WHEN I FIRST STARTED mingling with beer geeks I’d met through my blog, I spent a lot of time wondering what the hell they were talking about. It’s not that they were drunk all the time and slurring beyond comprehension, it’s just that I was a complete noob.
At one event I heard a group of home-brewers talking about Michael Jackson’s death in 2007. Happy to be able to contribute – finally – I jumped in to let them know it was actually 2009 when the King of Pop died. I was about to offer a hot take on the whole slumber-parties-at-Neverland situation when someone gently told me Michael Jackson was the name of a beer writer. The world’s most famous beer writer. That was the last time I ever tried to correct a beer geek.
To save you some embarrassment if you’re ever in my position – trying to infiltrate the upper echelons of the beer community when you barely know what a hop is – I have compiled this short glossary of common beer terms.
ABV ABV stands for Alcohol By Volume, the percentage of alcohol in the beer. Although it’s often expressed as ‘Alc’ on bottles and beer lists, brewers usually talk about ABVs. Hot tip: always check the ABV before you down the beer. If you’re anything like me it’ll take only two nine-percent double IPAs before you find yourself dancing alone in a well-lit pub at seven p.m. This is fine, obviously, but it pays to know what you’re getting yourself into.
adjunct In beer, an adjunct is any ingredient, other than malted barley, that is added to contribute sugar for fermentation. Two of the most commonly used are corn and rice, and you sometimes hear beer geeks complaining about big breweries such as Budweiser and Corona using these to cut costs. Adjuncts may be sniffed at because of their association with macro lagers but plenty of craft brewers use them too. Pliny the Elder contains corn sugar (dextrose). Westvleteren XII, along with many other Belgian beers, contains candi sugar syrup (a mixture of glucose and fructose). Many other cereal grains, including oats, wheat and rye, are commonly added to craft beers to enhance flavour and body.
balance In almost every beer review – written or verbal – there will be a comment on balance: ‘It was very well-balanced’; ‘The balance was totally out of whack’; ‘After two of them I completely lost my balance.’ In the first two instances the word refers to the interplay of sweet malt and bitter hops discussed on page 30, with a well-balanced beer having enough of one to counteract and complement the other.
barrel-aged If you thought only wine and spirits were fancy enough to spend time on oak, think again. These days it’s common for beer to be aged inside wooden barrels, where it soaks up the personality of the barrel’s previous tenant. Bourbon- and wine-barrel-aged beers are particularly popular, and are often paired with strong dark beers like Russian imperial stouts.
beer geek I’ve used the term ‘beer geek’ multiple times in this book, and it may seem I’m being derogatory. The word ‘geek’ implies a certain social ineptness, an intolerance of the outdoors, and an unhealthy obsession with Star Wars, after all. In fact, beer geek is a term of endearment for anyone who is passionate in their pursuit of good beer. It describes people who view beer as a hobby – as in they read about it, talk about it, and quite likely brew it. Contrary to popular belief, you do not need a Civil War-era beard to be a beer geek, although it’s true a love of Star Wars is a prerequisite.
beer snob To outsiders, beer geeks and beer snobs may be one and the same thing, but any beer geek will vehemently deny being the latter. A beer snob is someone who looks down on other beer drinkers for the choices they make, and is more concerned with drinking expensive and exclusive beers than exploring new things. Most beer geeks, myself included, are probably guilty of having their own ‘snob’ moments, but that doesn’t mean we can’t agree those people are the worst.
bottle-conditioned Ever poured out a bottle of beer and found sludgy brown sediment at the bottom? Hopefully it was just a sign of bottle-conditioning. Most beers undergo a process of forced carbonation before they’re bottled, with CO2 pumped through the liquid in the keg. Bottle-conditioned beers, on the other hand, carbonate naturally inside the bottle. To make this happen, live yeast and extra fermentable sugars are added just before the cap goes on. The yeast gobbles up the sugar and expels carbon dioxide. With nowhere to go, the gas carbonates the beer. And that sludge at the bottom? It’s essentially a graveyard of spent yeast.
brandwank Fairly niche but a word I like, brandwank refers to empty terms like ‘premium’ and ‘handcrafted’, which beer marketers use to make their product sound fancy. The term was popularised among New Zealand geeks by Phil Cook, who has described brandwank as ‘stuff that seems flashy and marketing-speak-y but really just doesn’t mean anything’. He cites Moa Brewing slogan ‘The super-premium end of modern manhood’ as an example.
Brett Who is this Brett guy I keep hearing about, and why are brewers so afraid of him? That’s what I used to wonder before I learned that Brett was short for Brettanomyces, a wild yeast strain that lends a funky, earthy tang to beer. Although traditionally used in Belgian styles such as lambics and Flanders ales, it is mostly seen as an undesirable contaminant – something brewers work hard to keep out of their equipment. More recently, however, thanks to the rise of sour beers, brewers have been cautiously inviting Brett to the party, usually along with his mate Lactobacillus, a bacterium that produces a vinegary tartness in beer. If Brett sounds like someone you might want to meet, try an Orval Trappist Ale from Belgium’s Brasserie d’Orval.
contract brewery Some of my favourite breweries are not breweries at all: they’re contract brewing companies. This means they own the beer brand and usually develop the recipes themselves, but hire another company to produce the beer. Plenty of breweries start life as contract brewing companies until they get enough cash to buy their own kit, while others, such as Yeastie Boys, find the model works well and stick with it.
drain pour Pretty simple one, this. A drain pour is a beer so bad (usually because it’s infected) that not even your Natty Light-swilling boyfriend is able to drink it.
free house A free house, sadly, is not a house you can have for free, or even a house with free beer. It’s a pub that does not have contractual ties to a brewery, and such places are surprisingly rare. Most licensed New Zealand venues have contracts with breweries. For a long time DB and Lion held a duopoly, but more recently Asahi and Independent Liquor have been making inroads. In return for rebates or free tap installations, these contracts require the venues to stock that brewery’s beer, sometimes exclusively. Free houses, on the other hand, pay for all their own taps, and so have the freedom to serve whichever delicious or terrible beers they like.
gateway beer We all know how it goes. One day you’re sipping a lightly hopped pale ale and noticing it tastes a little punchier than the Heineken you usually drink. Next you’re on a plane to California with an empty suitcase and a list of Pliny distributors in your pocket. Who’s to blame? Whoever handed you that pale ale, the stepping stone from the familiar land of green bottle lager to the uncharted galaxy of craft beer. Most beer geeks can fondly recall their gateway beers. Mine were Guinness and Mac’s Hop Rocker, both nicked from my dad’s fridge.
IBU Okay, this is as technical as we’ll get. IBU stands for International Bittering Units, and measures the volume of iso-alpha acids (bitter-tasting hop compounds) in beer. Lightly hopped beers such as pale lagers may have an IBU as low as five, while a heavily hopped double IPA can have an IBU of up to 120. This sounds like something consumers wouldn’t really want or need to know, but with the explosion in teeth-strippingly bitter IPAs in the last decade some breweries have been bragging about high IBU ratings as if they were IQ scores – slapping them on labels, using them in marketing, and in some cases even making them the focal point of the beer. It’s become like the Scoville scale used to rate chillies – the higher the number, the more intense the beer, the (presumably) more well-endowed the drinker.
One thing to remember about IBUs, and what is commonly misunderstood, is that the rating doesn’t indicate how bitter a beer will taste. The perceived bitterness will depend on how malty the beer is, because the sweetness of the malt will balance out the bitterness. So if you put a barley wine, a beer with a big malt profile, that has an IBU of 100 next to a less malty IPA with an IBU of 70, the IPA will likely taste the more bitter of the two.
imperial If you’ve started to dabble in craft beer, you’ve probably come across the word ‘imperial’ in style names – imperial IPA, imperial pilsner, Russian imperial stout. Although this sounds suspiciously like brandwank, it just means supersized. The term is thought to have originated in the eighteenth century, when British brewers would send shipments of extra-strong stouts to Russia to impress the imperial court. Since then, breweries have used the word to indicate that a beer is stronger in alcohol, bolder in flavour and generally more regal than its non-imperial counterpart.
real ale Bit of a strange term, this one. It was coined by a British organisation, Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), in the 1970s as a way of differentiating between traditional cask-conditioned beers and the fizzy pale lagers sweeping British pubs. Today it’s still used interchangeably with the term cask ale, those English-style beers that people describe as warm and flat. (In reality they should be neither.) As with bottle-conditioned beers, cask ales are naturally carbonated inside the container from which they are served, which is why they’re less fizzy. The beer reaches your glass fresh and technically ‘alive’ since the yeasties are still in there doing their thing.
session beer The term ‘session beer’ gets used a lot these days and yet, like ‘craft beer’, it has no set definition. Typically, session beers are moderate in alcohol (around three to 4.5 percent ABV), and not so intensely flavoured you couldn’t want more than one. Beer blogger Martyn Cornell summed them up nicely when he said: ‘Like the ideal companions around a pub table, a great session beer will not dominate the occasion and demand attention; at the same time its contribution, while never obtrusive, will be welcome, satisfying and pleasurable.’
smashable/quaffable Used interchangeably, a smashable or quaffable beer is the most beautiful and dangerous kind there is: one that’s easy to drink very quickly.
Untappd Just about every craft beer fan with a smartphone these days uses an app called Untappd. It allows you to ‘check in’ to bars, rate beers as you drink them, and unlock badges for completing various beer-drinking related accomplishments – a bit like Scouts but for lazy, beer-loving adults. With over three million people using it worldwide, it’s overtaken BeerAdvocate and RateBeer as the beer-rating platform of choice.
wet-hopped beer Usually hops are dried whole or turned into pellets before being sold to brewers, as they have a short shelf life once picked. But every autumn, during the annual hop harvest, brewers scramble to get hold of sticky, freshly picked hops and get them into a brew while they’re still wet, ideally within about twenty-four hours. The beers produced are known as ‘wet-hopped’ or ‘fresh-hopped’ and typically have a more resinous, pungent hop aroma than regular hopped beers. Keep an eye out for them on the shelves around late autumn.
white whale Confession: I never got around to reading Moby Dick. However, I understand it’s about a guy who falls in love with a whale and spends his whole life trying to win its heart. Or something. Similarly, in the beer world white whales are ultra-rare, elusive beers that beer geeks go to ridiculous lengths to try and find. This can involve combing through beer forums for sightings, befriending anyone who might have access to a bottle, and being on 24/7 alert should the particular brewery announce a sudden release. I don’t have the determination or the money to land any white whales, so I can only imagine the deep sense of emptiness and regret that must come after you’ve pissed out the last of a $2,000 bottle of beer.
zymurgy The science of brewing and fermentation. Not likely to come up in conversation, but it’s nice to end on a Z.