Beware the Beer Scams

Miller's newest piece of advertising dreck inspired this post. It's "Triple Hops Brewed" says its new ad agency, BBH-New York. Miller gives them $150 million a year. And that's the best they can come up with? Pathetic.

It's probably not the most egregious. But it's gotta be in the top 10. And since it's the scam that ticked me off most recently, figured I'd wax poetic about some of my favorite examples of big-brew/big-agency beerhype:

1. Triple Hops Brewed: What a crock of you-know-what. It refers to how many times hops are added during the "brewing" phase, when "wort" the unfermented, sweet beer is being boiled in the kettle. The oils in hops are not soluble in wort. So they have to be boiled long and hard to get them to dissolve out. Then we can taste them in the finished beer.

If you hop early in the brew, you get mostly bitterness in the finished beer. But long boiling destroys some flavor and aroma components. So brewers hop both early and late, to coax different characteristics from the hops. Hopping a beer three times is so common it's not even worth mentioning, let alone making it the centerpiece of an entire multi-million dollar national ad campaign.

A barrel of Miller lite has about as much hops as my little finger. The issue is not when they add the hops, it's how little they add.

2. Beechwood Aging: This is a crock that actually has roots in truth. The Czech/Bohemian brewers of the 19th century discovered this trick. Beechwood is used as a traditional "fining" agent in European pilsner - the lightly colored, well-hopped, bottom-fermenting lagers made famous by such labels as Budweiser-Budvar (the original Bud) and Pilsner Urquell.

When people started drinking beer from glass vessels, brewers started looking for ways to make the beer look better. Before the development of filtering, fining agents were used to remove solids from the beer. They mostly go after dissolved proteins that tend to become solid at serving temperature, lending a cloudy appearance to the brew served in glass. Subjecting the beer to wood chips will help. Millions of microscopic nooks and crannies in the beechwood serve as places to trap solid particles. And unlike its cousin, oak, beechwood is relatively inert in liquid - it does not impart any significant flavor components.

America's King of Beers, Budweiser, is beechwood aged. No problem. But then, like all mass-market beer, it's cold-filtered. Cold-filtering removes any and all particulates in the beer, rendering the beechwood aging completely irrelevant. It's done out of a sense of tradition, only. Advertising it as a real benefit is misinformed at best and disingenuous at worst.

3. Cold Filtering You probably recognized that term earlier, because it's another piece of crap that beer ad agencies have been foisting on the populace for years. If a beer is filtered, it's cold-filtered. On his worst day, a brewer would never filter beer warm. Filtering is pointless unless you have something to filter. Remember those dissolved solids from the beechwood aging example? They stay in solution unless you chill the beer. Chill the beer, solidify the solids. Now you can filter them out. See? It ain't rocket science. And it does not make one beer stand out against another.

And there's an even bigger scam at work here. Cold filtering isn't done for you, it's done for them, because Mass Market Model-T beer is made to be packaged. Like pasteurization, filtering makes the beer more stable for sitting on room-temperature shelves for who-knows-how-long. And, like pasteurization, it does little or no good for beer flavor.

Recommendation: drink beer that insults neither your taste buds nor your intelligence.