Beer 101: Lesson #1 - Tasting Beer
Jason Foster
Where better to start a course on beer than with how to better enjoy the experience of drinking it. It may surprise those who have grown up drinking Coors Light that beer is actually a very complex beverage. There is an impressive mixture of flavours and aromas found in that pint glass in front of you. But if you chug it down unthinkingly, you are going to miss most of it.
And the good thing about beer is that, unlike those snobby wine tasters, you need to actually swallow it to pick up its full offerings.
The first thing you need to know is that beer is about balance. A beer needs to keep its two dominant characteristics - sweet and bitter - in some kind of harmony. Where on that scale of balance the brewer lands determines much about the style of their particular beer. And how you experience that beer depends upon how you detect its flavours.
The key to fully enjoying the taste of a beer is to be able to both appreciate the whole of the experience, but also to isolate the different components. The former is about your mental state of mind, but the latter requires a bit of awareness of how to detect flavours. Let’s walk through the taste cascade of beer.
Of course, most of us now know our perception of flavour is really a complex interaction of smell and taste. Fair enough. But allow me to oversimplify by focussing solely on your tongue and mouth. And while everyone is different, we can generally identify different areas of the tongue that detect various flavours.
Take a sip of your favourite beer, but slowly. That first sensation, on the tip of your tongue, is the sweetness. It might be light and grainy. It could be caramel or toffee. Regardless, the first impression a beer will make is with its sweetness, which comes from sugars left behind from fermentation. This is the first sign post for beer tasting - how sweet is it and what is the quality of the sweetness?
Jumping to the end, the other major sign post is at the very back of your tongue - bitterness. (This is why beer must be swallowed, unlike wine). Here you find the sharp, drying sensation of bitterness. It can be grassy or spicy or citrusy. This is the hops talking. And it is the bitter yang to the barley malt ying. But note, in darker beers, that coffee-like bitterness you pick up isn’t from hops but from malt roasted just like coffee.
In the middle of the sipping a number of taste buds might get triggered. If it is a bitter beer, like an Alley Kat Full Moon Pale Ale or a Wild Rose Industrial Park Ale, then after the swallow you might get some lingering grassy dryness. This is also hops, but not bitterness. It is from hop resins not boiled off - and it creates a complexity and dryness to a beer. It comes from adding hops after the boil.
Some beers might set off your sour buds, which are at the middle-edge of the tongue. In most beers, this is a bad sign, of something gone wrong. But there are certain Belgian and French beers which highlight this quality. Duchesse de Bourgogne and any beer from Lindeman are good examples.
Other beers leave a puckering sensation in your mouth. This is a graininess that comes from the grain used and the fermentation. In some styles it can be positive at low levels. Generally it should be avoided.
Finally, you might get the fruitiness across the sides of your mouth that you will recognize from, well, fruit. It might be a light pear or berry flavour. It could be darker like raisins. Or it might be a noted banana flavour. This is to be expected, as fruity notes are a natural byproduct of yeast fermentation, especially in ales. German wheat beer brewers use special yeasts to highlight this fruity nature.
Once you start paying attention, you will find dozens of different flavour sensations in that beer. It won’t all come at once, however. Teaching yourself to identify the components of beer takes time. But knowing how to highlight particular flavour notes will enhance your enjoyment of your beer. This column is just a primer on how to taste beer. There are subtle complexities awaiting you as you develop your palate.
For now, sip that beer with care and bask in its complex flavours as it works its way across your mouth and down your throat. That is beer heaven speaking.