The Problem with Imports

Hallo Esteemed Comrades,

I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to run long distances for a few weeks after running a marathon, so this week will be a shorter post (not short, shorter) on imported beer and its follies, a sort of part one of a two-parter on off-flavors, which is on the mind since we at MacLeod recently had our approximately annual off-flavor tasting. Each year I enjoy the spiked beers more and more, and I don’t know if that means I’m reaching Peak Beerperson, or if I’ve crossed the edge of the circle back into the purgatory of amateurism, trapped in an all-beer-is-good-beer hell of my own design. 

The Beer’s Done, Now What?

Brewing beer without off-flavors may be tough for homebrewers, especially to my strict standards of flawlessness, but it’s a game that’s been optimized and endlessly won by many new US craft breweries, and certainly the vast majority, if not all, of the old-world European breweries that import into the US (here I’m excepting newer craft entries, like those from Germany). And yet, somewhere between their Brite tanks and my fridge, some adverse transformation takes place, especially with older bottles (read: what feels like 98% of the available imported bottles). How is it that what I know for a fact were once incredible beers turn to ash in my mouth? The answer lies in temperature and time.

Holding back the microbial horde

There are essentially three packaging issues that can harm beer quality, and let’s say roughly two handling issues (don’t you dare @ me), namely:

Packaging

• Infection

  • Takes time to appear (perhaps a few weeks)

  • Rare in professional setups

• CO2 Loss

  • Immediate effect

  • Unavoidable to some degree, but often accounted for

• Oxygen Ingress

  • Takes time to appear (the effects are staggered and temp-dependent; let’s say a month at least in normal circumstances)

  • Unavoidable to some degree, but mitigated largely proportional to the cost of the rig

Handling

• High/Fluctuating Temps

  • These accelerate chemical degradation of the beer, largely through redox reactions if yeast is absent (that’s the first of three incredible, if technical, articles on the subject)

• Light

  • This is the source of the famous “light struck” flavor evident in Corona’s clear-bottle beers, though interestingly not their cans (for obvious reasons)

In packaging, for this discussion, it’s oxygen ingress which we’re concerned with, and something that, even on the most incredible rigs (read: large breweries, in this context German Lager breweries), is unavoidable to some degree. This excellent article on the subject suggests a drop in perhaps 82% of oxygen pickup, which naturally buys these breweries’ beers a lot more time in the tasty zone.

And yet

And yet, pretty much every (non-kegged) import beer I’ve consumed in the last three years has made me sad deep, deep down. Why? Why hasn’t the endless R&D budgets of these huge breweries solved the sad beer problem, and what even is that problem?

The answer is two-fold. First, as heavy-handedly hinted at above, it’s the arrow of time’s fault. Lowering your packaging oxygen helps, but only to some degree - this article (which I’ll blindly trust for illustrative purposes) shows an insane ~91% drop in shelf life for beers packaged with .5 mL of headspace per bottle vs 2 mL of headspace (which is proportional to oxygen content). 

Second, there’s temperature. That same graph shows a halving of shelf life for beer stored at 86˚F vs 43˚F, and this is largely due to a cool effect ascribed to the Arrhenius Law, wherein, roughly speaking, biological activity doubles with every increase by 10˚C (18˚F). By this rule, beer at 86˚F would “transform” in some sense, that its clock would run faster, by 2.39 times or so, which lines up with that doubling (granted, I’m cherry-picking my data - the chart has much higher ratios for different oxygen levels).

So these are my enemies, and the reasons that, over several months, an import beer stored at room temperature (*screams internally*) is dead by the time I grab it, which I do with vanishing frequency. And this is, I suspect, the reason that kegs are generally a way safer bet than bottles - the prevailing wisdom is that this is due to the larger oxygen ingress in bottling, which I hardly doubt, but the real nail in the coffin is the longer delay between breweries and bars for bottles vs kegs (unsubstantiated) and the more common storage of bottles at room temp as opposed to kegs (also anecdotal).

But there’s one more quirk in this story.

The Customer is Always Right

The customer is, in fact, always wrong, and this is no exception, though perhaps due to no innate lack of taste on their behalf, but due to the wide prevalence of deteriorated beer. The argument is summed up nicely in that article linked to above:

Barry Axcell and Phill Torline, in an interesting if provocative article, argue that most beers are consumed during Stage B. During this period beer flavors are undergoing discernable change, and the authors suggest that the changes are at the root of consumer dissatisfaction. Among other things, they cite the so-called import paradox as partial evidence of this theory, the paradox being that a definite proportion of the beer-consuming population actually prefers beers in Stage C. (Here, “import” means any beer consumed at a significant distance from where it is brewed.) These authors noted the stability of flavor in Stage C and “learned prejudices” (such as prestige of the beer and packaging) as the keys to this paradox. Statements like “If Pilsner Urquell has HSA, then I want my beer to have HSA,” often seen in the internet discussion groups devoted to beer, illustrate the apparent validity of this point. Stage B flavors, on the other hand, appear to have very few advocates.

The “Stage” system being a three-tiered system, wherein beer in Stage A is fresh, Stage B beer (as stated) is in transit from A to C, and Stage C beer is stable, but damaged by temperature, oxygen, and time. Guinness is a great colloquial example, hailed as incredible fresh but clearly somewhere between decent and great, depending on the bar, in the US. I’m not so much annoyed by this claim, which I believe, than by its use as an indirect braggy way to say “I’ve been to the Guinness brewery.” Just say that, dude, save me the interpolation. In my experience, it’s the light lagers of Germany that are rock-your-shit good when fresh, but, as with Guinness, between good and great here (with maybe one or two exceptions; Wurstküche is your best bet in LA, in my opinion, though I’m very curious about Hinterhof, and RIP Lorelei)

Conclusion

The punchline here is not that imports suck, but that, for me, the game is to enjoy them as fresh as possible, via kegs in reputable bars, in order to avoid the insanely depressing time-ravaged examples on shelves. Fortunately, I work at a brewery, where the beer is all super fresh (sometimes mere days old), and never displays these off-flavors, and where I can even get Cask Beer, which has the intriguing quality of playing with these time-based changes, often to its advantage, time being, as proven by lagering, not always a bad thing (usually when there’s yeast around, or at very low temps and in the absence of oxygen, which yeast scrub out very efficiently during fermentation).

So yeah, grab a 4-pack of some of our lovingly- and carefully-packaged beer today, and drink it sooner than later!

Cheers,

Adrian “Don’t @ me, bro, please” Febre