Question: Where Does Light Beer Fit On The Flavor Wheel?

We received a ques­tion via our con­tact page and it was a great one. Here is the ques­tion from John, find our response after the link.

Love the pas­sion for beer! I was won­der­ing where light beer fits in the beer wheel? I am doing a report in a col­lege class and try­ing to explain how mass mar­ket­ing of light domes­tic beer has poi­soned the minds of young beer drinkers. I want to explain how much more beer has to offer. Any help or sug­ges­tions or where light beer would fall into on the wheel would be greatly appre­ci­ated. Thanks.

Hey John, how are you! I wanted to shoot you a quick answer to your ques­tion. First, and tech­ni­cally, the fla­vor wheel is sim­ply look­ing at char­ac­ter­is­tics of an indi­vid­ual beer’s fla­vor pro­file, so each light beer should have it’s own loca­tion on the wheel. How­ever, to answer your ques­tion fully, there is no place on the fla­vor wheel for light beer, and here’s why.

Dur­ing the process of brew­ing nor­mal, non-light beer, brew­ers add hops, a vari­ety of malts and often other ingre­di­ents to add a wide assort­ment of fla­vors. How­ever, it’s quite the con­trary when brew­ing light beer. The major brew­eries have found that while adding these extra ingre­di­ents, you are also adding extra calo­ries, like 150+ extra calo­ries, even up to 350 and higher per 22oz. So, in an effort to appease the stan­dard igno­rant pub­lic, brew­eries have begun mar­ket­ing beer that “doesn’t make you fat”. If you look closer, how­ever, you will find that not have to add hun­dreds of pounds of expen­sive hops, choco­late, roasted malts, cof­fee and other ingre­di­ents save you thou­sands and thou­sands of dol­lars per batch.

To take it one step fur­ther, large brew­eries have begun to remove essen­tial ingre­di­ents (malts and hops) almost alto­gether from light beer. That’s why you’ll rarely find any color, aroma or taste in light beer. In it’s place, they brew with rice instead, which is con­sid­ered an adjunct ingredient.

So, the bot­tom line is that light beer does not have a place on the fla­vor wheel. In order to find a home on that wheel, by def­i­n­i­tion, you must have fla­vor. You won’t be pulling out flo­ral aro­mas or cit­rus fla­vors from a light beer. And you def­i­nitely will never see the glow­ing amber of a light beer.

EDIT: As pointed out by oll­l­llo, Light Beer tech­ni­cally does have a place on the fla­vor wheel, sim­ply because it’s beer. I, how­ever, have trou­ble plac­ing it. Maybe We can get oll­l­llo to write an arti­cle for us explain­ing the place light beer has in the beer world, and at the same time it’s place on the fla­vor wheel.

Also, I will omit the last part of this arti­cle, as it is argu­men­ta­tive based on pas­sion instead of fact, but not agenda.

With all of this being said, some peo­ple do believe that light beer has it’s place. They say, “craft beer isn’t for every­one”, or “at least they dis­play mag­nif­i­cent con­sis­tency”. To which I reply: No. You’re wrong. Light beers of the world ruin the art of beer and brew­ing. They do not use the appro­pri­ate ingre­di­ents, they “dumb down” the palates of the unknow­ing pub­lic, they put drunk­e­ness above fla­vor and expe­ri­ence, and they encour­age quan­tity over qual­ity. And in response to the con­sis­tency com­ment, how many glasses of water can you pour in a row that have the same fla­vor pro­file? Prob­a­bly as many as Miller­Coors and AB have pro­duced over the last decade.

Be Socia­ble, Share!

Dane

Dane Mentzer is a young man with a love for beer and a pas­sion for peo­ple. He prides myself on a well-established nose and palate, with a widely devel­oped vocab­u­lary. The only thing he loves more than beer is peo­ple, and that is where life gets excit­ing. In addi­tion to found­ing The Brew Bros, He has also estab­lished “Beer Into Water” a non-for-profit orga­ni­za­tion aimed at host­ing beer events in order to quench the thirst of chil­dren around the world. Stay tuned for more infor­ma­tion as that char­ity comes to fruition. His favorite style is the Impe­r­ial India Pale Ale, although it changes with the sea­sons. His favorite brew at the time is Arc­tic Panzer Wolf by 3 Floyds.

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4 Comments

  1. olllllo says:
    October 12, 2011 at 1:07 pm

    Really?
    I cant tell if you’re seri­ous or if this is a troll.

    The fla­vor wheel has no met­rics for level of inten­sity.
    This is an agenda based argu­ment and not one based on facts.
    You begin with an (inac­cu­rate) argu­ment about process. Does an argu­ment about the fla­vor of an apple begin with process?

    Cut to the chase and read the BJCP or BA guide­lines for this style of beer.
    Grain
    Apple
    Corn
    Lightly fruity, yeasty

    Reply
    • Danegerousds says:
      October 12, 2011 at 2:09 pm

      Inten­sity or lack of inten­sity was not at all my argu­ment. My argu­ment was that when lack­ing fla­vor, it becomes very dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble to char­ac­ter­ize some­thing by fla­vor. We’re not talk­ing about Pil­sners that have sub­tle fla­vor, we are talk­ing about muted fla­vors. Fla­vors that have pur­posely been subdued.

      Please, explain to me the error of my think­ing in terms of the process, too. Because the last time I brewed with GABF gold win­ning brew­eries, they weren’t adding adjuncts, and they also weren’t skimp­ing on ingredients.

      So no, inten­sity is not a fac­tor taken into con­sid­er­a­tion, but again I will argue, lack of fla­vor is very dif­fer­ent from mild flavor.

      I will say, in addi­tion, that I get excited about this argu­ment. I guess what you’re most likely say­ing is that as long as a beer is brewed accord­ing to beer stan­dards, it has a place on the fla­vor wheel, regard­less of the AMOUNT of fla­vor. So, based on that argu­ment, I will say that you are cor­rect (if I’m under­stand­ing you correctly).

      My counter to your argu­ment about the apple is this. I agree that the process is irrel­e­vant to the fla­vor wheel when speak­ing pre­cisely about BJCP judg­ing. How­ever, when under­stand­ing beer fla­vor, the “why” in addi­tion to the “what”, it helps to under­stand what is behind the fla­vors. The process also is extremely impor­tant in under­stand­ing off fla­vors and whatnot.

      I hope this makes sense. And yes, I’m argu­ing on pas­sion and agenda in the last para­graph. The dif­fer­ence is that my agenda is to pro­mote great beer, and make sure that peo­ple under­stand it. I have no stakes in any beer com­pany and I have no rea­son to argue other than because I love the topic.

      Reply
  2. olllllo says:
    October 12, 2011 at 2:35 pm

    Your propo­si­tion: “there is no place on the fla­vor wheel for light beer”.

    You begin with an expla­na­tion of the brew­ing process.

    The so called “nor­mal” process of brew­ing that you cite is no dif­fer­ent when brewing­ing up a light lager.
    Malt is used, gen­er­ally more than 60%. Less hops are used but they are the ever increas­ing high alpha hops designed for larger scale operations.

    You then talk about adjucts, rice in par­tic­u­lar but you don’t even men­tion corn which is abun­dant in Miller (like a can of corn when com­pared to Bud). Bud has a sig­na­ture green apple fla­vor due to the fer­men­ta­tion process they use. Miller is corny because of the adjunct they use. Corn and Apple are on the Fla­vor Wheel.

    Do you know why they use adjuncts? It’s not price. It’s not calo­ries. They used them to lighten the body (full­ness, vis­cos­ity) of the beer (see http://maureenogle.com/2006/12/the-myth-of-beer-a… ). Ini­tially adjuncts cost the brew­ers more than grain. They Amer­i­can Lager and Light Lager styles are born from adjuncts. They are a de-facto required ele­ment in brew­ing them.

    Your argu­ment about the sub­tle or muted fla­vors does not ring true either. There are sub­tle fla­vor in lighter styles like Kolsch that are rep­re­sented on the fla­vor wheel. Even intensely fla­vor­ful ales like RIS have sub­tle under­tones. If some­one drinks a Old Rasputin and picks up hints of anise are you going to deny it’s on the fla­vor wheel too? On the fla­vor wheel is Geran­iol. Tell me the last time you had a beer that screamed geran­iol. (I can. It was added to Bud­weiser in barely detectable amounts in a sen­sory exercise.)

    As far as your expe­ri­ence at brew­eries go, I’d ven­ture to guess that you weren’t brew­ing light lagers. If you’re going to toss around brew­ing expe­ri­ence we should ask Mitch Steele, Dan Carey and Randy Sprecher if they think there isn’t enough fla­vor in a Bud to exclude it off the fla­vor wheel. Each of these brew­ers worked at a major before doing their own thing. I don’t know them per­son­ally, but I’d wager they don’t see things your way (or even why brew­ing expe­ri­ence is rel­e­vant to this discussion).

    Reply
  3. Danegerousds says:
    October 12, 2011 at 4:20 pm

    See, that’s a good lit­tle dis­cus­sion, and I appre­ci­ate your con­tri­bu­tion to the arti­cle. My points ini­tially were far from where we ended up now, but I’m glad we’re here. You’ve made some won­der­ful points regard­ing the less promi­nent fla­vors and their role in beer, both craft and main­stream. You’ve also made good points regard­ing the brew­ing process of other (won­der­ful) beer styles. I appre­ci­ate your retorts and I will gladly and humbly say that I wrote the above with more heart than thought.

    Next time I’ll just say, “Get Bud off the same shelf as my Three Floyds”.

    Reply

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