Budweiser American Ale - The Ale Revolution Begins

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In October 2008 Budweiser will roll out a brand new beer and I am sure you will see a few ad's for it. It's called Budweiser American Ale and for the first time in a long long time a Macro Brewer will be pushing Ale instead of Lager.

The difference in ale and Lager is that Lager is fermented cold with yeast that stay on the bottom of the batch. Lagers are more crisp and cleaner tasting.

Ales on the other hand are brewed warm and the yeast floats on top. This makes of a stronger, sweeter more full bodied but cloudy beer.

Lagers rule when it comes to the market place but in the past 10 years more and more craft breweries have been making ale and taking away from market share from the big boys and their insipid weak tasting alcohol liquid they call beer.

So once I found this out I felt I should go onto the homebrewer forum to hear what people were saying and I was a little shocked.

First - the beer, here is what Anheuser Busch officially says about it. - it's an amber ale, 5.2 percent ABV. IBUs (International Bitterness Units) 25 to 28. It's made with two row pale barley and caramel malt. Bittering hops are Palisade, aroma hops spicy Saaz and Willamettes and piney, citrusy Cascades. It's also dry hopped with Cascades.

WOW - OK - breaking that down into layman's terms, they are making an ale, but deliberately going light on the hops... and deliberately choosing a yeast that won't have a lot of character... and they don't want it to have any sweetness....

But one thing that that strikes me is that Anheuser Busch has formulated a beer AND advertise's that beer as 'dry hopped and using top-fermenting yeast . . . . . Joe Common does not have a clue what that means so who are they advertising this too?? Ale and Craft brew drinkers.

But here is what most home brew people are thinking. This will lure normal Bud drinkers to try an ale just to see what the difference is and once they realize that ale actually tastes better then lagers, the lager drinkers will look for other ales to try, never to look back.

More macrobreweries are looking into ales and watching how this all shakes out. The ale revolution as begun. With "nostalgia beers" like PBR and now Schlitz being released (interesting story about Schlitz**) maybe some of the other macrobreweries will blow off the dust on their ale recipes.

On the bad side is you know that this beer will be at every bar in the country and might knock out the one craft beer they have on tap.

**Schlitz - As late as 1976 there was only one brewery selling more beer then Schlitz and that was Bud. But because of cost-cutting in the recipe and just some dumb mistakes the beer became, in what many drinker's thought — undrinkable, turning what was once the world's most popular brew into little more than a joke.

Pabst who now owns Schlitz (after the 1981 workers strike) interviewed old brewmasters and found notes about the original recipe and are once again be making the original brew. The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous. In fact in Milwaukee there is a waiting list for 6 and 12 packs because people are buying it so fast.

Still - is it nostalgia? or flavor.
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On August 23 1883 the trial of Frank James, Jesse James brother began. Frank turned himself in a year earlier. His brother Jesse was murdered the year before and thinking it was only a matter of time before he was also killed figured the courts might be a good way to NOT get killed.

It was better then he had hoped.

Even though his gang had killed many many people Missourians saw them as heroes who took money from ruthless bank and railroad companies and redistributed it to the poor.

hmmmm sounds oddly like another bank robber I have heard about.

After the trial began, several prominent witnesses testified to Frank's character and how he had fought for the South in the War between the North and the South. Rural Missourians were unwilling to convict the legendary Frank James. The jury found him not guilty.
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Here is something a kid wrote about the Olympics and Greece.

In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java. The reward to the visitor was a coral wreath. The government of Athen was democratic because the people took the law into their own hands. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn't climb over to see what their neighbors were doing. When they fought the Parisians, the Greek were outnumbered because the Persians had more men.

and in the same vain

Without the Greeks, we wouldn't have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns - Corinthian, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in "The Illiad", by Homer. Homer also wrote the "Oddity", in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Acutally, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

Seems pretty close to me!!
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have a great Thursday!

Rod