Sadlers - Mud City Stout 6.6%

Brewery: Sadlers

Beverage: Mud City Stout 6.6% (Bottled)

Style: Stout

Brewery Address:

 7 Stourbridge Road,
Lye,
Stourbridge,
West Midlands, DY9 7DG

Brewery Website: http://www.sadlersales.co.uk/

Comments:

Putting a Head Brewer and a Head Chef together could be a head butting recipe for disaster. A dangerous case of 'Too many heads spoiling the brew'. Well this dynamic duo is heading to the rescue of tired tormented taste buds throughout the land. This bottled beauty is a perfect pint of poetic harmonious heady flavours. Caramel sweet and smoky bitter dark malts combine with fresh vanilla pods and raw cocoa beans to compose a pure heady symphony of delight. Too often these types of drink can be a bit too Cocoa The Clown and taste sickly of dry grainy powdered chocolate thrown unceremoniously into your beer. This sensual stout, on the other hand, is a luscious wet dream of being afloat on a sea of liquid chocolate. It has managed to be both lush and bouncy, and yet still grown up and refined. Just like what I am.

It’s pukka class in a glass.
Head out and neck one.

Beer, Ingredient List Or Not?

Ingredient List Or Not

Views: Beer, Ingredient List Or Not

Information Websites:
http://www.foodreactions.org/allergy/additives/400.html






Comments:
Whether you're gulping mouthfuls of 'Spotted Dick',
slurping down a thick juicy 'Cock

Soup', or perhaps even dumping a steaming dollop of 'Shito Hot Chilli Sauce' into your cooking, you are still making an informed choice upon ingredients.

We can choose to avoid chemical additives, because each of those products has to, by law and by pain of death, include an ingredient list. Everything we drink or eat has this type of legal binding ingredient list except, that is, for alcohol drinks.

Why not?

Most beer, especially quality beer, is made from four wholesome, pure and tasty ingredients. Using just Barley, Hops, Water, and Yeast, it’s been possible to make many thousands of beautiful and very different beers, and proper brewing is still mainly a noble art. There are though, some underhanded brewers that are chemically disguising cheap insipid ingredients such as rice, maize corn, etc. by shovelling in colouring, sugar, sweeteners, flavourings and thickeners until their beers are mutton dressed as Lambic.

OK, you can now relax.
I’m not gonna get too technical and bore you with the science behind additives.
I won't be rattling on about chemicals such as propylene glycol alginate, and the way it adds a snotty, gummy, Vaseline like, gluey, meringue head on those indoctrination corporation McLagers and McAles, as that would be boring.
Neither am I going to rant on about reports of E150 colourings having circulatory system toxicity, or carcinogenic (cancer causing) properties. I promise not to weigh down this piece by going into why the Centre for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) are petitioning the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to revoke the GRAS (Generally Recognised as Safe) status of the E150 colourings. I’d also be sending you into the land of slumber with the mere mention that many drinks using the E150 colourings exceed the NSRL (No Significant Risk Level) by 1063% per 500ml bottle, and thus dive headlong, way beyond the Significant Risk Levels. 

Many Drinks Are Loaded With Over 10 Times
The Significant Risk Level For E150 Dyes

Yet believe it or not, that is not my main gripe here and the science is boring (believe me, I know just how boring because I've waded through shed loads of it). Anyway we also consume other food and drink products that further add to those risk levels. The BIG difference is in the knowledge we are given about these additives.

We are kept in the dark about the science of unnatural chemical additions to the food and drink that we put into our bodies, and hear many conflicting reports as to their safety. From childhood, we learn about the dangers of smoking, of drugs and of excessive alcohol consumption and can make educated choices regarding these. Alcohol drinks must legally exhibit their ABV, as well as scientifically documented medical guidelines regarding our intake. We can then set an informed benchmark for our own consumption. We have little or no education, though, when it comes to the dangers and/or side effects of consuming chemical additives, flavourings, sweeteners and E-Numbers etc. Even if we did know about this oily rainbow of additives, we still couldn’t possibly make an informed choice upon whether we want to ingest them or not. That's because there is seldom a full ingredient list on beer, wines or spirits. When a brewery does volunteer an ingredient list, those illusive and almost secretive additives are rarely on. Just try looking for them on brewery websites, literature, labels, etc. I have hunted these (invisible to the naked spy) ingredients down and it gives me a headache just thinking about it. Perhaps the Vogons have them filed somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.

Vogon's Filing System

If one Christmas, a friend gave your child a 'Dr. Frankenstein Jr. Chemistry Set' and the ingredients list read; rho iso-alpha-acid (RIAA), protease, E150c ammonia caramel, E220, beta-glucanase, silicone, E290, amyloglucosidase, E405 propylene glycol alginate etc you'd probably be concerned. Would you be concerned if you found out that a few underhand breweries were quite legally hiding them right under your nose? Hiding them not under the carpet, but IN YOUR BEER!! Hidden in the beer you believed to be pure of body and spirit. Beer that you just paid your hard earned money for. It's an ugly looking list to see on a beer label, and maybe that's why a full disclosure of beer ingredients is as illusive as unicorn shovellings.
I hasten to add here that most of the smaller breweries are doing the right thing and are lovingly brewing liquid art using purely natural ingredients in the time honoured tradition. I applaud them and feel their pain that they have whilst competing against a loaded deck.
To quote Jamie Oliver, "If it reads like a chemistry set, you shouldn't put it in your basket", but we need that same choice that food consumers have.
Whether it is expensive beer, costing three figure sums, or beer libelled as 'premium' there is still more respect given to a penny chew sweet label, than to a beer libel.
You, the beer buying public are given less respect than those buying cat and dog food.

So, what do you think?

Ingredient list, or not?

What's in your beer?