The Craft Beer Novelty Machine has proven itself adept at supplying ADHD drinkers with a seemingly endless and inventive array of unique ingredients and processes that put new spins on classic beer styles. However, some trends prove to be more persistent than others. For example
The Craft Beer Novelty Machine has proven itself adept at supplying ADHD drinkers with a seemingly endless and inventive array of unique ingredients and processes that put new spins on classic beer styles. However, some trends prove to be more persistent than others. For example, the NEIPA haze craze shows little sign of abating whereas Smoked Oyster and Mussel Belgian Imperial Stouts never quite caught on.
One of the more recent trends to have grown legs is the addition of lactose to sours, IPAs, stouts and, well, pretty much anything. However, adding lactose to beer is not just a new, craft phenomena. It all started with the milk stouts of early twentieth century Britain...
For Ron Burgundy, milk may have been a bad choice. Yet, for brewers – or should that be beer marketers? – of yesteryear, the mere mention of milk seems to have been the perennial good choice, with this creamy epithet capable of captivating the drinking public’s imagination as well as their wallets.
The fact that putting milk in beer seems, well, gross, doesn’t seem to have put anyone off. Perhaps the first round of milk stout drinkers were savvy enough to understand that the milky marketing didn't refer to bovine mammary excretions, but merely an isolated component – lactose.
Under The Milky Way
One of the first instances of lactose in beer crops up in England in 1907 when Mackeson’s Brewery of Kent used it in a stout weighing in at a whopping 3 percent ABV. Mackeson Stout, with a milk churn on the label, is still available today, but at a more reasonable 2.8 percent ABV. The beer quickly became a much-imitated national brand: a beer style was born.
But what exactly is lactose? And why throw it in beer?
In a nutshell, lactose is a simple carbohydrate, a sugar that naturally occurs in milk. The etymology of the name stems from the Latin “lac” meaning milk with the chemical suffix -ose meaning sugar. The name was coined in 1843 by Jean Baptiste André Dumas, a French chemist. That last nugget of info isn’t especially relevant, but what a name.
When delving into exactly what lactose is and why it’s used, it helps to understand a little about sugars, the concept of sweetness, and wort: the sugary malt syrup that yeast ferments to produce beer.
Pour Some Sugar On Me
Sugars are simple carbohydrates, the simple, easy-to-burn fuel for our bodies. Glucose – aka dextrose, is our planet’s most abundant monosaccharide (single sugar molecule) and is the basic fuel for life on our planet: plants and algae use sunlight to photosynthesise glucose from water and carbon dioxide, and the food chain marches on up from there.
Glucose is also in milk, tied up with another monosaccharide called galactose that is not so nearly as abundant and is found mainly in milk. In milk, glucose and galactose are linked together to form lactose, a disaccharide. To digest lactose, humans use an enzyme called lactase that splits lactose into its constituent single sugars. People who are lactose intolerant lack this enzyme and their unfortunate inability to digest it will send them farting to the toilet if they so much as get a whiff of the white stuff.
Sucrose (aka table sugar) is another common disaccharide that also contains glucose, except this time it’s bound up with fructose (fruit sugar). If you lack the enzyme sucrase, then you can’t split sucrose and are therefore sucrose intolerant. Stay