MdV: Merchant du Vin beer e-newsletter – Monday Feb. 28, 2005:  Tasting, Evaluating, and Enjoying Fine Beer

 

Ayinger Celebrator Doppelbock resonates with rich, deep, malt complexity.  It is available year-round in bottles, but in the winter and early spring you can get it on draft! http://www.merchantduvin.com/pages/5_breweries/celebrator.html 

(And . . . . available June 1 . . . . Ayinger Brau-Weisse Draft!)

 

Get your beer attire, glassware, and collectibles at our e-store . . . we have added Bar Kits and a couple of beer books as well.

http://store.merchantduvin.com/e/mdv

 

Roanoke, VA; Philadelphia; Minneapolis; Kalamazoo; Pinkus Organic beers coming to South Carolina, . . . tastings, festivals, beer coverage in the press . . . it is a great time for fine beer!  Full event listing at:

http://www.merchantduvin.com/pages/1_about/news.html

 

 

 

Beer Chat from the Beer Court Jester: Tasting, Evaluating, and Enjoying Fine Beer

 

Lately, we are seeing a wonderful trend in American dining: fine beer paired with fine cuisine. 

 

A few short years ago, restaurants – even those with 200 wines – didn’t sell much fine beer.  (If you had asked for a beer list, the server would probably assume it was a joke and laugh.)  Now, because of innovative chefs, excellent beer writers, and the wonderful American beer consumer fine beer is appearing at more great restaurants every day.  At last, beer is becoming respected as a compelling and wonderful beverage, as legitimate and tasty as wine or spirits.

 

So when you enjoy a beer, what are you tasting?  At a restaurant, how do you know what to order?  When your server says that one is “malty” what does that mean?  Isn’t “bitter” a negative?

 

Distinct components make up the flavor of beer, and a brief understanding of those may help with choices and even with enjoyment.

 

  1. Malt: barley (and sometimes wheat) is the heart of beer.  It gives beer its color, its body – that’s the tactile thickness you feel in your mouth – and its subtle flavor of cereal or grain. When a portion of the malt used in the recipe is roasted, smoked, or handled in a special way, those specialty grains add their own malt component to the flavor – often extreme roastiness, or rich caramel, or biscuit notes.  A “malty” beer means that the malt flavors are emphasized, whether they are rich “pure grain” flavors or complex compilations of cereal flavors, roast, caramel, etc.  Try a Samuel Smith Taddy Porter.
  2. Hops: In humans, bitterness is indeed a flaw.  In beer, the bitter flavor originating from hops balances the rich/deep/sweet flavors that come from malt.  (Marinara sauce with no spices would be cloying and boring, wouldn’t it?)  Hops also provide an herbal, spicy aroma that serves as the high note over the rich tones of malt.  Bitterness can be measured as a simple number, International Bittering Units or IBU (10 IBU is low and 40+ IBU is high) but wonderful subjective words describe the character of hops: piney, grapefruit, musty, earthy, spicy, floral, bright . . . . Try a Samuel Smith India Ale or Orval Trappist Ale to experience hops.
  3. Body: Some beers feel thick and viscous in the taster’s mouth, and work their way slowly along the tongue; others are thin and light, running lightly and quickly down the hatch.  This thickness or consistency is mostly a factor of how many unfermented sugars are left in the finished beer. (Note the rich body of Ayinger Celebrator Doppelbock and Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout; Pinkus Ur-Pils and Ayinger Jahrhundertbier have a lighter body.  American light lagers, with their additions of rice or corn, have very light body.)   Relating to body is the level of dissolved carbon dioxide – “how fizzy?” – which also varies by beer and affects how body is perceived.  Many highly-carbonated styles, like Orval or Westmalle, are best served by pouring them into a chalice where the escaping CO2 forms a beautiful aesthetic head.  The bubbles also help carry the aroma & bouquet to the taster . . .
  4. Alcohol: Ethanol – the variety of alcohol we drink – has a warm, medicinal flavor.  Ethanol is right up front in vodka and strong light rum, and it’s noticeable as a flavor component in strong beers like Samuel Smith Imperial Stout, Westmalle Tripel, and Traquair House Ale.
  5. Fermentation: Here’s the magic component of beer flavor and aroma that is most elusive and difficult to describe: if a taster can isolate malt, hops, fruit, spice and alcohol flavors, then identify what’s left over . . . that is the flavor provided by yeast.  Yeast also affects body, because some strains consume more or less sugar during fermentation than others.  Yeast is such a key component to beer flavor that if a brewer made two beers with all the ingredients the same and only changed the yeast strain, the resulting beers would be completely different.
    There are over 100 strains of brewers yeast, each with different flavor characteristics.  In the case of a Bavarian weissebeer, like Ayinger Brau-Weisse or Ur-Weisse, the yeast provides a clove-like flavor.  Many Belgian yeast strains add notes of bubblegum or tropical fruit; some English ale yeast strains suggest butterscotch – consider that next time you have a Samuel Smith Pale Ale.  Pinkus Munster Alt has crisp citrus notes from the yeast strain used.  In the case of Belgian lambics, indescribable extreme flavors result from fermentation via wild yeast – try a Lindemans lambic, especially Cuvee Rene or Gueuze.  Orval Trappist Ale also has very complex yeast flavor notes from multi-yeast-strain fermentation. 
    So, the fermentation action of yeast converts sugar & oxygen into alcohol, carbon dioxide, and *flavor.*  The examples above are ale yeasts (“top fermentation”), which do produce noticeable “fruity” or “bread-dough” flavors; lager yeasts (“bottom fermentation”) – which work more slowly and in a cooler environment – produce less-noticeable fermentation flavors.  
  6. Fruit or spices:  brewers, particularly those in Belgium or America, may add other flavors by choosing special ingredients - some of the more common are coriander, bitter orange peel, fresh fruit, honey, heather, bog myrtle, even hemp . . .   and each adds its own note.  Try a Traquair Jacobite Ale and note the uniqueness added by coriander; a Lindemans fruit lambic shows how well fruit can pair with beer.
  7. Balance:  Brewers choose to emphasize flavors in their beer, to brew a beer that ranges to one end or another of the spectra above.  But balance is important to the finished product: a clean, light-bodied beer, low bitterness, but with 10% alcohol by volume would lead to some ugly faces on tasters because it would be a single statement, ethanol, with no balance.  A deep & malty ale with thick body but only 2% alcohol would be cloying and oversweet. However, American India Pale Ales, with their extreme bitterness and finishing hops, are also brewed with strong malt backbone and usually fairly high levels of alcohol: great ones illustrate the concept of turning all the knobs up to 11 . . . and they are actually balanced.   India Pale Ales from the UK will certainly not have the extreme hopping levels of American ones, but with refinement and restraint applied to the other flavor components they are beautiful, balanced, tasty beers.  Likewise, German Doppelbock or Marzen – profound malt statements – will be a bit higher in alcohol and will also have significant body, for balance.

 

Look for future MdV e-newsletters to suggest beer-and-food pairings; also, we keep an archive of previous Merchant du Vin beer e-newsletters at:  

 

http://www.merchantduvin.com/pages/1_about/enews_archive.html/

 

Merchant du Vin, America’s Premier Specialty Beer Importer Since 1978

www.merchantduvin.com