Ice beer

Ice beer is a marketing term for pale lager beer brands which have undergone some degree of fractional freezing somewhat similar to the German Eisbock production method. These brands generally have higher alcohol content than typical beer and generally have a low price relative to their alcohol content.

The process of "icing" beer involves lowering the temperature of a batch of beer until ice crystals form. Since alcohol has a much lower freezing point (-114 °C; -173.2 °F) than water and likewise does not form crystals, when the ice is filtered off, the alcohol concentration increases. The process is known as "fractional freezing" or "freeze distillation".

Eisbock was developed in the Kulmbach region of Germany by brewing a strong, dark lager, then freezing the beer and removing some of the ice. This would concentrate the aroma and taste of the beer, and also raise the alcoholic strength of the finished beer. More specifically, the method is as follows. "By cooling beer to just below freezing, you separate out a large portion of water from the alcohol, which has a lower freezing point. You then skim off the ice crystals from the brew leaving behind a beer that is twice as potent as the original." That produces a beer with 12 to 15 per cent alcohol. In North America, water would be added to lower the alcohol level.

Eisbock was introduced to Canada in 1989 by the microbrewery Niagara Falls Brewing Company. The brewers started with a strong dark lager (15.3 degrees Plato/1.061 original gravity, 6% alcohol by volume), then used the traditional German method of freezing and removing ice to concentrate aroma and flavours while increasing the alcoholic strength to 8% ABV. Niagara Falls Eisbock was released annually as a seasonal winter beer – each year the label would feature a different historic view of the nearby Niagara Falls in the winter. This continued each year until the company was sold in 1994.

Despite this precedent, the large Canadian brewer Molson (now part of Molson Coors) claimed to have made the first ice beer in North America when it introduced Canadian Ice in April 1993. However, Molson's main competitor in Canada, Labatt (now part of Anheuser-Busch InBev) claimed to have patented the ice beer process earlier. When Labatt introduced an ice beer in August 1993, capturing a 10% market share in Canada, this instigated the so-called "Ice Beer Wars" of the 1990s.

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Wikipedia