Why Craft Beer Breweries Have Embraced the Rice Lager

Twelve years ago, Stone Brewing co-founder Greg Koch produced a relentless four-minute compilation of different brewers espousing the tenets of craft beer, called “I Am a Craft Brewer.” It is the kind of cheesy, dated video that was at the time a rallying cry for an exciting industry sticking it to Big Beer. Alongside ideals like “integrity,” “tradition” and “style,” the brewers specify they are superior to macro beer because of an omission: “I don’t use rice in my beer.” 

Throughout craft beer’s earlier decades, rice was an adjunct associated almost exclusively with Budweiser and Coors, a low-cost shortcut to producing as light a beer as possible—rice yields fermentable sugars for yeast to entirely convert without residual sugars hanging around, creating a crisp, dry beer. But a lot has changed in 12 years. Rice is no longer synonymous with subpar brewing or watered-down flavor, just as craft beer is no longer the David to Big Beer’s Goliath. 

That industry maturation, and the decreased pressures of toxic fandom—no one’s boycotting your brewery anymore if you sell shares to a corporate overlord, nor if you put rice in your beer—has allowed craft brewers more freedom to find a place for the grain.

Some breweries, like Philadelphia’s Attic Brewing Co. and Oregon- and Washington-based Chuckanut Brewery, have been exercising an appreciation for Japanese rice lagers like Asahi and Sapporo. In Japan, these lagers tend to use higher percentages of rice than their American macro counterparts, and the rice is more of an integral part of the country’s brewing tradition—Japan enlisted German brewers to help them establish lager-brewing in the 19th century, but applied those techniques to their own high-quality rice supply, which was more abundant than barley.

Brewers also increasingly see an opportunity to create pairings for rice-based meals. “We are big fans of sushi and could only find macro Japanese beers when out around town,” says Rawley Macias, head brewer at Rouleur Brewing Co. in Carlsbad, California, whose Raida Japanese Lager blends white rice with pilsner malt and also incorporates a Japanese hop, Sorachi Ace. Similarly, Chuckanut and El Segundo Brewing Co. in Los Angeles originally brewed their rice lagers to fulfill requests from restaurant chains, Din Tai Fung and Japonica, respectively. Chuckanut’s beer for Din Tai Fung was called an “Asian-style lager”; the brewery’s own current version is a “Japanese-style lager” combining a rice lager and Chuckanut’s popular helles lager.

Rupee Beer, meanwhile, celebrates Indian cuisine and ingredients. “Rice beer is less about a trend and more about how we grew up in the Indian restaurant business,” says co-founder Sumit Sharma, whose family has been in the industry for decades. “We always felt the global import beers and craft options out on the market were never truly brewed to pair with the rich and spicy flavor profiles of global foods like Indian, Thai, Middle Eastern, etc.,” and Basmati Rice Lager was made to fit the bill. It’s brewed with both rice and corn as well as barley, based on a traditional Indian recipe. India has its own history of rice lagers, counting both commercial examples and home-brewed versions; Sharma says his father, grandfather and uncles used to home-brew with their own basmati crops.

Others see the crisp, dry profile rice can yield as a canvas to better highlight hops. Attic Brewing in Philadelphia leans into that hoppy potential with its Profane Rice Lager. Made with Abstrax BrewGas—a mix of extracts of terpenes, the compounds found in cannabis and hops—it has an “extra dank” profile, says co-founder Laura Lacy. Attic also utilized Motueka hops, which have a lime flavor that Lacy says works well with the rice lager.

And other brewers, still, spotlight the flavors of the rice itself. While El Segundo’s Harvest Legend Rice Lager began as a beer for a Japanese restaurant, it has evolved into a platform for showcasing local agriculture through the use of California-grown Calrose rice. Harvest Legend effectively delivers a familiar rice flavor because, as El Segundo vice president and COO Tom Kelley explains, brewers add whole rice to their mash without first cooking it. (Most brewers, by contrast, would cook the cereal first to unleash fermentable sugars.) Skipping that pre-mash gelatinization step means more of the rice’s flavor can infuse into the mash, and the resulting lager has the aromatics and dry-finishing yet rounded mouthfeel of a bowl of rice.

More than a decade after “I Am a Craft Brewer,” though, a growing number of breweries are using rice to make the crisp, dry styles the grain has always been known for. Cody Morris, director of brewing operations at San Diego’s Harland Brewing Co., says the motivation for the Japanese Lager was to make something “insanely crushable.” And Sam Richardson, co-founder of Brooklyn’s Other Half Brewing Co., says that the brewery’s Poetry Snaps Rice Lager is “especially easy-going and lower-ABV, so it’s nice to have around to complement the massive double IPAs we are known for.” 

Most brewers do not brew with 100 percent rice, instead incorporating traditional malted barley for a balance in both mouthfeel and flavor. It’s this fact that some say is the biggest sticking point when it comes to consumer education. Lacy says today’s taproom guest indeed is less surprised to find a rice lager at a craft brewery, and more curious about whether a rice lager is gluten-free (only the rare 100-percent rice iterations are). Once the hurdle of explaining grain bills has been cleared, it seems the current craft beer drinker is excited about lighter lagers in their favorite taprooms, more open to different ingredients, and, says Richardson, also trusting in their craft brewers. After all, just because craft brewers are using an adjunct macro brewers use, it doesn’t mean they’re also using the same methods and making the same beer.

“Each of us [craft brewers] has our own philosophies of methods, recipes, fermentation, filtering or not filtering—that’s what makes it craft and why each of us have different-tasting beers,” says Chuckanut co-owner Mari Kemper. Especially with increasing demand for light lagers and lower-ABV options, some say craft beer’s lager renaissance is still in its infancy, and rice lager is just one of the styles within that category that brewers can put their own spin on.