Taking Mass Market Lagers Seriously
Beervana Show/Podcast listeners will have seen a new episode in the feeds of their favorite podcast services last week. It is the third edition of our blind tasting series, following local pilsners and a “smackdown” pitting Washington and Oregon IPAs. Whereas we held those two with a real curiosity about who would win, in our latest edition, it was all about the journey. We sat down with Zoiglhaus’s Alan Taylor to taste 18 domestic and foreign mass market lagers, hoping mainly to learn more about the world’s most popular beer style. With so little going on flavor-wise, mass market lagers have to impress with execution and harmony without producing off-flavors, and it’s a really tough trick. In the event, the tasting proved to be educational. I thought the whole exercise warranted a separate post to discuss some of the takeaways. There will be spoilers! (Listen first to avoid!)
Before we dig in, though, a brief comment on this category of beer, which is by far the most popular in the world. My whole life, mass market lagers have been denigrated as tinny and cheap, often even by regular drinkers. As we discovered, a few are pretty bad—but that’s true with any style. But as a category, their main crime is having such a low flavor impact. They got sweeter and lighter as tastes changed in the 20th century, and they fall a full notch in intensity below the lightest of traditional or craft styles. That’s fine. They round out the flavor wheel of beers that start with lambics and barley wines and get less and less intense until you arrive at Stella. The good ones are quite nice, and I happily drink them when the moment is right. I encourage anyone to grab one of the six that broke into our final round and see if you don’t agree.
They Don’t Taste the Same
One of the more remarkable experiences of my life was sitting down to a sample of 23 mass market lagers, arranged in the shape of a rainbow in front of me. It was eleven years ago at Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis. On two days each week, a panel of master tasters sat down to sample one Bud and one Bud Light from every plant in North America. As a control, they added three other beers. I was invited to try, which is no doubt a parlor trick they use to keep writers humble. The object, though, is important. These beers have very specific flavor parameters, and the tasting assured that none of the plants was wandering off the mark. The point is: these beers are brewed to have a particular and very intentional flavor profile.
Not that they’re all great; we found five of the beers wanting, due to execution, formulation, of flaw. A couple seemed to have process issues that made them mildly unpleasant, but they weren’t necessarily flawed: Hamm’s (Alan: “musty,” Jeff: “tinny,” Patrick: “yuck”) and Rolling Rock (Alan: “musty, unpleasant”, Jeff: “cheap, industrial,” Patrick: “weedy, kinda gross”). Something wasn’t right in the execution there—and it could have been with the packaging or handling. Nobody liked Stella Artois, either, which we found thin and watery, but it didn’t have flaws. Among a sea of low-flavor beers, it seemed to be trying to have the least flavor. Two beers did have flaws, however: Narragansett, which had diacetyl, and Beck’s, which was lightstruck. (Some European breweries insist on using green bottles, basically guaranteeing it.) Yet even these “off flavors” may have been intentional—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. In any case, in a blind tasting, they stood out.
Blind tastings are helpful in illustrating good beers, too. It was nice as we went along to see that we had general agreement on the beers we sent forward. They expressed a nice range from the pale and very delicate to the almost golden and more full-flavored.
Familiarity
What makes a drinker reach for the Coors instead of the Pabst? A cynic might say marketing. The fact that I have a huge affection for Hamm’s, which I found tinny and hollow when I tasted it blind, demonstrates the point. But there’s more to it than that. We like certain flavors, but more than that, certain flavors are familiar. I suspect this is a very big deal in mass market lagers.
We came to one beer that I immediately liked. It was clean and mild, with a sweetness that recalled corn in my mind. In my notes I wrote “traditional ‘American’ flavors.” That was almost certainly less a critical note than a personal one. I guessed that it was either High Life or Hamm’s—two beers I spent a lot of time drinking in my younger years. (It was High Life.) But looking at my experience, I have to confess that I probably mistook cause and effect. It tasted American to me because I drank enough of it that the familiar flavors came to define what “American” means. Patrick also had a familiarity reaction when we got to what turned out to be Rainier. There was a certain kind of sweet flavor he liked and recognized. Alan suggested is was the ester ethyl hexanoate, which to his palate tastes like red apple. Alan was more often attracted to the fuller-bodied beers that might have been all-malt, like his beloved German lagers.
To get back to Narragansett and Beck’s, familiarity can also be why breweries preserve ostensible off-flavors. We all assumed we’d identify Rolling Rock because for decades it had the characteristic flavor of DMS—though apparently parent company AB InBev has cleaned it up. None of us westerners are familiar with Narragansett, but maybe diacetyl is part of its profile—it certainly is with Pilsner Urquell, to offer another example. Alan mentioned that breweries might even pass their beer through a UV light to give it that skunky flavor of a green bottle, which many Americans associate with European imports. Why would breweries do this? Their fans, sometimes millions of them, expect it. They’re familiar flavors. If you take the diacetyl out of Urquell, is is Urquell?
Finally, sweetness is perhaps the key x-factor in mass market lagers. We like to say that lagers are clean and free of the fruity flavors of esters that are far more prominent in ales. But that’s not actually true of mass market lagers. As the American diet got sweeter, so did the beers. One of the easiest ways to create a perception of sweetness in a lager as light as these is not residual sugars, but esters. In beer after beer, we commented on the esters. Some were citrusy, some tutti fruti, some apple. In a mass market lager, those notes are a big part of the flavor profile. For ester fans, Busch was the most exaggerated example.
Sampling the wares with lunch.
Only One Can Be Champion
So which beers made our finals? We had four countries represented, and you won’t believe number three! Honestly, none of us had ever tasted or remembered having tasted Kokanee, from British Columbia. (Big thanks to Maletis Beverage and Columbia Distributing, who provided us with beers for our taste-off. It would have been hard to find some of these without their help.) The others are familiar and somewhat expected names:
Coors Banquet Beer
Heineken (Netherlands)
Kokanee (Canada)
Miller High Life
Modelo Especial (Mexico)
Pabst Blue Ribbon
I won’t have a follow-up here on who took home the gold medal—that wasn’t really the point, anyway—but listen to our next show. We ended up having a philosophical debate about what actually qualifies as a mass market lager. At what point does a beer have too much flavor to qualify? Meantime, go listen to this episode.