The Brave New World of “White Bucket” Beer

I am taking a break from work this week, so I thought I’d repost some good stuff from the archives. Two years ago, Nat West introduced us to artificial flavorings and how they’re changing the drinks industry. If anything, this seems more relevant now.

In episode 101 of the Beervana Podcast, we invited Nat West of Reverend Nat’s cider on to discuss the phenomenon of hard seltzer. He’s got a supermarket cider brand called Cascadia that just released a seltzer, and he talked forthrightly about how these drinks are developed and produced.

An industrial-age product, seltzers exist because humans have learned out to create flavorings that taste like other things. Nat described the white buckets these products come in, puncturing any romantic ideas we might have of the “mango” and “key lime” of the labels. No fruit is ever harmed in the production of a vat of seltzer.

Near the end of the podcast, I gingerly asked Nat a question about how he feels making seltzer. (His, incidentally, is made from fortified apple juice and has a more natural flavor than many of the more synthetic brands.) Is it a “crafted” product, I asked.

Before we come to an answer, we should acknowledge seltzer’s beery doppelgänger, which has a very different reputation: milkshake IPAs and pastry ales. When brewers make 100,000 barrels of grapefruit IPA, they’re not using California fruit—it’s all white bucket grapefruit. When they make sorbet IPAs and ice cream pales or banana split and blueberry muffin sours, they’re using white buckets. My sense is that it’s often a blend—some fruit, some natural flavoring (vanilla, chocolate), plus processed flavorings to make the beer taste exactly like that treat they’re recreating in liquid form.

Most beer, in fact, benefits from industrial-age chemistry, like salts, acids, enzymes, stabilizers, clarifiers, and so on. Craft breweries, which we otherwise consider wholly traditional, use these, too—not just larger ones. So if we adopt a purist, no-white-buckets vision, it’s worth noting how little beer out there will actually meet this standard.

So where does the craft lie? It’s not an easy question, and even the mandarins who oversee Reinheitsgebot, which has been addressing these issues for over 500 years, sometimes tie themselves in pretzels trying to draw the line. It’s not easy.

Coincidentally, I happened to mention to a friend we were doing the seltzer podcast and added that I didn’t much care whether we got “good” ones or not. He was a little offended and considered that close-minded of me. Indeed, it is literally my job to keep an open mind when I approach new things—categorical dismissal isn’t generally regarded as an asset (cf glitter beer).

It’s good to interrogate ourselves in those uncomfortable gray areas. I did a Twitter poll asking about flavorings and the general sense seemed to be flavored beer was permissible somehow while seltzer wasn’t. It’s productive to ask why we might think that—is it because we’re old dogs who just don’t like this new trick, or because it’s because we hold an unexamined bias for beer over other flavored malt beverages or what? And why does just posing the question seem to make us tetchy?

For my own part, the line is fairly clear. Seltzers are creations of modern chemistry. They taste just as I imagined—some pleasant, some unpleasant, but all artificial in exactly that way other flavored products are. Mango White Claw and Cool Ranch Doritos? Yep, it’s all familiar.

It is absolutely fine to make a judgment about this category of food from an aesthetic and artisanal perspective. One can enjoy Cool Ranch Doritos without trying to argue that they’re the equivalent of the paella I had last night at Pintxo here in Seattle. We can see that these things are categorically different and that one, which is composed of the flavors of whole food, spices, and process, is more complex and aesthetically interesting than the other, where the flavors came from a bucket. I would defend anyone who admires and elevates the chef who executed the paella over the food processors who created the flavorings to imitate ranch dressing on a tortilla chip.

Further, it’s possible to hold two views that exist in tension at the same time. Seltzers have only the flavor of white buckets in them, and every hint of process and ingredient has intentionally been wrung out. You’re only supposed to taste the flavoring. I don’t think it’s close-minded to judge that as an inferior expression of the gastronomic arts. And acknowledging that doesn’t mean we don’t love a good bag of chips from time to time. Of course we do!

But it’s worth coming to clarity about where you sit on this question with regard to beer. Are synthesized flavorings something you’re willing to have in your beer, or do you want products where the only thing you taste come from ingredient and process? How do you feel about processed ingredients like hop extracts, now very common, or genetically-modified yeasts? Is it possible to draw the line between hop products and artificial flavorings?

There’s no wrong answer, but increasingly, it’s going to be hard to avoid considering the question.