Hacker News Reader

Comment by chasd00 | Hacker News Reader

The same holds for the large brewing companies. I toured the Budweiser plant in Ft. Collins once, one of the things they were very proud of is the fact that no matter where or when you buy a Budweiser it tastes like a Budweiser. It's no small accomplishment, i can taste the differences between batches with the small brewery stuff i like.

View on HN

You are so right about AB's consistency. I home-brew and am a certified cicerone. One of the absolutely hardest things to do in brewing is having consistency from batch to batch. One of the things that AB has been able to do to help here is develop innovative food chemistry processes to test ingredients prior to use and a chemical understanding of all the flavor compounds in their product so they can blend different brew batches together prior to packaging to achieve the same ratios of flavoring compounds. Both of which are processes largely unavailable to smaller breweries and home brewers.

Consistency in your product is crucial in the food and beverage industry, because a buyer needs to know what they're getting. If you've already successfully sold them on your product, the repeat sale is only going to happen if they can be assured they're going to get the same thing they liked the first time. Nobody in the industry understands the importance of consistency better than Anheuser-Busch. McDonald's is right there with them on understanding this. Food and beverages are products like anything else, and just like with any product, once you achieve product-market fit, it's important not to make changes that would eliminate or chip away at the fit you have with your customer base.

There's the apocryphal[1] story about the (Trappist? Belgian?) brewer-monk who, when asked about his favorite beer, answered "Budweiser" because of the consistency over millions of gallons.

The linked[1] article below also highlights that "quality light beers are incredibly difficult to brew". So here you have Budweiser/AB excelling on two fronts: a difficult brew and incredible consistency.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/light-bee...

I'm reminded of the (perhaps apocryphal) story of how starbucks overroasts its coffee beans to achieve a consistent taste despite having multiple sources for beans (necessary due to its scale). the implication being that they sacrifice the average quality of the finished product to reduce variance.

is there a similar tradeoff in brewing? I do notice fairly obvious differences batch-to-batch in microbrews, but I would still prefer the worst batches of my favorite local beers to any AB product I can think of. are they trading away best/average taste for consistency, or is it more a function of the price point (microbrews being quite a bit more expensive)?

From what I've seen, the brewers at AB are world-class, and they have a very specific and longstanding flavor profile they target. I happen to also not be a fan of Budweiser, but it's been the same for decades and has a very loyal following. They are not brewing to a price point, they spend more on process and verification than any microbrewery to ensure that consistency, although they have introduced the use of adjunct brewing (rice) to make the materials cost fit their price point, and they were able to do it without changing the resulting product taste.

> I'm reminded of the (perhaps apocryphal) story of how starbucks overroasts its coffee beans to achieve a consistent taste despite having multiple sources for beans (necessary due to its scale). the implication being that they sacrifice the average quality of the finished product to reduce variance.

The version I'd heard was people associate the ashy taste and dark roast with higher caffeine, even though it's the opposite.

Yeah that's true, the Starbucks "house" beans they use in their stores are nearly soot, and the coffee tastes like it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com