This Is My Blood: Nightmare on East Elm Street

Here's another entry in a seemingly never-ending quest to drink every style of beer this year. There are a lot of them, some of them more obscure than others, so I think at this point I can admit that this list (found HERE) is going to be incomplete by December 31st. But I'm still trying! Here are three more that I've had in the past week.

Roggenbier
(#50)
Exemplified by Wacker Imperial Rye Altbier

Look, I don't even know if this altbier is a roggenbier. If not (probably not), then it's close enough to talk about anyway. "Roggenbier" isn't a term I see that often. It doesn't appear on Beer Advocate, for instance. But Tasting Beer insists that it is a thing, devoting a whole two sentences to it in the "Continental Ales" chapter. It probably isn't globally ubiquitous enough to have made the "beer styles list," but what can ya do, right?

Okay, so we talked about Bavarian Dunkelweizens, and how they are basically hefeweizens but with dark malts added, giving it a caramel flavor that hefeweizens otherwise don't have (and a brown color instead of a golden one). Roggenbiers take it one step further, and replace the ingredient of wheat with malted rye. According to the book, this gives roggenbiers notes of "deep fruit/tobacco."

This beer I drank the other day, the Wacker Imperial, definitely had shades of those flavors (maybe leathery more than tobacco-y). I've seen the term "sour" associated with roggenbiers around the internet, and I don't think the Wacker has anything that could be considered sour, even lightly. And let's not forget that this was an imperial, meaning that every flavor was doubled, so I dunno, maybe this Wacker was akin to a roggenbier on steroids?

None of this is making the idea of categorizing beer styles any easier, by the way. I would love if I could walk into a bar and say "pour me a roggenbier, barkeep" so that I knew for certain what the fuck I was drinking. The waitress at the Malt House was probably just surprised I didn't order a whiskey/PBR-chaser combo, and most likely knew about as much about roggenbiers as I do.

American Light Lager
(#30)
Exemplified by Coors Light

Considering the utter dominance of Bud, Miller, and Coors in the American beer scene, you might've thought that this category would be more deserving of prominence than what is practically a footnote in this blog post. It's safe to say that, in my life, I've had more American light lagers than every other beer style combined. Conversely, the fact that this is probably true for you too means that I might not have a whole lot to say about it that hasn't already been said.

Here's a fun fact, though: light beer was originally a diet beer marketed toward women in the 1940s. It was only masculinized by Miller years later, with the misspelling of "Lite" purposefully created to dispel the notion that it was "light," i.e. for women.

This beer is "light" because the enzymes used are more efficient at breaking down all the starches into fermentable sugars. The more simple sugars, the more yeast is able to convert to alcohol, and the less residual carbohydrates are left over. Fewer carbs, as all you keto dieters know, is healthier for you ("healthier" in quotes, I guess, because you are still drinking beer, after all). Compare this to a lager like Bud Heavy, which has more than 10 grams, or a stout, which could have north of 20.

The trade off, of course, is that there is less alcohol content in each beer. This is good or bad, depending on which direction you are approaching your beer drinking. If you are approaching it from the left of alcoholism, then this is probably a good thing—it's going to make your natural tendencies to black out that much harder to actually achieve. If you are approaching it from the craft beer realm, i.e. you are used to beers that are much heavier, and perhaps you are only going to have three beers in one night no matter what beers they are, then you might find that light lagers are not to your satisfaction.

I would take anyone in the latter category with a grain of salt when they are talking about light lagers, myself included. They don't exist to be "tasted" or "examined." They exist to be swilled in high quantities. Pretending that light lagers are something more than they are is a disservice to both the drinker and the drink.

Like, when you look in Tasting Beer, you see that Randy Mosher claims that light lagers are "really not recommended as a companion to food." This is completely misunderstanding the idea of light lagers. This is Randy Mosher approaching a Coors Light as a person who writes entire books about beers. This is a person who has probably never taken a 24-pack of Beast Light into the woods and split it with a friend on a cold February night. It's not that light lagers don't pair well with anything, it's that they pair well with everything.

And you'd only know that if you grew up on light lagers. I'm proud to say that I did.

Pumpkin Ale
(#81)
Exemplified by Nightmare on East Elm Street (among others)

We've already talked about pumpkin beers a little bit, and I'm sure there will be ample opportunities to talk about them again in the coming weeks, but for now, I wanted to briefly look at them from a "beer styles" perspective. What differentiates a pumpkin ale from any other style of beer?

I guess the first thing I'd point out is that "pumpkin beer" really covers a wide range of already established styles of beer, and simply adds a bit of "pumpkinness" to them. There are pumpkin ales, pumpkin lagers, pumpkin porters, pumpkin hefeweizen, pumpkin barley wines, etc., etc. "Pumpkin beer" doesn't exist in a vacuum; it's always beer plus pumpkin.

So the second thing I should point out is that the thing that usually makes something a "pumpkin beer" is not necessarily pumpkin flavors, but more of a pumpkin pie flavor. Ya know, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, that kind of thing. Not saying that pumpkin beers never taste like the gourd itself, but it's definitely rarer than the pumpkin-associated spices.

While I may consider pumpkin beers hit-or-miss in general, I am a big fan of the fact that, all of a sudden, there is this whole other world of beer that suddenly unlocks itself after Labor Day. So many additional beers to try! I can't imagine how excited I would be if my pumpkin beer was my favorite style. It's not, but I don't hate it, so I say: bring it on.

NOTES

BEER: Nightmare on East Elm Street

GENRE: Pumpkin Beer

ABV: 5.8%

BREWED BY: Conshohocken Brewing Company

LOCATION: Conshohocken, Pennsylvania

PURCHASED AT: IGA

PAIRED WITH: nothing, because we drank it later in the night, and I can't imagine that pumpkin beer goes well with many foods, especially not the chicken fajitas that we had for dinner (though this can's label helpfully suggests to pair it with candy corn)

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5

BEER COUNT: 356.5