Idiots on Social Media Thread

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Aesop Poprock: Oct 21, 2008; Grimey Drawer

Xombie posted:

Every single one of them is lovely, in part because they use food additives in place of actual fresh ingredients. They use them for the same reason that many junk food companies do, and that is because it is cheap at the cost of taste. They are the frozen dinners of beers.

I'm not talking about any and all possible food additives ever used in all foods, this is about beer specifically. They are only included to water it down. They give the Bud/Miller/Coors companies a fatter bottom line, for no net positive on the consumer's end. It's not about health, it's about quality. Food additives as a whole are not necessarily evil. But they most definitely interfere with the chemical process of beer. There is an extremely noticeable objective difference between cheap beer full of food additives and anything a craft brewer can come up with.

There are about four basic ingredients to beer: malted barley, yeast, hops, and water. When you brew a beer, you heat the barley in water to mash it. This process produces the sugars. When you pitch in yeast, it eats the sugars and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide. When you add other sugars it changes the taste. Just like HFCS and imitation sugar taste like poo poo compared to real sugar, adding them to beer to speed up the process makes the beer taste like poo poo. But it's even worse, since we're talking about the actual chemical processes of producing beer, not just making a cheap alternative to sugar to sweeten foods. Corn and rice make beer cheaper, but taste far crappier.

Every blind test taste of products that have sugar and HFCS varients has resulted in almost everyone not being able to tell the difference. Same with impact it has on the body. If you think HFCS tastes noticeably different than cane sugar its likely just in your head.