How often do breweries change the recipe for a beer?

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Hey Kate,

Is a brewery changing the formula of a popular beer common? In fact, I drink (and love) IPA for years, but I still encounter the same problem: I find a beer that I like, I drink it religiously for a year or two, when I start to have the impression that the taste changes. I know there's a certain level of familiarity going on, and I'm sure the hop beers are perhaps more intense, but I get the feeling that it's not limited to that. My tastes in other areas do not seem to change as much. I always eat the same food I ate in high school and I like it!

My example is Dale's Pale Ale. It was my favorite when it was hard to find, but as soon as it became ubiquitous, I did not like it anymore.

Thank you!
-Mike

Hey Mike,

Thank you for your good question. I contacted a few brewers – including brewer Oskar Blues, responsible for your beloved Dale's Pale Ale – to ask how often they changed or changed their recipes. But before explaining why and how often brewers change their recipes, let's also look at the psychological aspect of your question.

Yes, breweries are changing recipes. But our palates also evolve over time as new experiences change our perceptions. Maybe you've already thought that a cup of jalapeno-topping pepper was spicy, until you tried a phantom pepper. IPAs who have daringly tasted citrus and fruit notes for customers ten years ago, for example, may seem less dynamic today, due to the profusion of more tropical and fragrant hop varieties marketed in recent years. . And that does not mean anything about the mystique that scarcity confers on a beer.

Psychology aside, beer recipes fluctuate themselves. Remember that beer uses two agricultural products, malted barley and hops, which vary from year to year, season to season. With time changes, these ingredients can be very different from one crop to another, much to the chagrin of brewers.

"If you followed by heart the exact [beer] each recipe, and if you had different alpha acids from a different hop harvest from year to year, you could get more or less bitterness, "says Chris Goulet, managing partner of Birdsong Brewery in Charlotte, North Carolina. Take away. "We will make very small changes every time we make a beer because we adjust to these variations in the ingredients. The goal is that the taste is as consistent as possible. "

I've heard the same from every brewer I've talked to: sometimes it's necessary to tweak a recipe to get consistency. This may seem paradoxical, but making small adjustments to reflect changes in ingredients helps to achieve a more consistent product year after year. Hops in particular can vary from one annual harvest to another, which complicates the task of your IPA. If a brewery uses only one type of hops in an API and its characteristics change from one year to the next, this could have a significant impact on the taste of the beer.

"Master brewers can play with anything they want, but that will not exactly give you the same beer," says Ron Barchet, co-founder and brewmaster of Victory Brewing in Downington, Pennsylvania. "It's the misfortune of these hop beers, especially those that consume a jump. That's why most of our beers offer a hop mix with similar characteristics, so when that happens it's easier to adjust the recipe. "

Tim Meadows, master brewer at Oskar Blues in Longmont, Colorado, is using the example of the Centennial hops crop around 2010 and 2011. There was a Centennial hops shortage at that time – due to weather conditions and demand – and available hops are not available. always of the quality sought by the brewery. Oskar Blues decided to replace Centennial in some beers with a Cascade and Columbus hops mix that would create similar flavor and bitterness.

"The raw materials are not consistent and you have to make adjustments so that these raw materials blend in with what you want the vision of this beer to be," says Meadows. "Over the years, you can get closer and closer to your target."

As technology or ingredients improve, brewers are able to move closer to their goal of becoming the ideal beer. Quality control and badysis equipment has become more sophisticated in recent years; the technology of canning is much better than ten years ago; Chemists specializing in brewing are making more and more progress in understanding the interactions between ingredients such as yeast and hops.

"If we change something, it's because we want to do [our IPA] Higher Ground is more like Higher Ground, "says Goulet of Birdsong. "We have an idea of ​​what this beer should be and if we can make a small change to make it a beer more like that, we'll do it."

To what extent has the recipe of your beloved Osale Blues Dale's Pale Ale changed? Very little, says Tim Meadows, who has worked at Oskar Blues since 2008. Not long ago, he sat down with Craig Engelhorn, one of Oskar Blues' first brewers to be responsible for Dale's Pale Ale. (Engelhorn has since left Oskar Blues and now owns a distillery.)

"I asked him how he remembered the recipe for Dale's to be back in 2000," says Meadows. "We wrote our recipes on separate sheets of paper, without showing them to us. Then we went back and they were pretty much the same. "

According to Meadows, the flavor differences you've had in recent years are probably due to improvements in canning technology, which has reduced the oxidation of Dale's Pale Ale. If you prefer the previous version, well, maybe you like some oxidized taste in your lager.

In addition to improvements to improve consistency or quality, there is of course another reason why breweries can change a recipe: consumer demand. What beer drinkers expect beers today is not what they expected from beers 15 years ago. Long-time breweries sometimes change aspects of a beloved beer to better meet what customers want from a beer in 2019.

The posters for this film may well be the Prima Pils of Victory Brewing, the brewing German brewer brewed for the first time in 1996. Although it is one of Victory's most respected beers, the company recently found that Prima's sales had dropped two years in a row. It was the moment to change.

"It's my child, my favorite beer we make in the brewery, so I'm very protective of it," says Barchet. "But you can not continue doing the same thing if it does not work."

Barchet noticed that he was no longer able to drink the same amount of Prima as before. At the third beer, his palace was a little tired. The brewing team and he himself decided that slightly reducing beer's bitterness – from 50 bitter units to about 45 – might be enough. Victory brewers have also modified their process to incorporate Prima hops at a different stage of the brewing process – almost entirely in the hopback rather than the kettle – which gives the beer more aroma of hops with less of bitterness of hops.

"We are very happy with the way things went. It's a little more modern, because the taste buds are tasty and the market, "says Barchet. "We thought that if Prima would continue, we had to make it a bit more modern."

But there will be no mbadive announcement of change, no "New Recipe!" Label on 6-packs. Victory does not try to hide the change, says Barchet, but they do not try to scare away long-time Prima Pils drinkers either. This is a calculated and delicate risk to take with a revered beer: by making changes to improve the recipe, some of his frequent customers might now like the change. Barchet, for his part, has confidence in the new Prima and says it himself as a longtime fan.

"I do not think people will necessarily be able to choose change," he says. "I hope they just think" Wow, that's a good lot. It's a Prima lot that I really like. "