How beer tastes (part II)

In part one I only discussed the way beer reacts with the taste buds in the mouth. Flavor perception is by no means limited to what the tongue can do. Let’s look at how beer smells and feels.

Aroma is the way that your beer smells. This might include scents like citrus, pine, smoke, sweetness, spices, or fruit and so on.  The possibilities are almost endless.  Most of the flavor that we enjoy is not perceived from the tongue alone but from cooperation from the sense of smell as well.  Try this, go eat or drink anything without breathing out of your nose. There is little to nothing there. In fact, all you will get are the four basic tongue flavors described in part I. They won’t be as vibrant as you would have perceived them if you had your sense of smell to complement and back them up.  

Aftertaste is a word with a bad rap. I hear “after taste” and I don’t associate that with a good thing but it is not a bad thing by necessity.  The finish of your beer is the flavor you have left over once the liquid has passed on its way to making you happy. Some beers are made to have a clean finish; they are described as dry, clean, fresh. In fact, whole marketing campaigns have been devoted to selling beer without an after taste. Japanese beers are known for the use of a dry hopping technique where hops are added to the beer after the beer is almost done fermenting or when it is aging. This leaves an aroma but little lingering flavor in the beer. Still other beers are made to be complex and offer an evolving taste profile during each stage of the drinking process. Barley wines are a class of beer that comes to mind. These high alcohol beers are aged, for years some times, and have a very large amount of hops and malt included in their ingredients. The flavor in these beers lingers by design.

"Mouth feel" is a term you hear the wine guys throw around quite a bit. It describes the weightiness of the liquid in your mouth. Milk is thicker than water, honey is thicker than milk, and Jell-O is thicker still. Beer will have much more subtle changes than this, but with a little practice you may begin to notice the weight or the thickness of your favorite beer. If you have a light American lager and a Stout at the same time it is easy to appreciate how much thicker the stout is.

How Beer Tastes (part I)

There are four flavors that the human tongue is able to detect; Sweet, Salty, Bitter, and Sour. (yes, there is a difference between bitter and sour.)

Sweetness is noted on the tip of the tongue. All beer made from grain is a process known as mashing. During Mashing the grain is added to hot water to extract the natural sugars and make them available for yeast to convert into alcohol. There are many types of sugars that vary slightly depending on their chemical make-up. The arrangement of atoms in the sugar molecules effect how they break down and how well the yeast will be able to use them for food as well. There are residual sugars (ones the yeast can’t use) in beer which affects the flavor depending on a variety of factors like concentration, solubility, acidity and ultimately preference of the brewer. 

Bitterness is derived from the flower of the hops plant. These green pine smelling plants have been used in beer making for imparting both flavor and as a preservative for a long time. Other such ingredients include flowers, spruce needles or spices. These other ingredients have mostly gone away with the early brewers who first used them with some really tasty exceptions which are interesting subcategories of beer.  Hop flowers became king as the bittering agent of choice for most beer making traditions, and it remains so today. Bitterness will be experienced toward the back of the mouth.  If you can’t imagine what I mean when I say bitter then get a small piece of baking chocolate or unsweetened coco powder; all will be clear immediately.

Salt is not something you think of when pondering the qualities of beer but consider this. Beer is made of over ninety- percent water. The water used in making your brew will contain various minerals and dissolved particles in different concentrations depending on where it is from. If you had the same beer made with water from two different parts of the world but all other ingredients were the same it, would taste different

Sourness is affected by the amount of acid in your beer. It doesn’t mean that your beer will taste like a lemon, though it could be brewed with lemons. Hmm. The proteins and sugars in the beer donate organic acids during production. Yeast can create and prefer to live in an acidic environment. There are two major products from yeast in your beer: alcohol which provides the buzz, and carbon-dioxide gas which gives your suds their bubble. CO2, when it is dissolved in water becomes an acid. With all of these factors beer can be up to 10,000 times more acidic than pure water. Not to worry, many things we consume every day are just as acidic as beer or ever more so.

Styles of Beer

There are as many styles of beer as there are people in the world who drink it. The type of beer that you like the best will depend on many factors. We all have a predisposition for one end of the flavor spectrum or the other. That does not mean that your taste doesn’t or won’t change depending on your mood, the season, time of day, the occasion, what you are eating…. You get the idea. It is worth wild to look at the flavor attributes that make up a taste profile to help you identify the type or style of beers that you like best. The more you now about what you like the more easily you can find more of what you like.

Maybe you have been drinking the same beer for years, maybe you would like to like beer but you have not found one that you like. Maybe every time you have tried a craft brew it has punched you in the mouth and taken your wallet from you. I hate to waste money especially on things that in retrospect are not worth the price of admission. Let’s be realistic if you are new to beer and you try to spend $4 a bottle on a six pack of craft brew that it too much for you to handle then you are going to be less likely to spend the cash when you can buy PBR for less than the cost of bottled water. I will do a series on PRB and guilty pleasure beers some time.  Would you ride a dirt bike if you had not ever ridden a bike? Would you expect to enjoy an opera if it were not in the language you speak… you might but not as much as the person who speaks the language or the person who knows who to ride the motor cycle.

The goal in reading and doing all of these exercises with me here is to develop a vocabulary, to know the jargon, to decode and demystify the beer experience in such a way to make every experience in drinking beer more enjoyable. When I started drinking coffee I started with a lot of cream and sugar in it. Now I enjoy a nice espresso black, sometimes I will get a shot put in my black coffee to stiffen it up. My first wines were simple merlots. They were the two buck chuck variety, the cheaper the better, because I couldn’t enjoy the more complex styles and price points, they were beyond my reach.

When you are starting drinking beer I believe that you should start with one that has a lot of cream and sugar. American standard lagers are clean, sweet, have a limited hop profile, and are the color of urine. To the beer coinsure they are often regarded as the urine of the beer market. I disagree. They are the foundation of the beer market, the gateway or stepping stone that enables our simple American palate to enter into a beverage experience that is rich in tradition and variety that we are not accustomed to.

But wait you say, there is all kinds of variety in America. Really? There is Walmart with-in 50 miles of where you are right now, a Taco Bell, Target, Starbucks, or shopping mall much like every other shopping mall in this country. I don’t think there is anything wrong with a winning formula. After all, it wins. White bread is great with bologna. I don’t want you, however to believe that while bread is the only type of bread there is.  Increasing you beer palate is not going to be easy at first if you make to large of a swing. Try an easy beer for a while then think to yourself, “what would make this better?” From here you are in the verge of a great transition in to being a true beer drinker. Here is a style chart, that is very basic for you to check out when you want to branch out.

Notice that in general Lager beers are more Malty than sweet and lie to the right hand side of the chart. The big beer makers in America are producing Lager. To our collective taste a beer that Is slightly sweet and lacks personality or nuance is just the right fit. I placed a blue dot where I think that Coors would belong.  The great thing about that description is you could just as easily say that it has adaptability, is not foreboding, is approachable and pairs well with just about anything. There is another aspect of this chart that you can’t really show well and that is the intensity of flavor. Imagine that the chart is 3 dimensional and there is a way for the beer to rise off of the top of the chart. The higher the beer rises the more intense the flavor would be . American popular beer would be on the plane of the page. In theory you could take all of the same ingredients for two beers and make them different only by their relative concentrations but with the same ratio of hops to malt and you could end up with a similarly flavored but much more intense beer. To put it the other way if you water down a heavy beer then you end up with a light one. There is something lost in the process here but the point is made.

So I would like to enter into a conversation about beer styles and increase awareness of them so that you can try more beer and have success in drinking more beer that you like. I plan to include tasting information of the major commercially available beers that you should be able to buy at any grocery store in the US. I plan in posting some videos of those tastings and to empower you to be a more informed beer consumer. In my next post I think it’s important to start with an understanding of flavor in general then we will look at the things that make beer taste the way that it does.

Welcome!

This Blog is dedicated to the novice beer drinker. While there is a wealth of information for advanced beer drinkers and aficionados on the internet, there is little for those of you who are new to beer. Many web sites exist which attempt to make beer drinking a deep or even religious experience, but that is not what we are doing here.  I am seeking to provide an introduction to beer drinking that will inform and help people drink more good beer. So what is that exactly?

Good beer is easy to define. It is the beer that when you drink it you say to yourself, ‘ yum, this is good.’ It is the beer that you like to drink, the beer that you want to drink more of because it doesn’t leaving you wishing it was not that way it is.  I enjoy visiting the blogs and websites where obscure beer is reviewed and where the supertaster waxes philosophically about what they put in their glass. I will continue to scour them because I enjoy it but for the other 90 of beer drinkers, the number may actually be much lower, look around, have a beer and enjoy reading a little more about what I have to offer on the subject of beer.

-Cheers