Unique
Unique, of course, means “unlike any other.” These are beers that make you sit up and pay attention. They change a night at the bar from average to extraordinary. These are beers that stand out from the rest because they do something different. They may not follow any rules or be the quintessential of the style, but they are almost impossible to replicate. They may use an herb you’ve never had in a beer or a fruit found only in the area of the brewery. These beers can change your whole idea of what you thought beer could be. They break down barriers and destroy all the rules. These beers often cross over to the rare or iconic section, elevating themselves into the best of the beer world. Some of our favorites from the “unique” category:
CRAFTSMAN TRIPLE WHITE SAGE: Craftsman Brewing Company, Pasadena, California. This could cross over into icon territory for sure. A seasonal beer available only on tap, it can also be counted as rare. This is a Belgian-style Tripel brewed with sage hand-picked by the brewer. 9% ABV.
CHIPOTLEALE: Rogue Ales Brewery/Brewer’s on the Bay, Newport, Oregon. A dark-hued ale brewed with chipotle peppers. Smoky and spicy and surprisingly drinkable. 5.5% ABV.
TRADE WINDS TRIPEL: The Bruery, Placentia, California. Belgian-style Tripel brewed with Thai basil. Peppery, citrusy, complex. 7.5% ABV.
ROSÉE D’HIBISCUS: Brasserie Dieu du Ciel, Montreal, Canada. A Witbier brewed with hibiscus flowers. Tropical and refreshing. 5% ABV.
PANGAEA: Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Milton, Delaware. A beer brewed with an ingredient from every continent—for example, crystallized ginger from Australia, water from Antarctica, and Basmati rice from Asia. (This brewery gets the gold for making the most ambitious, unusual, history-laden beers.) 7% ABV.
Iconic
Madonna, Jack Kerouac, Oprah, and Robert Redford have all become icons. A beer that becomes an icon is one you may see on posters, something you’ve heard talk of in craft beer circles; its reputation precedes it. These are beers that tend to have the highest ratings within their style. They don’t have to be quintessential or balanced; they are famous because of the populace, and popularity doesn’t necessarily require the brew to be balanced, unique, rare, or anything else, just favored by the public. Chimay Tripel (White) is a great example of this. To some people, it is the quintessential Belgian Tripel; to others, not at all, but everyone has heard of it, and most bars have Chimay posters adorning their walls. It’s famous, not rare; balanced to some but not others; and loved by thousands. An iconic beer is a must have beer:
CHIMAYTRIPEL: Bières de Chimay (Abbaye Notre Dame de Scourmont), Baileux (Chimay), Belgium. The largest Trappist Belgian brewery and the most popular. A staple of every craft bar. 8% ABV.
SIERRA NEVADA PALE ALE: Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, Chico, California. The most popular West Coast Pale Ale. Many attempt to copy this style, but few get it so right. Every bottle boasts the same constant quality hop bite. 5.6% ABV.
ANCHOR STEAM: Anchor Brewing Company, San Francisco, California. The one and only American Steam beer. Dominates the waterfront piers of San Francisco. 4.9% ABV.
BUDWEISER: Anheuser-Busch Inc., St. Louis, Missouri. Let’s admit it, it is a beer icon. 5% ABV.
GUINNESS (ORIGINAL): Guinness Ltd., Dublin, Ireland. Perhaps the most beloved beer of all time. A classic dry Irish Stout. Best in Ireland. 6% ABV.
PILSNERURQUELL: Plzensky Prazdroj, a. s., Plzen, Czech Republic. It made true Pilsners famous in America. 4.4% ABV.
PABSTBLUERIBBON: Pabst Brewing Company, Woodridge, Illinois. Even among craft beer drinkers, this little can gets props. A beacon for the working man and still quite popular. 4.7% ABV.
FAT TIRE AMBER ALE: New Belgium Brewing Inc., Ft. Collins, Colorado. The first craft beer for many beer drinkers. Beloved brewery with a green focus. 5.2% ABV.
Rare
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:
ANY BEER FROM THIS BREWERY: Brouwerij Westvleteren (Sint-Sixtusabij van Westvleteren), Westvleteren, Belgium. The most elusive Trappist brewery, they allow only a limited amount of beers past their doors and do not sell them to American craft bars (see Chapter 5).
THE ABYSS: Deschutes Brewery, Bend, Oregon. An extra-special Russian Imperial Stout. Super complex, great for aging, sublime. 11% ABV.
SAMICHLAUS BIER: Brewery Castle Eggenberg, Eggenberg Austria. This is a Dopplebock that is brewed only once a year and aged for several months. Rum flavor, deep molasses, and dark fruit. A whopping 14% ABV.
TEMPTATION: Russian River Brewing Company, Santa Rosa, California. The brewery sells only a certain number of bottles of this complex, sour, Belgian-style brew aged in French oak Chardonnay barrels. Well balanced for such a sour Belgian, if you see this hiding in a bar’s fridge, grab it! 7.25% ABV.
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.
Celestial Bodies: Understanding the Mouthfeel of Beer
As 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.
Carbonation
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.
Hops
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.
Malt
You know that malt provides the sugar for the yeast to consume and create CO2 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 CO2. 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.
Alcohol
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.
Yeast
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 CO2, 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!
Adjuncts and Flavorings
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:
Chipotle peppers or jalapeños can add a hot spiciness.
Oats can give a silky smooth texture.
Chocolate can make for a weightier beer or dry and bitter brew, depending on the type of chocolate used.
Rice can lighten the body.
Candi sugar can make the alcohol higher and the beer weightier, more viscous.
Rye increases head formation.
Lactose adds to the body and sweetness of the brew.
Fruit can give a sour sensation or sweet, syrupy weight.
Wheat has a lot of protein and can add silkiness on the tongue and a foamier head.
Corn can add to the sugar content, putting a weight in the liquid.
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:
The Philosophy of Beer: To Draught or Not to Draught?
Draught 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.”
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