Malt Liquor 101: The Black Sheep of Craft Beer

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When you hear the words “malt liquor” what immediately comes to mind? College parties? The day before payday? A wicked hangover? Garish labels bearing snakes, tigers and bears? Snoop Dogg? All of the above? Probably, but there’s an even bigger question that comes to mind: What is malt liquor?

Not a style unto itself, malt liquor is probably best considered a product category. Sounds sexy, right? There’s a reason—a few, actually—that malt liquor, unlike virtually every other arbitrary permutation of beer in existence, hasn’t made its way into the craft beer demimonde. For one, it’s explicitly a commodity, and craft producers never tire of dogging on “commodity beers”—even though many of them are now working furiously to bring their dressed-up versions to market such as 15-packs of craft light lager

Malt liquor is made for two things: Strength and value. But how is it made? Well, that depends. Interestingly, if we were to take the traditional definition of malt liquor, there’s nothing there to exclude it from the Annals of Craft: A malt-based beverage including some amount of adjuncts, fermented to moderate-to-high strength. A huge number of craft beer brands fit that description, in part because the traditional definition of malt liquor defined it against “regular” beer, that is, macro light lagers below 5% ABV. If you’ve ever seen the term “High Gravity” employed in malt liquor marketing, it’s simply meant to connote strength: “Gravity” is a measurement (roughly) of a beer’s fermentable sugars and potential ultimate alcoholic strength. With malt liquor, usually a fair amount of those fermentable sugars are derived from adjuncts. Adjuncts are, as we’ve discussed before, any source of fermentable sugar in beer which is not malted barley: Rice, corn and dextrose (corn sugar, in brewing parlance) are all adjuncts often used in macro lager brewing, particularly in malt liquor. Adjuncts tend to be cheaper than malt, and allow a brewer to increase alcoholic strength while keeping costs low. Adjuncts like dextrose are also much more highly fermentable than some malt-derived sugars, meaning that they add fermentable sugars (and thus more alcohol) without adding residual body or sweetness that would reduce the drinkability of your malt liquor. To make the beer even lighter-bodied and stronger, extra enzymes are added during fermentation to break down any long-chain starches the yeast otherwise wouldn’t be able to metabolize into alcohol. So again, malt liquor is, generally speaking, a strong beer (6% ABV and higher) made with adjuncts, often with extra enzymes added to boost fermentability and (in theory, at least), drinkability. Everything else is just marketing.