The Naked Pint (11 page)

The beer people buy on eBay. The beer that has been aged a few years. The beer that has a number on its bottle because there are only a few in the world. The beer that was brewed only once. The seasonal beer. The beer that you can get only in that little town in Belgium because they make it only for the monks. Like anything—diamonds, French perfume, truffles, honest politicians—the more rare, the more coveted, the more expensive. Those obsessed with beer know when something is rare. They know that their favorite Porter is more rare on cask than on tap or in the bottle. They know that a certain local brewery offers its aged Cherry Sour Belgian only in February, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s wonderful to drink a special beer like this. It seems to capture the fleeting aspects of life, to force you into the pleasure of the moment. These aren’t beers you can find at any store; they come around once in a while, and drinking them becomes a celebration of craft beer and its creative components. These beers aren’t always even the best, but finding them often provides such excitement that you can appreciate them even if they don’t get on your top ten list. A few of the extremely rare:

These guidelines will help you discriminate between beers as you delve into a variety of styles and eventually begin your beer pairings and tastings, and finally start brewing your own. Of course, favorite beers are certainly subjective, and no one can really tell you you’re wrong about your favorite beer. It’s like one’s taste in music. You may love Kenny G, and who’s to stop you? (Well,
we
would if we could!) But in music, there is
some
general agreement on what is great, what is well written, what is musical, what is unique: Beethoven’s Ninth, Sinatra singing “New York, New York,” U2’s “One,” The Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” Devo’s “Whip It.” So how do we, the drinkers of beer, detect this greatness? How do we participate in this art? Surely the consumer is as important a participant in the beer world as the audience is in the theater world. Without the eyes of the audience, is there really a show? We are the audience for great brewers. We are where the beer ends up; our taste buds, its stage (what, too much?). So it
is
important that we create some personal guidelines for a great beer, a barometer of greatness, if only for our own Beer Journey. Graduating Beer School means fulfilling this art requirement.

A
s the word implies, mouthfeel is the sensation of how a liquid or food feels in your mouth. The term refers to its body, its consistency; how it feels on your tongue, how it hits the sides of your mouth, the back of your throat, your nasal passage (sexy, isn’t it?). It is a textural, tactile descriptor that encompasses the experience of a beverage or a food. It is subjective and varies from person to person. We’ve all used many familiar words to describe the mouthfeel of whatever we are consuming; a cup of coffee is sharp, a soup is heavy, a glass of Champagne is refreshing, a Pinot Noir is dry, a soda is crisp, a Chardonnay is creamy. These descriptions are extremely popular in the beer world, and
mouthfeel
is a common word found in beer reviews. A beer’s mouthfeel is influenced by all of its contents: carbonation, hops, malt, alcohol, water, yeast, and adjuncts and flavorings. You know about these ingredients by now, so let’s consider how they affect the mouthfeel and experience of the beer. Let’s work it out.

You’ve all had this experience with a bottle of soda: You open it, it’s prickly (almost unbearably so), and it tastes refreshing, light, crisp, and sweet. Leave that bottle out for a while, and we all know what happens: The loss of carbonation brings out more of the sweetness in the soda, it gets syrupy and loses some of that refreshing feeling, and it becomes weighty, almost a dessert. This is because those little soda bubbles break up that syrupy sweetness; they balance out a heavy feeling, lifting up the flavors and the sugar. Sweetness in beer is affected in a similar way by the carbonation. The bubbles of carbonation in beer often balance out the sweetness of the malt, giving a lift to the alcohol and sugar. In a hoppy beer, the carbonation can keep the beer from tasting too bitter, enhancing the crisp and astringent feeling of the hops in the mouth. And the bold fruity aromatics of many hops are carried to the nose by those little bubbles. Beers with a high ABV can mask the alcohol with a good amount of carbonation. Think of how the soda in a whisky and soda masks some of the heat and high alcohol of the liquor.

On the flip side, Cask Ale or Real Ale (see page 94) tends to have less carbonation than other beers, and this can be a benefit. In fact, some beer experts will tell you to let the beer open up (yes, just like wine) and lose some of that carbonation to allow more flavor to come through. Think of carbonation as a distraction; sometimes it helps divert your attention away from an unwanted mouthfeel of potentially cloying malt or the heat from high alcohol. Other times, excess carbonation could hinder you from tasting the nuanced, toasty flavor of a subtle British ESB. Whether the distraction is a good or bad thing depends on the beer style and what the brewer thinks brings out its best components.

As you know, the brilliant tiny cone-shaped hops flowers do a lot for a glass of beer. As we said in Chapter 1, the hardworking hops can add dryness or bitterness, right? Well, think of how you determine if something is dry or bitter. When you suck a lemon, your whole mouth is involved; you make that crazy pouty face and feel a shock throughout your taste buds, in the back of your throat, and in your nasal passages. This is the total mouthfeel experience of astringency. In beer, usually most of the same puckery astringency comes from the hops and can affect your mouth in a similar, if not so extreme, fashion. If the beer is simply dry because of the hops, it can have a clean, crisp mouthfeel, leaving the taste buds without any residual flavors and cloying sweetness. The dryness can also balance out high alcohol or sweetness in the same way carbonation can. This is often the primary function of hops, offering a balance to sweetness in the same way that tannins in wine offer a balance to the sugar. Tannins are contained in hops as well, and the astringency they offer is a gift to beer, which would otherwise be all sweetness and no balance. When you taste beers, pay attention to any dryness, astringency, bite, and zing you get in the mouthfeel; this can often be attributed to the hops.

You know that malt provides the sugar for the yeast to consume and create CO
₂
and alcohol. You also know that more malt means more sugar. More sugar means more for the yeast to eat, which means more viscous, weighty, and coating alcohol and more effervescent, prickly, and cleansing CO
₂
. Because malt is the instigator of many of these effects, it is a key contributor to the mouthfeel of the beer. The amount of malt directly relates to the warming alcohol in your mouth or the prickly CO
₂
. Beyond that, the mouthfeel of the beer can be affected by the amount of malt, or sugar, that still remains in the brew after the fermentation process is finished. This lovely stuff is called
residual sugar
. In addition to a sweet flavor, residual sugar can give off an oily viscosity on the tongue, an almost syrupy quality that adds weight to the beer.

A shot of bourbon, a snifter of sambuca, a little whisky in your coffee; we all know how these drinks feel going down. They create great warmth, coating our throats and leaving us with a waft of the liquor in our mouths. Nothing warms one up in the snow like a nice Scotch. Similarly, high-alcohol beer can give us that warming sensation. Beer lovers often describe this warmth in their beer reviews, and whether the alcohol is present on the tongue or well hidden is an important aspect of the mouthfeel of that beer. A beer with big bitter chocolate and coffee flavors, like a Russian Imperial Stout, can support a nice warm alcohol, and this style does indeed boast an ABV anywhere from 7% to 10%. Well crafted beers have perfected the art of hiding alcohol in beer, hitting your mouth first with complex flavors of roasted malt, dark fruit and spice, or sour earthy tang, followed by a bit of warmth at the end. This can be quite dangerous (don’t forget to check the ABV!). When you taste beers, try to detect the alcohol by mouthfeel. You’ll learn a lot from trying to estimate the ABV. When you guess that the ABV is low and it’s actually high, you will be in awe of the brewer’s know-how.

Oh, magic yeast, how we love ye. You do so much for beer. Yes, this includes affecting mouthfeel. Yeast is the eater of malt and creator of alcohol and CO
₂
, so it would follow that the type and amount of yeast used in a beer affects the creation of these things, which in turn affect the mouthfeel. But beyond that, yeast can have other textural effects on your beer-drinking experience. If a beer is unfiltered, like a Bavarian Hefeweizen, it will be cloudy due to the yeast hanging out in the brew. This adds a coarseness to the liquid, a fullness, a texture on the tongue. Yeast can also give sourness to beer (see page 79), and like a sour candy in your mouth, this is a full mouthfeel experience, similar to bitterness but not quite the same. It hits you all over, sometimes balancing a sweetness or a funky earthiness, other times just making you pucker up and say Howdy!