Cream ales from Bissell Brothers, Maine Beer Co. and Trinken Brewing. Photo by Ben Lisle Maine Beer Co.
recently released Dutch’s Cream Ale at its Freeport brewery. The name pays tribute to the old Dutch Village Motel that once occupied the brewery’s site, its charming little cottages staged across a spacious lawn off Route 1 in Vacationland. One can imagine an old caretaker mowing that vast expanse, buoyed by a cream ale (a style sometimes referred to as a “lawnmower beer”).
Unpretentious, sessionable and thirst-quenching, the cream ale makes a suitable companion for a bout of yard work under the sun. Cream ale is a distinctively American beer (and not just because the first commercial canned beverage was a Krueger’s Cream Ale in 1935). Cream ale was once widely popular in the United States, particularly in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, brewed as a competitor to the pale lagers that became so popular in the later decades of the 19th century.
This makes it something like an American version of the Kölsch: lager-like, but often with a slightly fruitier profile. Unlike a Kölsch, though, this beer was made with two ingredients indigenous to the Americas: corn and Cluster hops. Corn was used by brewers to clarify the beers aesthetically, making them look more like the popular pale lagers.
American six-row malt was dense in protein, which made it harder to achieve that effect; adjuncts like corn or rice could help brewers achieve that crisp luminosity that drinkers.
