"Beer-swilling"?
I like beer. I really like beer. I brew beer. I know an awful lot about
it. I hope to be a certified beer judge soon.
One thing I do not do, though, is *swill* beer. That implies a certain
lack of respect for the brewer's art.
I am forced to drink Miller High Life in cans lately when I visit
a certain friend and when I do, I engage the swilling mechanism.
The point is that a major ingredient of what
they are calling "lite beer" is sugar. Think
now, after fermentation you get ethanol. One
might consider this cheapo beer to be beer mixed
with water and alcohol.
Much cheap beer is brewed with rice and flavored with chemicals.
It isn't even really beer. Sugar isn't used much in brewing. It's too
expensive for cheap beers and not useful for good ones.
Corn mash as well.
I seem to remember a budwiser can saying "brewed with the finest rice,
corn, barley and hops." The irony escapes most.
Kinda like saying; "Jimmy's jailhouse rotgut; brewed with the finest
rotting potato skins and mouldy raisins."
Then there are those mass-produced blasphemies that refer to themselves
as "micro-brews" (such as Killians Red) which use carmel coloring
to get darker colors typical of actual beer.
Watered down, chemical flavored saki. That's what many cheap beers
are today.
And the can gives that nice fragarance of aluminum, and that slightly
tangy metallic aftertaste.
Which begs the question; what is the beer of neutopia, and of monster
truck ortho-neutopia? No doubt there will be no lagers in neutopia.
Perhaps something like sumerian coriander ale; cloudy, flat & air-pitched
in openmouthed stone jars?
Fuel-Air Explosive Neutopian Ale
5 lbs Dutch Light dry Malt Extract
1.5 lb american pale malt
1oz chinook hops (I used pellets) 9% alpha
1oz Northern Brewer hops (ditto) 7% alpha
Red Star Ale yeast
1/2 lb jalepeno peppers, sliced on axis to make jalepeno disks
a supply of serrano or other small -n- not so spicy hot peppers
Do a simple extraction/sparge on the pale malt, add the extract, 3/4 oz of
the chinook hops, top off water if needed, and boil. After 45 minutes, add
the rest of the hops. Boil another 15, water to 5 gallons, then cool to
80F & pitch yeast.
Add the (well scrubbed) jalepenos to the secondary fermentor when primary
fermentation is finished. After 1 week, bottle with priming sugar. If you
want it hot, trim the stems from the serranos, scrub them and add one to
each bottle. Otherwise you should get a mild spicy tingle from the
jalepenos, harmonizing nicely with the bitter hops.
-Lupo