German Brewing

Having been to Germany five times this year and having both awesome and bland german beers I wonder if we can put together a list of good examples of commercial beers that all (if fresh) have the LoDO character.

My contribution of LoDO beers
Bitburger
Spaten
Jever
Weihenstephaner
Löwenbräu
Franziskaner (a bit unsure about this one, many seem to fade quickly)
Paulaner (a bit unsure about this one, many seem to fade quickly)


Beers I suspect you will mention but which I haven't tried recently, can't confirm LoDO taste or have had bad examples of
Ayinger
Andechs
HofBräuhaus
Hacker-Pschorr
Augustiner
Früh Kölsch
Dab
Erdinger
Schneider
Gutman
Becks


Please help me round up a wishlist for my next visit zu das getränke markt! Please note, I'm not searching for German beers but good examples of LoDO beers.

Kloster Doppelbock has a great malt aroma, even more than Weihenstephaner Korbinian, I suspect this process has a lot to do with it.


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To pay homage to American brewers

AB Budweiser (bud-light and all that too)
Miller
Coors

You get the idea

Rest assured that every sizeable outfit with an international presence will avoid oxygen intake during their manufacturing process.

People actually forget what a brilliant brewery Annheuser Bush is. I may not enjoy the recipe of their flagship product much, but that doesn't mean they aren't excellent manufacturers.

Indeed. Budweiser isn't a great recipe, but it's brewed with a near-perfect process. If they instead made a 12 plato OG beer from 85% or so pilsner malt and filled the rest with some mix of Vienna, Munich, Carahell, etc. and maybe used a different yeast strain it would be a truly world class beer.

The corollary is that a low oxygen brewing process isn't sufficient by itself to result in a good beer. There are plenty of bland or even flawed examples of low oxygen lagers around the world. It may be brewed in a low oxygen brewhouse, but German beers don't get much more bland than Bitburger. I've found plenty of bottles of Corona to have downright offensive levels of acetaldehyde.

Your list of suspected LoDO beers that you haven't tried yet is right on.

A few more LoDO examples from Germany:
Pinkus
Tegernseer
Reissdorf
Sunner
Kostritzer

A few from Japan:
Kirin
Suntory
Sapporo
Orion
Asahi

A few others:
Guinness
Heineken
Stella Artois
Peroni

Many LoDO beers aren't so great in bottles. They're too often abused and stale. I've never had a good bottled Peroni, but it never disappoints me on tap when paired with a pizza.

One beer that I would not include in the list is Pilsner Urquell. I just had some fresh on draft in Europe and it confirmed for me that it's definitely not a LoDO beer.

But I think the benefits of Lodo process is diminished by high gravity, adjunct, filtration and pasteurisation.


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Pasteurization, absolutely.

Filtration when done properly can be beneficial. But it's extremely difficult to do it well without oxidizing the beer and wihout stripping too much flavor.

High gravity I'm inclined to agree. Yeast don't like high gravity wort, and the ferment needs far more attention than usual. Even when done well, a 16 Plato OG beer diluted to the same strength as a 12 Plato OG beer post-fermentation will have higher levels of Fusel alcohols and the like. In general, the 12 Plato neighborhood is a really nice sweet spot IMO. It's about as high gravity as you can get before the fermentation begins to suffer. That doesn't mean higher gravity beers are bad, but above 13 Plato Fusel levels see a sharp increase and it just generally becomes increasingly more difficult to achieve a good ferment.

Dilution when done properly doesn't necessarily oxidize the beer. But done improperly it definitely will.

Adjuncts like unmalted grain, rice, corn, etc I'd also agree about. Even unmalted barley doesn't taste as good as malted barley. The malting process unlocks a lot of great flavors.

One can, however, mash high gravity and ferment target gravity -- which makes more sense to me.

The lists above look solid.