Discovering Taste & Style
>> Taste is Individual
You may not like all of the beers featured on this site (in fact, we won’t necessarily like them all either), but learning why you like a particular drink is just as important as learning what you like to drink. Beer can exhibit a multitude of complex flavors and a great many factors go into crafting those flavors. When you begin to understand your own taste, you can experiment with food pairings, discover new styles, or simply find the best beers to quench your individual palate.
The modern art of brewing is still evolving, regularly welcoming bold (sometimes indescribable) new styles and flavors to the table. In fact, home brewing wasn’t even legal in the United States until November of 1978 when Congress, under president Jimmy Carter, repealed Federal restrictions on home brewing. Today the U.S. is home to nearly 1400 craft brewers, brewpubs, and microbreweries- many of them inspirational for pushing the envelope on traditional brewing tactics.
>> Beer Styles
By about 1550 BC, the Hittities of ancient Anatolia may have had as many as 15 different types of beer. Amazingly, it wasn’t until about 1977 that efforts were put forth to establish an order, or standard of organization, for styles. It was in that year that esteemed English author Michael Jackson (”The Beer Hunter”) published The World Guide to Beer on which today’s beer style taxonomy is largely based.
Today, The Beer Judge Certification Program outlines an extremely comprehensive index of styles, essentially the style dictionary for modern craft brewing. Some brewers, of course, choose to ignore the rules all together- that’s where the real creativity comes to play. There are a ton of places to read more about different beer styles, for now, we’ll cover the basics.
Most beers fit under two classes – ales and lagers.
We mentioned earlier ales use a strain of yeast that ferments at the top of the beer, at times imparting aroma and flavor to the brew. Ales are also brewed at higher temperatures than lagers, amplifying that aroma and flavor. The ale family generally includes more of the robust and citrusy, aromatic, abundantly hoppy beers; some wheat beers may even give off notes of clove, bananas, or bubblegum.
Included under the ale family are Barley Wine, Dubbel, Trippel, Quad, Altbier, Bitter, Amber Ale, Brown Ale, Pale Ale/India Pale Ale (IPA), Kölsch, Porter, Stout, and Wheat beer.
The product of bottom-fermenting yeasts, lagers require longer storage times and cooler temperatures than ales during the fermentation process. Lagers make up the majority of beer sales- among them, the American dry lagers like Budweiser, Miller and Coors. They are usually filtered and served cold, seen as ‘crisp’ and refreshing, highly drinkable. Although there are exceptions, lagers are not known for intense flavor, rather for malty undernotes and subtle hoppiness.
Types of lagers include Bock, Dunkel, Helles, Märzen, Oktoberfest, Pilsner, Schwarzbier and Vienna lager.
Both lagers and ales can range from very pale to black, and no generalization can truly encompass the expansive variety of flavors found under either roof. In paler beers, particularly ales, aim to pick out hops, citrus, and floral notes. In darker beers, look for some of the rich malty flavors, caramel, coffee, and chocolate. Expect some surprises along the way.
As mentioned there are a number of beers that don’t quite fit the ale/lager classification, some of them a hybrid of brewing styles. Most notably, a ’steam beer’ or ‘california common’ is brewed with lager yeast at higher (ale) temperatures. Then there are Lambics, spontaneously fermented, a specialty of the Pajottenland region in Belgium. [Wikipedia: Beer Styles]