicklein explains. By brewhouse, he doesn’t mean separate facilities—they’re all incorporated into the main brewery. “So I have eighteen mash vessels, and each brewhouse has two lauter tubs, so we have six lauter tubs and six brew kettles.” Bicklein schedules fifty to sixty batches every day.
Brewmaster Jim Bicklein at Anheuser-Busch brewery, St. Louis
The brewing process is itself completely (and disappointingly) ordinary. Budweiser uses a grist similar to the original beer Adolphus Busch introduced in the 1870s: a blend of two-row and six-row barley and 35 percent rice. The rice is prepared in separate cookers—an arrangement also typical in Belgium—and then fed to the barley mash. Budweiser uses pellet hops rather than extracts, with an addition at the start and end of the boil. Fermentation is also pretty typical, although “this is when we do get big,” Bicklein told me as we stepped into a room with rows of 6,000-barrel fermenters. The yeast is original and only the St. Louis brewery propagates it—that way they can be sure the strains aren’t morphing over time. Each day, kegs full of fresh yeast go out on trucks or in airplanes for delivery all over the globe. Budweiser ferments at 52°F for five days and then goes for three weeks to condition—though at the fairly warm temperature of around 50°F.
High-Gravity Brewing. The idea behind high-gravity brewing is simple enough: Breweries make a concentrated wort and then water it down before packaging. The practice is fairly widespread among larger breweries, since it saves money and tank space by reducing the volume of beer working its way through a brewery. (Anheuser-Busch doesn’t use it for Budweiser or Bud Light, but does for some of their other brands.) Breweries begin with worts that will result in a finished beer of 6% to 8%. Because yeast behaves differently in denser worts, they have to be careful that these stronger beers don’t change the profile of the final beer once it has been diluted back down to its appropriate gravity.
Of course, it is possible to use more efficient processes to produce huge quantities of beer. Many breweries employ high-gravity brewing or use mash filters (or both). They also save money by shaving days off lagering time. Some of these techniques affect the beer, some don’t. But it’s important to clarify a point many people misunderstand: Beer is beer. That mass-market lagers are lighter and blander than craft-brewed IPAs is not a function of the brewery design or brewing techniques—it’s an intentional decision to make beer that way. It also doesn’t mean a brewery doesn’t take its beer incredibly seriously.
Indeed, the thing that charmed me the most about visiting St. Louis was arriving at the beechwood tanks. Spiral strips of beechwood, completely sterilized and stripped of their flavor, are used ostensibly to collect yeast so that circulating beer has more opportunity to be in contact with it. The idea is that it will reduce diacetyl and other off-flavors while the beer slowly conditions. But in a modern brewery, it’s a technical antiquity. The microbiologists and chemists at Anheuser-Busch know how to make beer and are certainly competent to address these issues without this old-timey method. But Budweiser has always used beechwood chips, and like breweries that stick with copper kettles and grants, they do it for reasons that can’t be explained by chemistry alone. I pressed Bicklein on it, and he said, “We can argue whether it does or it doesn’t [affect the flavor profile], but it’s something we’re not willing to change. It’s part of the heritage of Budweiser.”
People will decide whether they think beers like Budweiser, Miller, and Coors are great accomplishments in the art of brewing. Those will always be subjective judgments. But breweries like Anheuser-Busch live and breathe beer no less than the Dogfish Heads, Rodenbachs, and Schlenkerlas. They make very different products, but they make it the same way everyone else does—by mashing it, boiling it, and fermenting it. Just, you know, in somewhat larger volumes. ■
ECONOMIST Lisa M. George makes a persuasive case that the shrinking of the planet helped speed the demise of local breweries as national TV advertising appeared at midcentury. According to her analysis, television and the nationalization of beer markets accounted for about a quarter of the decline in local breweries, and trimmed nearly a third of their production.
What effect, then, might the atomization of media in the twenty-first century have on tastes and trends? Craft brewing accounts for more than 10 percent of the total beer market (in dollars) in the United States, and is growing at double-digit rates each year. Meanwhile, demand for the most popular mass-market lagers slips a point or two each year. The United States is on the leading edge of this trend, but it’s happening around the world as well. Thirty years ago, the idea of “mass market” was well understood and stable. It is nowhere near as certain what the center of the mass market will look like thirty years from now. Over the course of the twentieth century, beers got lighter and less hoppy. It’s possible that this trend could reverse itself and to compete, the large lager breweries will make fuller-bodied, hoppier beers. It’s at least conceivable that lagers may lose out to ales eventually. Probably not burly imperial red ales, but pale and wheat ales have found large enough markets that it’s possible to envision an ale-dominated future in the U.S.
One thing that does now seem inconceivable is a return to the dominance and consolidation of the 1970s. The big international breweries recognize this and are addressing it by introducing mass-market ales (MillerCoors and the Blue Moon line), purchasing craft breweries (Anheuser-Busch InBev and Goose Island), and product development (Anheuser-Busch and Black Crown). Meanwhile, the “microbreweries” aren’t going to remain micro for long. Larger ale companies like Sierra Nevada and New Belgium are following Budweiser’s lead and opening up new breweries to increase capacity and improve quality on East Coast shipments. It seems certain that the future will consist of a much more heterogeneous beer landscape marked by more choice and the growth of craft breweries. That will in turn affect the mass market—probably in unforeseen ways. The safest prediction about what will happen? Wait and see. ■
Budweiser’s signature beechwood chips await in a tank.
ONCE UPON A time, partisans would gamely fight over which of the mass-market lagers tasted the best; later, weary beer geeks would dismiss the lot, declaring there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them. Neither is quite right. As a group, these lagers have more similarities than most styles. In blind tastings, they regularly fool drinkers who think they know how to distinguish among them. But if you step back and consider them region by region it’s easier to see their contours. Even in the realm of mass-market lagers, culture exerts an influence: Germany sticks with Reinheitsgebot-compliant lagers that are more full-flavored, while Japan goes the opposite direction, drying their beers out with rice. It may not be easy to distinguish a Bud Light from a Coors Light, but Bud from Beck’s and Beck’s from Foster’s—much easier. Below are the regional differences and notes on the major brands.
■ United States. Americans were the pioneers of cereal grains, and you can taste the difference if you try Miller Genuine Draft, which when cold has a riesling-like crispness, but warms into its corn palate. Coors also has a corn note, but it is crisper and more neutral. Budweiser is made with rice and the sweetness comes from a combination of low hop bitterness and a touch of ester from comparatively warm conditioning.
■ Mexico. Hot-weather countries are ideal for light lagers, which don’t dehydrate the drinker as fast. Mexican beers, like those made to the north, often have an undercurrent of corn. Pacifico is medium bodied and toasty, but slightly sweet and moreish. Modelo Especial is smooth and clean and has the suggestion of hops. Dos Equis is crisp but fades like mineral water on the palate.
■ Germany. As a contrast, German lagers are all made with 100 percent barley malt. They are fuller and usually a little less gassy. Warsteiner has a soft, grain-y malt base and a sprinkle of peppery hops. Beck’s is heavier and quite hoppy in comparison to American standards. Spaten, the lightest and fizziest, shows how close to the American model a brewery can get without resorting to rice or corn.
■ Europe. Expectations vary widely across Europe, and it’s interesting to see how different the beers can be. Carlsberg (Denmark), one of the most famous names in the world, is sweet, corny, and watery. Stella Artois (Belgium), which markets itself as the sophisticated lager, is clean and crisp like a club soda, but low on actual beer flavors. Heineken (the Netherlands), by contrast, is full of flavor, with the dial turned up on sweetness, hoppiness, and body. Of the European lagers, though, Peroni (Italy) may well be the overlooked gem; it has rich, bready malts and pronounced herbal-to-spicy hops. You might even mistake it for a German pilsner.
■ Australasia. Down under, they make comparatively robust beers. Foster’s is a full, slightly sweet beer with rich, toasty malts that give it excellent moreishness. In a similar vein New Zealand’s Steinlager has a fairly full middle and a dry finish, all in a beer with a healthy dose of lemony hops.
■ Japan. The 1980s “dry wars” shaped the character of Japanese lagers, which are incredibly crisp and, yes, dry. Sapporo is the driest, with just a touch of toast and lychee. Kirin is fuller and more tropical with honey malts and a floral, gardenia-like nose. Asahi, which kicked off the race for drier beer, has taken things so far their beer now has very little flavor left. ■