291–300 of 309 posts
There's absolutely no metabolic process that alcohol helps where at least cigarettes' increase your IQ:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-a-nicotine-p...
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The skunky odor/flavor comes from light exposure to hops and it’s easily prevented with dark bottles or cans. Other herbs work well as preservatives and don’t get skunky at all. Beer can be shelf stable basically indefinitely if well kept, and often ages very well.
That's absolutely not true. IPAs cannot be shelf stable past a few months if unrefrigerated. They start to lose the hoppy aroma and taste and taste more muted. The longer you go the more skunky it tastes.
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People get it in their heads that small and local means good or at least better than the stuff mass-produced by MegaCorp, but that's not always the case. I think beer is a case where it's hard to beat Big Beer. Heineken, the second-biggest brewery in the world, moved 231.2 million hectoliters of beer in 2021[0], or nearly 19,000 acre-feet of beer (!). How many locally-produced lagers actually taste better than Heinek…
I'm really confused at the general lack of knowledge about this topic on HN. Heineken is one of the worst beers made, and local beers, while mostly not great, are certainly better. Look at untappd for statistically significant ratings.
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Any of Alchemist, Hill Farmstead, or Lawsons would be an uproar, and they’re all within like 60 miles of each other. Across New England there are many.
I've had all of them, other than being darlings of craft beer geeks, there is nothing really different about them. Parent is correct.
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Just about every major metro in the US likely has a brewery making better tasting beer than Heineken. That’s not what Heineken is going for.
Which is why I was refuting OP's statement: > How many locally-produced lagers actually taste better than Heineken?
The article buried the lede. "Anchor, founded in 1896, was saved from bankruptcy in 1965 by longtime owner Fritz Maytag, and _sold to Sapporo in 2017_, Singer said." It ceased to be an independent local brewer almost a decade ago. The corporate overlords are doing what corporate overlords always do.
>sold to Sapporo in 2017 And suddenly a great mystery is solved! I had Anchor Steam in 2013 thereabouts and liked it quite a lot. When it became available locally I was happy to get it but it didn't quite taste as I remembered it. As time went on I quit buying it because it just wasn't as good as I remembered it to be. I wonder what they changed in the recipe?
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> t's trivial and cheap to make water harder, home brewers do it all the time to replicate specific styles I'm aware of this. I did it for my ribbon-winning brews. It is cheap at the home brewer scale, but at commercial scales, maybe not so much. > can be shipped Sure, it's possible to get genuine Saaz hops shipped from the Czech Republic to California. Again, A home brewer might be willing to shell out top dollar fo…
Adjusting the water for different styles or consistency across production facilities is a thing that is done at commercial scale. I had a professor in college who figured out how to do that for Bass' UK production facilities in the 1980s.
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> I have so many great, local breweries My city has a lot, but I personally can't share in them. I will instantly vomit if I drink any local brews (in any locale). Same with whiskey. I can drink nationally-distributed beers and vodka with no ill-effects. I have no idea why. I'm jumping on this comment because I imagine there are some HN readers that might have a theory and I would be very interested in hearing them.
I hate local beers. Local wine makes sense, there is terroir, a sense of place etc. Local beers are just some weird competition to see who can make the hopiest bitterest beer. I don't want to try a new lager every time I cross county lines, when I want beer I want something reliable.
Local brewers with even the smallest bit of Belgian influence often have at least some small idea of this. Brewers that enjoy exploring styles known as "farmhouse" or "spontaneous" or "common" are generally exploring truly local beers in both flavor profiles and execution.
If brewing was as lucrative as fancy wines, you'd probably hear a lot more about breweries staffing local yeast experts and building yeast labs the way fancy vineyards hire soil experts. (I do know of at least a couple that do. New Glarus is a stand out for a number of reasons, including that their commitment to local also means that they never distribute beer outside of Wisconsin.)
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The skunky odor/flavor comes from light exposure to hops and it’s easily prevented with dark bottles or cans. Other herbs work well as preservatives and don’t get skunky at all. Beer can be shelf stable basically indefinitely if well kept, and often ages very well.
If it's easy to prevent, why is it so much more of a problem than for wine? Budweiser had a “born on date” and later switched it to a "freshest before" date. Other breweries insist on cold shipping--that's quite expensive.