TASTING THEME IDEAS

In the chapter on beer styles, I’ve suggested sometimes simple or obvious blind tastings for each style of beer. If you want to dig in more deeply, here are some blind tasting ideas that you might consider—and perhaps they’ll inspire you with ideas of your own!

BEYOND BASIC STYLES

Not every style was mentioned in this primer. If you have a good bottle shop, try these rarer beers:

Creams and steams. As they descended from rich, hoppy pilsners, our current tin-can lagers went through other evolutions like cream ales, steam beer, and pre-prohibition light lagers.

Weizen up. Beyond hefe, weizens come in kristal (clear), bock (weizenbock), and dunkel (dark).

Rye not. Germans make roggenbier, Russians kvass, and Finnish sahti—all are principally rye beers.

Smoke gets in your beer. Until the modern malting, many beers had a smoked flavor, and some breweries still make revivals like rauchbier and smoked porter.

Sprechen sie sour? Gose and Berliner weisse are nearly lost styles enjoying a revival in the United States. The first is salty; the second sharply tart.

EXPERIMENTING WITH INGREDIENTS

What makes one beer sweet? Which hops make another beer taste like lemons? One way to be sure is isolating ingredients and putting your tongue to the test. These suggestions will get you started. Design your own once you get the hang of things.

Malt trials. Pale ales are generally made with all-barley grists, but some use wheat, others rye. Compare a variety and see if you can pick out the qualities of the grains.

No peeking. How much information comes through your eyes? Literally strap on the blindfold and find out when you taste a flight of beer ranging from the lightest to the blackest.

Hop versus hop. This tasting requires a bit of research to find out which hops were used in each beer. This information is not generally listed on the label, and single-hop beers can be hard to find, but the search is worth it. Compare a group of singlehopped beers so you can start to identify individual varieties.

Spice of life. Many beers employ spices or other flavorings. Some draw out existing flavors in the beer; others add contrast and zip. Blind tastings are wonderful ways to hone your palate to distinguish the spicelike flavors beer produces and those actual spices when they’ve been added to beer.

CELLARING BEER AND
VERTICAL TASTINGS

Most beer is best when consumed fresh, but some styles evolve and improve with age. As it ages, beer goes through slow chemical changes. A vertical tasting involves sampling different vintages of the same beer. It’s possible to do this with just two or three vintages, but five to seven is especially interesting. Unlike wine, beer doesn’t age on a predictable curve. Because it has so many different molecules interacting with one another, it changes year to year. A beer may be maltier at two years, hoppier at three, and malty again at four. Various notes will appear and disappear. Vertical tastings are always a surprise.

A Few Tips on Cellaring

The best choices for cellaring are those beers with an alcohol percentage above 8%. Beers at 10% and higher may last years or decades. Cellar beer below 60°F, but don’t refrigerate it—that effectively stops the aging process. Some temperature fluctuation won’t hurt the beer, but if your cellar regularly gets warmer than room temperature, it will damage the beer. If the date is not marked on the bottle, note the year and month each beer was made. Place capped bottles standing upright and corked bottles on their side. Bottle-conditioned beer ages best, so look for bottles that have a skiff of yeast on the bottom (but don’t rule out those that don’t). Finally, buy several of each beer you wish to cellar; that makes it possible to hold periodic vertical tastings.