essential food & beverage
Trendy Creamy Lactose
Won’t Go Home by Kyle Jacobson
But you can’t push lactose ‘round; lactose makes dough. I really want to hate what lactose is doing to beers. In some implementations, it’s like pouring honey over homemade pasta—an insult to the chef at the very least. But for the brewery, it’s brought in a bunch of non-beer drinkers, which is fantastic. And as far as the taste goes, after telling my inner purist to take a seat, it’s not too hard to see there are some brewers out there making it work with an adept showing of balance. Lactose, for starters, is simply milk sugar. It’s about a quarter of the sweetness of cane sugar and is, most importantly, nonfermentable. That means that all the sweetness from those sugars finds its way into the beer. Because lactose can be added at any point in the brewing process, with some ingenuity, brewers can turn one batch of their latest brew into two by splitting the beer into two vessels then adding lactose to only one during secondary fermentation.
lactose in most anything aside from Stouts is a recent trend, and the Milk Stout itself only goes back to 1907. Considered the first commercially available Milkshake IPA, Apocalypse Cow from 3 Floyds Brewing Company failed to garner much attention when it came out in 2008 (most likely because it was new rather than being a poor attempt), but now the style is everywhere. Last year, a lot of people thought the lactose craze had reached its peak. For better or worse, they were mistaken. As I’m writing this piece, I’m drinking Saugatuck Brewing Company’s Blueberry Maple Stout. Even though it’s the well-established Stout-withlactose style, to me, this beer had everything going against it. I love blueberry pancakes, why would I want the beer version of it? Is it sweet? Yes. As sweet as syrup? Just about. What the— Hold on one second, inner purist.
Opportunity, however, doesn’t equate to success. The reality is most of these lactose-focused pastry beers and milkshake takes are subpar. It makes sense when considering brewing with 42 | m a d i s o n e s s e n t i a l s
The hint of dryness in the backbone derived from the beer’s malt bill is actually doing a lot of work here in terms of managing the sweetness.
I’m able to pull apart the beer on my tongue and more easily identify flavors, as opposed to being lost in too many sweets. It certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and it’s stretching thin the idea of what is and isn’t a beer, yet there’s thought behind it. Something I can give a nod to and appreciate in both aim and execution. I won’t be hunting these down on a regular basis, but so what? Why does everything thrown at the wall of consumerism need to stick? To get all sides of the argument, just listen to discussions happening at any brewery taproom. “I feel like both parties are super vocal about it,” says Danny McMahon, head brewer at Hacienda Brewing Company. “There’s a lot of people who are like, ‘Absolutely
