Twelve years in the past, Stone Brewing co-founder Greg Koch produced a relentless four-minute compilation of various brewers espousing the tenets of craft beer, referred to as “I Am a Craft Brewer.” It’s the sort of tacky, dated video that was on the time a rallying cry for an thrilling business sticking it to Massive Beer. Alongside beliefs like “integrity,” “custom” and “fashion,” the brewers specify they’re superior to macro beer due to an omission: “I don’t use rice in my beer.”
All through craft beer’s earlier a long time, rice was an adjunct related nearly solely with Budweiser and Coors, a low-cost shortcut to producing as mild a beer as attainable—rice yields fermentable sugars for yeast to thoroughly convert with out residual sugars hanging round, making a crisp, dry beer. However so much has modified in 12 years. Rice is now not synonymous with subpar brewing or watered-down taste, simply as craft beer is now not the David to Massive Beer’s Goliath.
That business maturation, and the decreased pressures of poisonous fandom—nobody’s boycotting your brewery anymore if you happen to promote shares to a company overlord, nor if you happen to put rice in your beer—has allowed craft brewers extra freedom to discover a place for the grain.
Some breweries, like Philadelphia’s Attic Brewing Co. and Oregon- and Washington-based Chuckanut Brewery, have been exercising an appreciation for Japanese rice lagers like Asahi and Sapporo. In Japan, these lagers have a tendency to make use of increased percentages of rice than their American macro counterparts, and the rice is extra of an integral a part of the nation’s brewing custom—Japan enlisted German brewers to assist them set up lager-brewing within the nineteenth century, however utilized these methods to their very own high-quality rice provide, which was extra considerable than barley.
Brewers additionally more and more see a possibility to create pairings for rice-based meals. “We’re large followers of sushi and will solely discover macro Japanese beers when out round city,” says Rawley Macias, head brewer at Rouleur Brewing Co. in Carlsbad, California, whose Raida Japanese Lager blends white rice with pilsner malt and likewise incorporates a Japanese hop, Sorachi Ace. Equally, Chuckanut and El Segundo Brewing Co. in Los Angeles initially brewed their rice lagers to meet requests from restaurant chains, Din Tai Fung and Japonica, respectively. Chuckanut’s beer for Din Tai Fung was referred to as an “Asian-style lager”; the brewery’s personal present model is a “Japanese-style lager” combining a rice lager and Chuckanut’s in style helles lager.
Rupee Beer, in the meantime, celebrates Indian delicacies and components. “Rice beer is much less a few development and extra about how we grew up within the Indian restaurant enterprise,” says co-founder Sumit Sharma, whose household has been within the business for many years. “We at all times felt the worldwide import beers and craft choices out available on the market had been by no means really brewed to pair with the wealthy and spicy taste profiles of worldwide meals like Indian, Thai, Center Japanese, and many others.,” and Basmati Rice Lager was made to suit the invoice. It’s brewed with each rice and corn in addition to barley, primarily based on a standard Indian recipe. India has its personal historical past of rice lagers, counting each industrial examples and home-brewed variations; Sharma says his father, grandfather and uncles used to home-brew with their very own basmati crops.
Others see the crisp, dry profile rice can yield as a canvas to higher spotlight hops. Attic Brewing in Philadelphia leans into that hoppy potential with its Profane Rice Lager. Made with Abstrax BrewGas—a mixture of extracts of terpenes, the compounds present in hashish and hops—it has an “further dank” profile, says co-founder Laura Lacy. Attic additionally utilized Motueka hops, which have a lime taste that Lacy says works effectively with the rice lager.
And different brewers, nonetheless, highlight the flavors of the rice itself. Whereas El Segundo’s Harvest Legend Rice Lager started as a beer for a Japanese restaurant, it has developed right into a platform for showcasing native agriculture by means of using California-grown Calrose rice. Harvest Legend successfully delivers a well-known rice taste as a result of, as El Segundo vice chairman and COO Tom Kelley explains, brewers add complete rice to their mash with out first cooking it. (Most brewers, against this, would cook dinner the cereal first to unleash fermentable sugars.) Skipping that pre-mash gelatinization step means extra of the rice’s taste can infuse into the mash, and the ensuing lager has the aromatics and dry-finishing but rounded mouthfeel of a bowl of rice.
Greater than a decade after “I Am a Craft Brewer,” although, a rising variety of breweries are utilizing rice to make the crisp, dry types the grain has at all times been identified for. Cody Morris, director of brewing operations at San Diego’s Harland Brewing Co., says the motivation for the Japanese Lager was to make one thing “insanely crushable.” And Sam Richardson, co-founder of Brooklyn’s Different Half Brewing Co., says that the brewery’s Poetry Snaps Rice Lager is “particularly easy-going and lower-ABV, so it’s good to have round to enrich the huge double IPAs we’re identified for.”
Most brewers don’t brew with one hundred pc rice, as an alternative incorporating conventional malted barley for a stability in each mouthfeel and taste. It’s this proven fact that some say is the largest sticking level relating to client training. Lacy says immediately’s taproom visitor certainly is much less stunned to discover a rice lager at a craft brewery, and extra inquisitive about whether or not a rice lager is gluten-free (solely the uncommon 100-percent rice iterations are). As soon as the hurdle of explaining grain payments has been cleared, it appears the present craft beer drinker is happy about lighter lagers of their favourite taprooms, extra open to completely different components, and, says Richardson, additionally trusting of their craft brewers. In spite of everything, simply because craft brewers are utilizing an adjunct macro brewers use, it doesn’t imply they’re additionally utilizing the identical strategies and making the identical beer.
“Every of us [craft brewers] has our personal philosophies of strategies, recipes, fermentation, filtering or not filtering—that’s what makes it craft and why every of us have different-tasting beers,” says Chuckanut co-owner Mari Kemper. Particularly with growing demand for mild lagers and lower-ABV choices, some say craft beer’s lager renaissance remains to be in its infancy, and rice lager is simply one of many types inside that class that brewers can put their very own spin on.
