The Naked Pint (12 page)

As we said earlier, adjuncts and flavorings are special little things often added to beer and can have quite an effect on mouthfeel. The effect depends on the adjunct or flavoring itself. Here’s a little breakdown of a few of them and their general effects:

When you start to review beers, be sure to include descriptions of mouthfeel. It will train your palate to stay active as you taste your way through your Beer Journey. Take the following terms along with you so that you can get specific about mouthfeel:

D
raught or bottle? That is the question, isn’t it? For many people, the answer becomes the deciding factor when choosing a beer. Of course draught beer is obviously better, right? Draught beer must be fresher, and fresher is better, right? It is true draught beer is wonderful. Many people sidle up to the bar to peruse the tap handles, eager to taste a freshly tapped beer. But is draught beer the be-all and end-all of beer service? Some say that certain beers are actually much better out of the bottle. First of all, sometimes an American craft brewery is so small it doesn’t even have a bottling line, or sometimes a brewery only bottles its beer, so in these cases you have no choice between a draught and a bottle.

Second, some people think that beers out of the bottle are a little more trustworthy. When you drink a craft or artisanal beer right out of the bottle, it’s as if the brewer handed it to you himself. With beer on tap, you add the risk of draught lines. Draught lines need to be properly and constantly cleaned and maintained, or they can contaminate your beer. If draught lines aren’t cleaned on a regular basis, gunk like sugars, proteins, hop resins, yeast, bacteria, and microflora can build up and make even the best beer taste like crap. Most beer bars are pretty vigilant about this, but if you start tasting funky off-flavors (see page 24) from a keg that is not otherwise bad, you may want to start drinking beers from bottles at that particular establishment.

So what is the answer?

Because there are many varied answers to this question, we thought we’d go straight to the top. We asked Randy Thiel, former brewmaster at Brewery Ommegang in New York and current director of quality control at New Glarus Brewing Company in Wisconsin. Oh, and he’s also the first American ever to be inducted into the Knighthood of Brewers Mashstaff by the Belgian Brewers Guild in Brussels. (We’re not messing around.) Randy says, “The quality of a conditioned beer should not differ based on the volume of beer. Albeit bottles can be conditioned to higher carbonation levels than kegs or tanks, for example, high carbonation does not dispense well from draught. Carbonation has a big impact on flavor, but that’s not necessarily a quality differentiation as it is a personal preference.”