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I love beer. And I also love hard alcohol like whiskey and cognac. But literally every single high-alcohol beer I have tried (anything over 5% ABV) just tastes like crap to me. I have tried many different types, and they all just taste like rubbing alcohol.
Is there something I am missing about these things? Are they just something people drink to get drunk faster? Note that I am not talking about ales, which tend to have a greater alcohol content compared to lagers, but normal lagers with a high ABV %.
Pretty sure I am your human antithesis in terms of beer preference
Location: St Thomas, USVI - Seattle, WA - Gulf Coast, TX
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hakkarin
I love beer. And I also love hard alcohol like whiskey and cognac. But literally every single high-alcohol beer I have tried (anything over 5% ABV) just tastes like crap to me. I have tried many different types, and they all just taste like rubbing alcohol.
Is there something I am missing about these things? Are they just something people drink to get drunk faster? Note that I am not talking about ales, which tend to have a greater alcohol content compared to lagers, but normal lagers with a high ABV %.
As long as you're only talking about lagers, I think I'm going to agree with you. There's really no reason for a lager/pilsner to have a greater abv than about 6% (try Lagunita's Pils, which is at 6%. It's good.).
If you're finding lagers with higher alcohol content than about 6%, they probably are brewed for buzz, not flavor. Just based on the raw materials and brewing methods with lagers, you'd probably have to do something to contrive the alcohol content to make it much higher.
Lots of other great beers with much higher abv's though!
Wife had Coop's DNR today, she didn't know it was 10% ABV. Malty, caramel, a touch of fresh hay, very drinkable with no bitterness, no hint of the higher alcohol content. Sticker shock when the bill came, $9 a pint.
I just bottled a Pliny The Elder clone (Plinian Legacy extract kit from North Brewer).
It's a double IPA and final gravity is 10.020 making 10.5% ABV.
It's one of the best ales I've ever tasted in my life, and you can barely taste any alcohol at all because the malt and hop character is so strong. A lot of it has to do with the dry hopping, as well as giving the yeast enough time to clean up the off flavors and diacetyl tasting notes.
Large commercial breweries ferment their beers only for a short period of time, and most use cheaper ingredients like rice, and generic yeast strains.
A real german lager takes months to brew and clean itself up. Coors, Budweiser and Sam Adams take under a week.
And this is why craft beers are so popular in 2015. Consumers are getting more educated.
I have to echo what so many others say. It is not that high-alcohol beers are inherently bad, it is simply the ones you were choosing. Also, although not definitive, I would say that any beer that specifically marketed itself as "high-alcohol content" would probably have been made more for that than for flavor and would most likely not be as good of a beer.
Try aging higher alcohol beers. They will usually mellow out over time. I pretty much quit drinking beer a while back but will indulge in one or two good ones on holidays or something like that. I prefer 10%+ beers for those occasions. I just like them better and not necessarily for the ABV, but I enjoy a thicker mouthfeel and my weakness is bourbon barrel aged stouts and barley wines. It is all subjective. I used to hate the burn of hard liquor but now I'm a bourbon fiend. I drink it on the rocks.
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