I must say as well that when I commented I hadn’t had the benefit of your comment about distillation vs freezing. I’m sold, it’s a beer and yours is the best explanation I’ve seen on the topic!

Damn you for keeping me honest. You make very good points about my own inconsistencies. I guess none of us are perfect, eh? And of course, writers get no civility. ;-)

I did miss Pete’s earlier post, I’ll have to go back and read that one.

J

In the same post that you have excoriated Roger for telling BrewDog to grow up you have celebrated Pete Brown’s moderation. But Pete posted an almost identical rant to Roger’s about BrewDog on 8 November for their “schoolboy pranks” which included a very direct call to BrewDog to “either grow up, or get out.”

Likewise, finishing the post by suggestion it should all be about the beer when BrewDog’s controversy seeking publicity seeks to make the story about anything but the beer – James wearing a penguin suit, that’s marketing. Launching a 32% beer on the day that the Scottish Parliament is debating an anti-alcohol bill, that’s akin to wearing a bedsheet to a Black Panther rally and wondering why everyone’s upset. I think Pete says it best: “There’s no place in the craft beer world for someone who seeks publicity by winding up regulatory bodies just for the sake of it, sending an early Christmas present to neo-prohibitionist Op-Ed writers in the process.” How is it that Roger’s is a ‘tantrum’ (@Alan) when Pete’s isn’t?

@Brian has already made the point above that there is a legitimate discussion to be had over whether this is a beer or something else. Despite how it begins life, whisky is not beer. Just because this is frozen rather than heated may not change that, I don’t know. I love whisky and I would be fascinated to try the Penguin – but I’m happy to discuss whether it is, in fact, beer.

Thanks for your comment. It’s not actually the same as distilling. In distilling, the alcohol is extracted, leaving all the solids behind. What becomes the distilled liquor is what’s left when the solids are removed.

By contrast, in the Eisbock method, which has a long tradition in German brewing, you freeze the beer, removing the water, which makes the beer more concentrated, thus upping the percentage of alcohol. But you keep everything that’s discarded in distillation, the solids, which include the proteins, dextrins, hops, hop resins, fiber, malt, malt color, etc. As a result, in a way the process is the opposite of distillation. All of the ingredients that makes it a beer are retained, only some of the water is removed. So what’s left I’d say is most definitely a beer.

Here’s more about Eisbock, from the German Beer Institute: http://www.germanbeerinstitute.com/Eisbock.html

As for Sake, I’d also argue that it is a beer, a rice beer, because it’s fermented from a grain using a process similar to beer, whereas as wine is naturally fermented fruit.

Wikipedia’s take:

Sake is also referred to in English as rice wine. However, unlike true wine, in which alcohol is produced by fermenting the sugar naturally present in fruit, sake is made through a brewing process more like that of beer. To make beer or sake, the sugar needed to produce alcohol must first be converted from starch. But the brewing process for sake differs from beer brewing as well, notably in that for beer, the conversion of starch to sugar and sugar to alcohol occurs in two discrete steps, but with sake they occur simultaneously.

“By freezing the beer to concentrate it this way, they get the alcoholic strength.”

Isn’t this a type of distilling? If you’re freezing the beer and removing the ice to increase the alcohol, how is this any different than heating the beer to concentrate the alcohol (as whiskey distillers do)?

I want to define beer as “grains that have been fermented w/ yeast” but that would also include sake. So….?

Regardless, I’m interested in trying it and think that all the criticisms are unwarranted (except for questioning if it is beer, that’s legitimate).