With most beers, fresh is best. Light, heat, and changes in temperature quickly extract a toll, staling or oxidizing bottled beers within weeks. As a rule, the lighter the beer (in both color and alcohol), the faster its decline. Highly hopped beers such as IPAs also lose vivacity quickly, as their hops aroma plummets with time. Drink ’em up! Dark beers and high-alcohol brews tend to have a little more stamina.
The death march accelerates in retail shops that display bottles near windows or under lights. Pay attention to the conditions in the stores where you shop. Think twice before buying a bottled beer that feels warm to the touch because of exposure to store lights or warm air. Despite the association of cans with low-end beer, several craft brewers have switched from bottles to cans to minimize the impact of light and extend their products’ shelf life. At home, store beer in the refrigerator—preferably with the bottles standing up, to allow any yeast to settle to the bottom.
A few beer styles do reward extended storage if you can provide appropriate conditions: a dark, wine-cellar-like environment with steady temperatures near 55°F and humidity in the 50 to 70 percent range. High-alcohol brews such as strong ales, Imperial stouts, quadrupels, and barley wines are the best candidates for cellaring and may improve with a year’s aging or even more. Some aficionados cellar them for a decade. The changes are hardly predictable, but many beers become more mellow and wine-like, with nutty or sherry-like aromas. Some people also enjoy putting away sour ales and bières de Champagne to experience the mellowing effects of time.
You’re thirsty. The beer’s in the fridge. You don’t need a manual to tell you how to enjoy it. But if you’re opening beer for aficionados, you’ll probably want to observe a few of the niceties. Serving the beer at the appropriate temperature and pouring it properly into a suitable glass will not go unnoticed. And you’ll probably soon become more finicky, too—and cranky when a craft beer isn’t served with respect. These rituals aren’t about one-upmanship, after all. They’re about enhancing the drinking experience: how the beer looks, smells, and tastes.
The serving temperature: For most craft beers, the ideal serving temperature falls somewhere between “refrigerator cold” (38° to 40°F) and “cellar cool” (about 55°F). That’s a sizable spectrum, almost 20 degrees, reflecting the diversity of beer styles and the differing needs of each. A pilsner served too warm or a porter served too cold loses a lot of charm.
So how do you determine where a particular style belongs on that serving-temperature spectrum? It isn’t difficult, and you can put the thermometer away.
Bear in mind that chilling a beer makes it more refreshing but also mutes its fragrance. Thus, the lighter, more delicate beers that we appreciate as thirst quenchers—pilsner and kölsch, wheat beer, and some pale ales, for example—should be served at the cold end of the spectrum. Strong, dark beers such as Belgian-style dubbels, Imperial stouts, and barley wines belong at the other end, around 55°F. At that temperature, these aromatic brews flaunt their beguiling scents, heady concoctions of spice, dried fruit, and coffee. Most other beer types—from IPAs to sour ales—are content somewhere in the middle.
Here is a more detailed guide for the styles featured in this book, based on the recommended serving temperatures in The Oxford Companion to Beer (Garrett Oliver, editor).
38° TO 45°F
(refrigerator temperature)
American Pale Ale
Belgian-Style Pale Ale
Bière de Champagne
India Pale Ale (IPA) and Imperial/Double IPA
Kölsch and Blonde Ale
Pilsner
Wheat Beer
45° TO 48°F
(remove from the refrigerator about 15 minutes before serving)
Amber and Red Ales
Amber Lager and California Common
Bock and Doppelbock
Brown Ale
Maibock
Märzen and Oktoberfest
Saison and Bière de Garde
Sour Ale
48° TO 52°F
(remove from the refrigerator about 30 minutes before serving)
Belgian-Style Strong Golden Ale
Dubbel
Holiday Ales
Stouts and Porters
Tripel
52° TO 55°F
(remove from the refrigerator about 45 minutes before serving)
Barley Wine
Bitter and Extra Special Bitter (ESB)
Imperial Stout
Quadrupel
The glassware: Always use scrupulously clean glasses for beer. Even a smidgen of soap or fat residue can compromise head formation, the foamy cap that makes many beers so eye appealing. Sniff glasses to make sure they don’t smell of detergent or stale cabinet. Glasses should be at room temperature—neither warm from the dishwasher, nor chilled. A frosty mug may be appropriate for a bland mass-market lager, but don’t even consider it for a craft beer.
Just as wine connoisseurs might raise their eyebrows at being served Bordeaux in a Burgundy glass (but wouldn’t refuse it), craft-beer fans associate certain beer styles with particular glass shapes. Most of these long-standing pairings have aesthetic or practical justifications. Pilsners, for example, look most beguiling in tall, flared flutes that show off their clarity and make room for the head. Fragrant Belgian-style ales call for stemmed goblets that taper inward to concentrate the aroma, allow for swirling, and contain the billowing foam.
You can invest in a variety of beer glasses if you want to be perfectly correct at all times. The pictures in this book will point you to the traditional glassware for each beer style. Alternatively, you can purchase a multipurpose glass like a stemmed tulip, which suits every type.
In any case, never allow the gaps in your glassware inventory to stop you from serving the beer you want. There’s a strong argument to be made for the notion that the right glasses for any beer are the glasses you have.
The pour: Beer enthusiasts take a lot of pleasure in a well-poured beer, one with enough foam creation but not too much. Foam drives aromas up to your nose and releases some carbon dioxide, so the beer is less gassy and more creamy—a good thing, up to a point. Too much foam can rob the beer of carbonation and annoy a thirsty imbiber who has to wait for the head to subside.
Beers vary in their head-forming and head-retaining capability. High-protein beers such as wheat beers and highly carbonated brews like Belgian-style strong golden ale produce a lot of foam. (The Belgian ale Duvel is notorious for its frothy head.) Barley wines and bitters don’t. But pouring technique also affects the volume of foam produced. Pour slowly onto the side of a tilted glass, and you will produce little or no foam. Pour steadily down the center of an upright glass, and admire the thick head you produce.
The most traditional pouring method calls for tilting the glass at a 45-degree angle. Pour slowly down the side of the glass until it is about three-quarters full. Then turn the glass upright and pour straight down the center to develop a head, taking care to leave any yeasty sediment in the bottle. For drinkers who like the sediment—some do—swirl the last remaining bit of beer in the bottle and pour it straight down the middle of the glass.
