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Thursday, August 7, 2008

Three chips or a walk to the Pub


Light beer, low carb beer, extra filtered and low calorie. It’s all beer but it is beer engineered for a sale more than for a sip.

Without going into all the technical and chemical engineering malarkey about how yeast and enzymes and malt and fermentables all combine and interact to become wonderful lovely beer, I will just say that beer ‘works’ at certain temperatures and in certain ways to come up with a beer tasting liquid of around 5% alcohol by volume and around 9-12% carbohydrates if left alone. Different malts, hops, yeasts and water can affect the taste profile, but the alcohol and carb levels kinda stay consistent.

If you want a low alcohol or low carb drop, you need to mess with the basic elements and the processes in a laboratory type setting by boffins in white coats with no friends and beer is all about friends so what’s the point? Really?

I have researched and analysed all the guff and whatnot surrounding carbs and beer and am compiling a very comprehensive post once I have fact checked it all. Stay tuned.

I will leave you all with this to ponder. If a full strength, craft brewed beer contains around 15 grams of carbs per stubby, and 100 grams of salt and vinegar chips contains about 67 grams of carbs, and low carb beer contains about a third of the carbs of regular beer, then the difference is about three chips. Or, cop the carbs and go for a walk to the pub or the bottle’oh instead of driving and the carbs are gone. Maybe we beer drinkers could outdo the greenies and the tree huggers and start a ‘carb-offset’ program?

There are plenty of very good beers going around at the minute and if you get out somewhere nice and try one you just might surprise yourself. Go on, find a new ‘favourite’.

Drink low carb beer if you like the taste, but don’t drink it because it is ‘good for you’. Then the marketing men get to win. Those bastards.

Cheers,
Prof. Pilsner