Detail from "Sausage truck" by Tuppus (Flickr, Creative Commons)
At some point in the last twenty years, the concept of the ‘premium sausage’ emerged: a banger with fewer additives, better quality meat and stronger flavours.
The problem with premium sausages? They’re sometimes too meaty — they lack a cohesive texture — and just don’t taste like sausages.
Yes, some really cheap sausages are downright nasty, made entirely of salty breadcrumbs dyed pink, but, really, the point of sausages is to make good use of offal and fat. They’re supposed to be full of crappy but delicious meat, fat, flavourings and, yes, breadcrumbs.
How does this relate to beer? After much experimenting, we have to conclude that we can’t taste the difference between whole leaf hops, pellets, extracts and oils, at least not in normal pub-going conditions; refusing to use sugar in beer on purity grounds seems to be missing a trick; and one of our favourite bottled lagers, Svyturys Ekstra Draft, uses rice in its grist, and we’re sure there are others.
Maybe more beers made lovingly but with cheaper ingredients would help to bring the price down? As long as brewers were transparent about it, we wouldn’t mind at all.
But they won’t be transparent about because they know there are people who won’t buy the beer because of how it’s made. You won’t find too many Anglophone beer snobs queuing up to criticise Pilsner Urquell. Would that change if the label said “BREWED WITH FINEST CORN SYRUP” on it? I think so.
Actually, unless we can taste the difference, who cares if they’re transparent?
Are you suggesting that the beer world is riddled with pointless dogma and irrationality?
I must say I care about transparency. Where a beer comes from and what it’s made from are important to me. I consider them part of what I’m paying for, particularly if I’m paying an above-average price. If it’s tuppence a pint I won’t cause too much fuss.
I’ve never seen any justification for alcoholic drinks being exempt from ingredient listing laws. Would you be in favour of extending the exemption to, say, sausages?
Zak — well, yes (again!), but the point here is that small producers saddle themselves with a burden if they insist on using only the best ingredients, etc. etc., which might not even make the best beer.
TBN — it is odd how some beers are very clear about their ingredients (especially German ones) while others obfuscate. The really sneaky trick is “made with”, as in “made with the finest East Kent Goldings” (5% of toal, with the rest being whatever was cheap this year).
We value transparency, and would tend to feel warmer towards a beer with cheaper ingredients and transparent labelling than one with ‘the finest’ ingredients and weaselly product info.
Stella did in fact go with “made with the finest corn syrup”, didn’t they? (“Contains only four ingredients: Water, Hops, Maize and Barley” or something like that.)
It’s not actually the ingredients that make a really crap beer so crap, but the processes, and that is something that people should once and for all get through their thick skulls. Stella is crap, not so much because it brewed with corn syrup, but because it’s brewed on the cheap and “lagered” only for a week or so.
It’s also funny how some microbrewers are strongly against the use of sugar for brewing and then go on to brew a “Trappist” or an “Abbey”. Morons.
And sausages, that’s another thing of people not understanding history. The finest cuts were eaten right away, other bits were smoked, what was left was chopped, mixed with spices and other animal bits and suffed into some instestines…
I would guess that the actual cost of ingredients (as opposed to energy costs, rent/rates, distribution, salaries, general overheads, VAT, duty, retailer’s margin etc) makes up well under 10% of the cost of a bottle of beer, even less so for a pint in the on-trade. So skimping on ingredients just to save money is unlikely to make any significant difference to the end-user price.
Maybe the point is more that you will get a more drinkable and balanced beer by not sticking to all-malt purity, just as you would get a less palatable sausage made from 100% lean meat.
Curmudgeon — yes, that final para needs an “also”, as in “also help to bring the price down”. The main point is, as you say, that using only barley malt/whole leaf hops doesn’t necessarily produce the best beer.
Garrett Oliver suggests provenance goes to credibility in terms of being a ‘craft’ brewer’, so you’d expect transparency if a brewers’ proposition is along the ‘craft’ lines (see the blurb for the new Harbour Brewery launching in Cornwall tomorrow).
Great Divide make a beer called Samurai which has rice in it. When it gets warm it smells like Budweiser. A turn-off, I must say.
Purely on the subject of meat – and I’m not drawing any parallels with beer – I grew up in a family of Butchers. Grandfather, Father, 2 Uncles and Brother all were (and some still are) butchers. We did not want for quality, Scottish beef, and grew up never really tasting a supermarket sausage or bacon.
Guess what I craved more than anything when I was a kid?
Cheap burgers, burgers from Fairground vendors of dubious origin, kebabs, sausage sandwiches and nasty-ass Hot Dogs on matchday at Elland Road. There’s no point to this comment, obviously, just thought it fit in nicely with your theme.
I lived in Germany for 2 years. Good sausage coming out of my ears. But when Walls launched frozen British Bangers (you oven-cooked them and they looked and tasted just like a mass-market banger), and we sold them at Naafi, I was all over them. Even bought frozen British sliced white bread to make sarnies…
That brings back memories of being an Army brat in Celle sometime in the 1970s/80s.
Apparently as I child I would peel bratwurst and chuck the offending skin over my shoulder.
Sid — good point — craft brewing being such a vague term, being transparent about ingredients, and using good ‘uns, is another way of a brewery making a case for their products being ‘craft’.
Leigh — literally nasty-ass hot dogs….
My name is Jon. I use sugar and hop extracts.
I like the tags on this post:
additives, hops, sausages, sugar
Replace one comma with a colon and you’ve got a really interesting beer…
MEAT STOUT!
Saveloy London Porter?
Full English Beer Geek Breakfast?
Come to NZ , then you will know about crap cheap sausages!
Then again my partner Sarah is the daughter of a Sussex Butcher and very particular about sausages, and many of the ‘premium snags’ don’t make the cut either.
Quite simply my favourite discussion on sausages!