On adjuncts

It’s a long-held belief in the craft beer community that corn and rice are evil and are part of the Macro Brewers’ master plot towards mind control and world domination. ‘Corn’ and ‘Cortex’ do share a suspiciously high number of letters, after all.

The thing is, that isn’t, uh, true. Oh, corn and rice do play a big part in macro lagers, and they are to lighten the body and add alcohol without contributing too much flavor, but August Busch IV isn’t sitting in a dimly lit room wearing an eyepatch and rubbing his hands together, one of which has been replaced with a hook. Though if he were, and that was on the bottle, I’d buy a hell of a lot more Budweiser (more being > my current ‘zero’).

But I digress. Thankfully, the craft community as of late has also had its share of realists, at least in part due to Maureen Ogle’s Ambitious Brew, which I’ll hopefully get to writing about here sometime soon. You know, the people who say ‘You can’t make a Classic American Pilsner without corn’ and ‘Those adjuncts originally cost more than barley, and were used to better the beer.’ But then came the Greg Koch-led I Am A Craft Brewer, which seemed oddly propagandic to me and touted the same anti-adjunct spiel (though my concerns didn’t stop me from appearing in the homebrew version, being that I’m an attention whore).

This was all to bring up an article in the LA Times about craft brewers increasingly using rice in beer, which basically says ‘People thought it sucked, and now some of them don’t.’ Greg Koch is called out for the ‘I don’t put rice in my beer’ segment; he responded via Twitter: ‘IMO, it’s far less about WHAT you use & far more about HOW you use it.’ To me, that’s pretty much the opposite of what he said and had others say in IAACB (another interesting tidbit in the article: Patrick Rue, of soon-to-be-video-reviewed-on-BOV The Bruery, changed the line but wasn’t included in the final cut, which seems damning but shouldn’t be construed — ha, Rue — as anything malicious).

I think brewers needed to have some time away from corn, rice and sugars, like a semester abroad to find out who they were outside of their relationship with adjuncts. Some pretty bad beer is made with them, sure, but that doesn’t extrapolate into all beer. Hell, within the next week you’ll be regaled with the conception of NAH’s Beer of Myst’ree, which thanks to a certain other writer of this blog contains a pound of corn. ONOES, as they say. (picture unrelated but it amused me)

So, in conclusion, the Wheel of Snobbery has come round full circle and it’s now acceptable to look down upon people who look down upon drinkers of light American lager.