Beer Me
Today is a beautiful day for a hurricane, or tropical storm, or whatever. Nobody can predict the weather. Weather happens. But you can be prepared.
My neighbors are clearly unprepared.
Yesterday I went around taking things inside and making sure there weren’t large pieces of debris around the yard. I even took out the window screens and put them in the garage because I really didn’t want to lose them to the storm. But my neighbors still have bird feeders, grills, Adirondack chairs, hoses, baskets, buckets, tires, planks of wood, and all kinds of detritus still out and about.
I suppose if it doesn’t get that windy later today, the joke will be on me. However I’ve seen what wind can do, and I know how to prepare for intense winds. I know a bunch of things, but I also know what I don’t know.
Beer is a blind spot for me. But I’m hatching a plan to fix that. Maybe you can help.
Actually I know a fair bit about beer. However for the most part that’s academic knowledge. For example, I know the difference between ale and lager. Ales use a top fermenting yeast that can release fruity esters (among other aromas) and lagers use a bottom fermenting yeast which generally results in a leaner flavor.
That’s all fine and good, but I can’t taste it.
Not that I couldn’t learn to taste it. But currently, if you put a beer down in front of me and asked me if it were an ale or a lager, I’d fail. Actually, I would fail a lot of beer taste tests.
Recently I had a Sierra Nevada Glissade out at a bar. While I wasn’t familiar with the beer, I am a fan of the brewery, so I ordered a pint. The bartender told me that it was quite malty and not very hoppy. Either his palate is notably different from the brewers, or he was misinformed.
Regardless, I realized my palate was ill-equipped to pull these component flavors and associated aromas from my glass. I took the bartender at his word, and only now do I realize how wrong he was. So I’m going to try to create some structured tastings to get my senses attuned to such things.
If you are a beer geek, your input would be greatly appreciated.
I’m a big believer in the power of four. I’ll go up to five in a tour. But sitting down at a table with four things in front of you to evaluate is plenty. The idea is to keep all four things as similar as possible, adjusting just one variable.
So in a hops tasting, I am imagining one could select a beer style, and choose two bottles that are lightly hopped and two bottles that are more heavily hopped. While I recognize that the hops used might be different, keeping the beers focused on a single country like England or Germany might minimize those variations.
There are a lot of variables, so this could take a lot of time. But I see this as a long-term project.
Naturally, I would want to do another one for malt. I’d like to be able to suss it out of a beer when it’s subtle, and I would like to confidently proclaim its dominance when it’s the aggressive flavor. Maybe I can even taste and smell the difference between two-row and six-row barley malts and identify other malted grains like oats or rice.
Eventually, as my palate improves, I’d like to test some of the maxims that I’ve been taught about fresher beer tasting better. It’s not that I doubt the logic, but I’m curious about how far beer declines and how quickly. For that, I’ll need to pick up a bottle of the same beer over time (say every three months or so) and label it. Then I can sit down with them and actually taste the difference a year makes.
One goal is that I want to be able to identify flawed beer, and right now I can’t.
I know that most of the beer cognoscenti can’t stand Heineken. And for the life of me, I still can’t understand why. When pressed they’ll say that it is often skunky. But I’ve never noticed that. I generally pick up a refreshing sensation of apricots. It may not be my favorite beer, but I fail to see how it’s worthy of such derision.
And given that I know most people can’t identify flawed wine, I’m thinking that I’ve been drinking a lot of beer that’s gone bad and haven’t ever noticed.
As luck would have it, we have a pretty impressive beer store in Albany with a massive selection of bottles of beer from around the world, Oliver’s. And they are magnanimous enough to let you purchase beer one bottle at a time.
This will allow me access to the beer I need for this project. But I still need a few beer geeks to help me think this through, and provide me with some specific recommendations. Because while I’ve found the selection at Oliver’s to be amazing, I’ve been less than enthralled by the knowledge of their staff.
Anyhow, this is the plan. Perhaps I need to give a more limited request for help. But I’m putting this out there now, and we’ll see what comes back. Thanks.
FUSSYlittleBLOG 
Well as for the question of whether beer can still taste good after a long time, the answer is yes. We tried a number of very old beers (a few of them were from the seventies and older than me) the Mahar’s twentieth anniversary party in 2009. They were really good. The bar had twenty old beers in all that were opened over the two day celebration, the oldest brewed in 1935. They were expecting some of them to be bad but I talked to Mr. Mahar towards the end and he said that surprisingly they hadn’t had one bad one in the bunch. These were all good British beer in their day so it isn’t so surprising that they came through the years well. That’s not to say they tasted anything like the brewers intended them to. Hops fall away fairly quickly with age and alcohol mellows. These tasted more like spirits or liquors than beers. But they were very tasty.
We are lucky enough to have all the bottles necessary (so far) to participate in Stone’s amazing Vertical Epic tasting next year. This is twelve beers that will have been brewed over twelve years, meant to be drunk together in a literally epic vertical tasting. Read about it here: http://www.stonebrew.com/epic/. So some of these beers were designed to age for years. That said, usually aging beer is something you do for fun, just to see what happens, and you know you’re not going to get quite what was intended. We have a case of Stone’s Double Bastard (which is a very hoppy strong ale) that we’ve had since I think 2004. Every so often we pull a bottle out and see how it’s changed. The Blind Tiger Ale House in NYC has a selection of “vintage” bottles you can buy (for more money) and i’m sure there are other beer bars following suit. So fresh isn’t always best when it comes to beer but if you’ve ever had beer at the brewery you know that there’s a lot to be said for urber fresh beer. And old bad beer is really bad beer.
To get a sense of what hopping does to a beer you might try doing a vertical tasting of Dogfishhead’s IPA. They have a 60 minute, 90 minute and 120 minute version, all of which you can get at Oliver’s. But just knowing when something is hoppy is not enough because there are different varietals of hops and they have very different flavors. I actually suggest going to a homebrewing store (there’s Hammersmith in Latham and another good one in North Greenbush, I’m sure there are others) and just smelling some of the hop varietals. Some of the hops are all about the nose and some of them are much more about how they taste on your tongue. I know there are a few I really don’t like (mostly the Californian varieties, Cascade, I’m looking at you) and others I really do like (mostly the more aromatic ones, and most of the Continental and British ones). You should also get your hands on some fresh harvest ales when they come out shortly. These are beers made with fresh hop flowers, rather than the dried hop pellets that are usually used because they’re more durable and more potent. The fresh hop ales are fragile and should be drunk immediately. Brown’s does a version with all NYS hops but you’ll have to go to the brewery to drink it ’cause they don’t bottle it and they won’t let you buy a growler ’cause supplies they are limited.
At Mahar’s you can usually snag a copy of Ale Street and sometimes of Beer Advocate, both of which are good reading if you want to learn more about beer.
But the really short hand answer for beer is that if it’s sweet it’s malty.
And I like me some malty beer.
PS The biggest problem with Heineken (not that they’re the only ones) is that they don’t ship their beer in brown bottles. Green or clear bottles let in light and beer is very vulnerable to light. If you’ve ever tasted skunked beer odds are it’s because it’s been light struck. Brown bottles are much better at filtering light and cans are even better, which is one of the reasons we’re seeing a lot of really good craft beer “bottled” in cans these days.
Daniel,
First, love your blog! It’s swell! Second . . . I love beer way too much and want to chime in on a few local gems for great beer: Brew Crew (buy a bottle and talk to the employees, they are often informed), Mahar’s (the employees are grumpy but the selection is great), Brown’s (vastly superior to the albany pump station), and touring Ommegang in Cooperstown. Hopefully, all will impress.
Also, try Midas Touch. You can find it at Oliver’s, Brew Crew, or Latham Beverage.
While I hate to suggest you buy bad beer just to get the concept of what it tastes like, but I suggest you buy a bottle of Grolsch beer. Like mentioned in the previous comment, it is also an import bottled in a non-brown bottle, and it is quite uniformly skunked. Really skunky.
Vertical tasting is a noble endeavor but not all hops or malts are created equal. There are dozens of varieties of each, and given ratios, blends and adjuncts used when brewing – not to mention the extremely wide cultures if yeasts used (many proprietary/custom cultured by the brewery) you won’t be able to pinpoint where the flavors and aromas are coming from without a wee bit of education.
I’m on my mobile right now but I’ll report back with some links to get you started and will suggest some beers to line up for tasting. In the meantime, peruse the beercommdood category on my blog for some brewing and tasting notes.
High-test beers age well. The high alcohol content and/or high IBU are excellent preservatives.
Heineken in America sucks because it gets loaded up with preservatives to help it survive the long trip over. And yes, the green bottles too. A Heineken in Holland or Greece (better water) is a magical experience.
While any particular style may be predominantly malty or hoppy, there still has to be a balance. You don’t want the sugars to get too far away from the hops, or vice-versa. To get an Imperial Pale Ale, you need a lot of hops. But if you just added more hops to your Pale Ale recipe you would wind up with a disgusting bitter mess. Conversely, if you had a nicely balanced amber ale and wanted to make it stronger, you add more sugar. If you don’t up the hops a bit too, you’ll wind up with cloying syrup.
I’m not saying they have to match exactly, but balance is key. If one overpowers the other, yuck (to use a technical term).
You should come into the shop & talk to Nick about IPAs..we have tasted the gamut from Olivers and a couple of homebrewers. He’s more of an expert, I drink what he brings home. I can’t stand the “regular” (mainstream) beers at all anymore….. not hoppy enough.
A net stretched along the fence line might be a good way to capture all of the neighbor’s debris. Good luck with the beer tasting.
OK follow-up…
First, hops. A link to variety descriptions follows. Basically, like any botanical, even the variety will vary based on where it’s grown. But each variety offers a different quality to a beer. The alpha levels you see indicate (basically) how potent a bittering agent it will be. The higher the alpha percentage, the more bittering it will offer the beer. This isn’t a rule in itself though, because depending on how long they are boiled in the wort (pre-beer fluid consisting of water and extracted sugars from grains) and the gravity (sugar level) of the wort, the bitter acids will be both extracted and utilized differently. The longer you boil hops, generally the more bitterness you get from them and the less of their aromatic qualities you will retain. Some very bitter hops are used toward the end of the boil to release only their aromatic qualities. Some hops with a lower alpha level are reserved for only aromatic use. And some beers are designed to be weak (session beers) and could use low alpha hops as both bittering and aromatic agents.
http://www.freshops.com/hops/variety_descriptions/
Malts, or grains, are the heart of beer. They are steeped in a precisely heated volume of water to trigger an enzyme reaction to release their sugars, which dissolve into the water to form wort. Like hops, there are many kinds of malts available, and each lend a different base color and flavor. How much you use depends on the style and strength of beer you’re aiming for. The most commonly used base malt (darker or more richly flavorful malts are used as needed for the target style of beer) is 2-row pale malt. Here’s a list of malts and their characteristics.
http://www.beertools.com/html/ingredients.php?view=grains
Yeast also adds a significant character to the beer. While primarily used to ferment the wort into beer (yeast eats the sugar to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide) it also adds its own touch to both the flavor and aroma of the beer. Some yeasts produce fruity esters, some flowery, and others a variety of other notes. Many breweries use their own cultured yeast that they harvest and nurture from batch to batch to ensure each production run of the same type of beer (or all their beers) is as close to identical to the previous. Large scale breweries have this down to a pure science, while smaller breweries tend to have slightly varied brews from batch to batch. Here is a sampling of yeasts from one of the more prominent labs from which homebrewers and breweries obtain their cultures.
http://www.whitelabs.com/yeast_search.html
Water also plays an important role in the character of beer. The quality of water imparts flavors, affects overall sugar extraction efficiency, affects hop utilization and can impact how well the yeast chows down on that sugar. Many brewers will add natural agents to help either soften or harden their water, as needed. Most strive for a target pH, and also a particular mineral content.
Adjuncts to beer (additional ingredients) also play an important role in what the finished product tastes, smells, and feels like when drinking. Your holiday beers are usually loaded up with pie spices, for example, and as you’re seeing in stores pumpkin beer is a seasonal favorite. But there are other adjuncts that add many characters to beer. You have sugars of many types that are added both to boost strength and impart flavor and even aromatic notes (Belgian candi sugar – basically rock candy of varying colors, honey, molasses, caramels, maple syrup, etc.). Fruit’s another popular adjunct, mainly in summer beers, though lambics can be enjoyed year-round. They lend sugars as well as tannin and other flavor and aromatic qualities. Brewers also can add bacteria to beer to alter its qualities, such as lactobacillus or brettanomyces, to make the beer creamier, tart, sour, or what have you.
All that said, setting up a flight of similar beers to compare notes will be difficult based these factors. You can certainly do a Dogfish Head IPA tasting of their 60, 90, and 120 minute IPAs but note that each will vary heavily in character by recipe. Also, if going for one 12 oz bottle of each, keep in mind that you’ll have consumed 7 beers’ worth of alcohol at the end of that tasting. Best option is to go to Brown’s, Pump Station, or another brewpub and get a flight of their beer, and note the differences in each. Yes, one will be a pale ale, one will be a stout, another an IPA, a pale, perhaps a heffeweizen, possibly a porter or amber or brown or… You get the idea. But reading up on the links provided above and schooling up on the Beer Judge Certification Program catalog of styles should arm you well to figure out what you’re tasting and why.
http://www.bjcp.org/styles04/
In closing of this VERY long comment, I’d be happy to sample along with you. Just give me some notice and I’ll meet you for some tasty brews!
I second Bill’s long comment. I’m a homebrewer studying to become a beer judge, and the BJCP style-guide has been an excellent resource for learning to suss out beer flavors. Pay attention to the “commercial examples” included in each style heading, and taste against the descriptions.
Cheers!
I have a refrigerator full of Dogfish. I have the following: 60 Min IPA, 90 Min IPA, Midas Touch, Aprihop, Raison D’extra, Punkin Ale. And I have a 4 pack of Punkin I have been aging in a dark place since last year, I plan on tasting that side by side with fresh Punkin this year to see how aging alters the profile. I’d be happy to share for the sake of science and education.
I think we need a Tour de Beer (or maybe just a Tour de Stout, Tour de Pale Ale, etc), but we’ll need designated drivers. Maybe rent a bus? Though I think we should wait till the new brewpub opens in Saratoga (http://blog.timesunion.com/tablehopping/24064/pump-station-brewmaster-partnering-in-saratoga-brewpub/). As it is Saratoga, Albany, Troy, Schenectady and Chatam all have breweries or brewpubs. Then again since beer travels rather well it might make sense to buy some growlers and have the tour somewhere where no one has to drive. It would still be a lot of fun!
Ever since taking the “purple bus” tour a couple of years ago through VT I’ve wanted to do something like that again. The growler idea has merit though.
To really accomplish his mission of trying to figure out how each component of a beer effects the overall flavor profile, I think Daniel’s best option is to either brew some himself or partner with an avid homebrewer to conduct some experiments. Homebrewers usually brew beer in 5 gallon batches. If you split the initial 5 gallons of wort into 5 separate fermentation vessels, you could ferment them each using a different yeast strain and taste how each changes the taste of the final beer. You could do a similar experiment using the same yeast and dry-hopping each microbatch with a different varietal. Similar experiments can also be done using different types/amounts of malt but require even more equipment and time. I would even be willing to lend some of the fresh Nugget hop flowers that have been growing on the side of my porch if someone wanted to investigate the difference between using fresh hops vs dried. Anyway, I would like to be involved in any kind of tastings that come out of this. Just let me know when and where and I’ll be there if there’s good beer to be had.
I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a while. I’d have to look into getting smaller fermenters though, as all of mine are 5+ gallons in size.
Wow. The brewheads have spoken. I don’t have much to add to this except to note that several breweries (Red Hook, for example) are changing the design of their cardboard six-pack carriers to a higher-sided version, further blocking UV light penetration into the glass bottles. Remember all the talk years ago about opaque milk jugs? Same thing. Keep the beer cool and dark.
Also, while there are a number of well-aged brews out there, it should be noted that the hop flavor in beer could eventually reach a peak and start to fall off if left too long. Hop is a preservative, which allows the beer to keep longer, but the flavor profile will start to change.
Hops do fade over time. Well-aged beers are usually higher gravity and have enough hops to preserve the beer. Older barleywines take on wonderful heavy dried fruit character, particularly J.W. Lee’s Harvest Ale. I have a 1998 and a 2001 at home waiting for a reason to celebrate.
I admire your desire to to educate yourself about beer and maybe understand enjoying it in a different way (if that’s what it is, even?), but I just don’t feel the same way. As with other food and drink (including wine), I like what I like, and I don’t like what I don’t like (right now…tastes do change!). While I care what other people say about something inasmuch as I like recommendations and starting points, if I enjoy a wine that you hate, I’m not going to stop enjoying it just because you told me it’s bad. The easiest way to figure out what you like is to drink. Have a party, everyone brings a different beer, try a lot of them, and mark the ones you like. See what they have in common. I like light fruity wheats but some oatmeal stouts–depends on the season and even the food pairing. Good luck on this endeavor!
It has nothing to do with influencing likes and dislikes, but understanding what the actual characteristics you like are and why you like them. For every beer or wine snob out there you have 3 others who are beer or wine geeks. They thrive on learning, not on influencing. There was a great graphic floating around on Twitter the other day that explained this well. If I can dig it up I’ll share it here.
Found it. http://visual.ly/evolution-beer-geek
I only scanned the comments and I don’t think this was mentioned, but if it has been, I apologize.
Drinking beer out of tasting glasses is not the same.
Now, some will disagree. However I’ve found that when I get samplers of beers from a brewery, they’re simply not as good as drinking a pint. Of course, this means drinking four pints of beer – which, by the fourth beer, you are in enough of an altered state that you might not judge it properly. You could fill the pint glasses halfway, essentially making it two pints of beer, and that might work better.
Wow, Daniel- the response to this post compared to the responses to your wine posts is interesting. People are just more into their beer in this town I guess. I’m with you (lousy beer palate but I enjoy one once in a while). Also I have a low tolerance for hops.
Regarding the “rule of four” if you were to go to a winery for a tasting you might have their pinot grigio, followed by chardonnay, followed by pinot noir, followed by cabernet. But I don’t think you would voluntarily do the same thing in a home tasting with multiple labels involved. You’d more likely pick a single category and maybe taste that across vintages or across labels, right?
Similarly, with your beer tasting, I think you should pick one type of beer, let’s say IPA, and build a flight off that. I happen to like IPAs so much that IPAs are basically all I drink. As others have mentioned, there are two categories of hops, bittering and aromatic, and the personality of an IPA is defined by the way those are balanced. My favorite IPA flavor profile is what is called “West Coast Style”, a citrus-y (specifically grapefruit-y) nose followed by a bitter yet rounded taste. Stone, Lagunitas and West Coast from Green Flash are three good places to start with this experimentation and the folks at Oliver’s can recommend a fourth.
Any beer geek will probably agree with me that tasty craft beer needs to be served at the right temperature. Chilled of course but not too cold. Unfortunately when trying to pair good beer with a restaurant meal, I often run into the problem of beer being kept way too cold in the restaurant’s cooler. (bottles). Draft beer usually comes out at the right temp. but even here, so may places make the mistake of pouring it into chilled mugs. (O.K. for Genny or Bud, etc.) I nip that in the bud but I can’t do much about the bottles except use hot water to heat my glass before pouring. (I’ve cracked a few glasses this way).