I was at a soccer game on Wednesday night and one of the vendors was selling Lakefront's New Grist, touted as a pilsner style brewed with sorghum and rice. It was an enjoyable beer and I'd recommend it to anyone who is looking for gluten free beer.
I was on a brewery tour one time at Lakefront. By the way, I highly recommend this tour. The tour was led by one of the founders of the brewery, Jim Klisch. At the end of the tour, there was a woman there that was talking to Jim, and Jim was giving her a case of beer. After she left I approached Jim and asked him what he had given her. He said that she had a gluten allergy and he had given her a case of short fills of New Grist. He said that usually the staff takes home the short fills, but New Grist is awful and no one wants to take them home.
I'm not picking on New Grist. I've never actually tried it. And I love Lakefront. I've been on the tour a number of times and I just thought this was kind of funny.
IMHO new grist is way better than bards or redbridge but not as good as gf Homebrew..why is it so hard to produce a good/decent gf commercial beer if people can do it in their basements?
igliashon said:I don't think it's a lack of care and dedication. That's like saying Bud/Miller/Coors sucks because the people making it don't care about the flavor--that's patently false. The BMC folks care about flavor possibly even more than the average craft brewery, or at least they invest waaaaaaay more money into ensuring that their flavor is exactly what they want it to be, every single batch. Bard's/New Grist/Red Bridge are what they are because it's as close as they can get to BMC, which they presume is what people want because BMC makes up over 90% of the market share of beer sales in the U.S.; if you're gonna try to emulate a non-GF beer as a gluten-free brewer, why wouldn't you emulate the beer style preferred by over 90% of beer drinkers in the U.S.?
And they're not *bad* beers; it's just that we homebrewers tend to favor less-common styles, and the ubiquitous homogeneity of light lagers bores us. I'd wager that if instead of making light lagers, BMC was making brown ale or IPA, then Bard's/New Grist/Red Bridge would have been brown ales or IPAs, and we homebrewers would be scoffing at those styles just as much. It's just how our psychology works. We're not joiners or followers, we have an in-born contempt for the mainstream! But we shouldn't forget about the fact that yes, actually, lots of people *like* light lagers, and that these commercial light lagers are actually exemplary for their style and completely successful at being what their brewers want them to be. We're just bored with the style, that's all.
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