Flavoured beers – are they all the same?

Most of us have had beers “that don’t taste like beer,” especially when we first start getting interested in different styles. You’ve also tried flavored beers that use different ingredients to give them a special twist. This time we’re going to focus on those beers, even more refreshing than their classic counterparts and designed to be enjoyed in summer; and we’ll try to answer one question: Are they all the same?

Let’s start with an example of an industrial, mainstream, well-known and accessible beer: Desperados. The popular French brand (although some people still think it’s Mexican) from the Heineken group offers its original tequila-flavoured version, but it also has three other varieties in Spain: cactus with lime, mojito and strawberry margarita. Let’s take, for example, the ingredients of its mojito edition: water, barley malt, glucose syrup, sugar, hop extract, acidity regulator: citric acid, flavouring (50% tequila, 14% mint extract, 1% lime extract). There are a lot of ingredients here that we wouldn’t expect to find in a beer, but let’s see what happens with other flavoured products.

Let’s now focus on a craft product. For example, Limón Serrano from the Salamanca-based La Bestia Craft Beer, a “citrus blonde ale”. On the label we can read the following ingredients: hops (Mandarina Bavaria), malt (Pilsner, caramel and wheat), as well as lemon and orange peel. Unlike Desperados, this craft beer uses natural ingredients, with the higher costs and added difficulty that entails for the product, in order to achieve an authentic result.

Let’s not forget a classic of Belgian beer, Blanche de Namur, the world‑renowned witbier brewed by Brasserie Du Bocq. Like Desperados, it’s an accessible beer, but we see big differences in the ingredients: water, barley malt, wheat, orange peel, coriander seed, yeast and hops. Contains gluten. This traditional beer was recognized as the world’s best wheat beer in 2009, 2013 and 2014 by the World Beer Awards.

As we’ve seen, not all flavored beers are the same. While craft and traditional producers focus on using natural ingredients, big industry tends to use syrups, extracts, acidity regulators and flavorings. Does that mean some are better than others? Not necessarily; what we can see is that they are different products with very different production costs. Each one has its own ideal consumption moment.