By MIKE DUNHAM
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: October 31, 2003)
The Atkins scheme, which at this point in the plan calls
for no more than 10 grams of carbs per meal, works for me because I could
cheerfully eat bacon three times a day for the rest of my life. But it leaves me
staring at 99 bottles of beer on my wall and wondering how long it will take to
sip my way through them without overdosing on sugar byproducts.
So when I saw Michelob Ultra, with 2.6 grams of
carbohydrates per 12-ounce bottle, it seemed worth a try, even at the gouge
price of $7 for a six-pack.
It wasn't.
In many Alaska communities, tap water has a more robust color than what came out of the bottle. The taste reminded me of what you might get if you mixed Zima with water in a 1:4 ratio. I wondered, had Atkins ruined my palate for beer the way it made my formerly beloved biscuits taste like paste?
Going to the Internet, I found plenty of disparaging comments about the Michelob product. The reviewer at beeradvocate.com called Ultra "the most lackluster, boring, gimmicky beer of its time."
Beerhound's beerblog.com site showed a photo of the test bottle being poured down a sink drain. "There was nothing horrible, but nothing good either," wrote Beerhound.
His comments were followed by those of readers, most of whom agreed with him. But others dragged the debate back to the point. "Anyone who complains about Ultra is not concerned with their waist line," wrote a person who goes by "Darling." "The taste is great, and cutting back on the carbs is amazing."
Darling drew fire from fans of Miller Lite, which has 3.2 grams of carbs. Beerhound himself described Miller Lite as "better tasting than Bud Light, which is pushing those carbs up to around 6.6 grams."
In an article in the Arizona Republic, Kerry Lengel noted that Bud Light has overtaken Budweiser (11 grams) as America's best-selling beer. He also described how a low-carb beer is made: The brewer boils the grain mash longer to break down more carbs into fermentable sugars, which yeast turns into alcohol and bubbles.
"The problem with this logic is that the only way to achieve the same alcohol content ... is to start with less total grain, thus ending with less flavor," Lengel wrote, "unless there's some sort of filtering going on that they're not telling us about."
What they're not telling us has been on my mind too. Beer makers don't have to list the nutritional content or ingredients the way food manufacturers do. The recipe for sugar-free root beer, which I have made, calls for using just enough sugar for the yeast to transform into carbonation and using artificial sweetner to replace the flavor that disappears when the real stuff becomes gas. Is some similar legerdemain employed for Ultra?
One reason to limit one's drinking to homebrew is that you know what's in it, or at least who made it -- usually a friend who observes the ethic of work first, drink later (an ethic which separates homebrewers from problem drinkers, who see things the other way around).
I might be lured into glugging a faceless Frankenbeer if it tasted sensational.
Ultra doesn't.
My research turned up some useful information. David Lauterbach, on the briansbelly.com Web site, reported that 12 ounces of Guinness -- which my homebrew aspires to imitate -- has 5.2 grams of carbs. Less than Bud, less than Bud Light. One could subsist on five Guinnesses, salad and bacon each day and not crack the Atkins limit.
Other sites say Guinness has 11 carbs and some dark beers run as high as 15 to 20. The USDA nutritional search site, www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl, lists 5.732 grams of carbs for 12-ounce cans of generic "regular" beer and Corinne Netzer's venerable "The Complete Book of Food Counts" gives 13.2 carb grams for the same product.
Without more consensus, I suggest, it's better to be skinny than sorry.
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