I'm gonna use an interesting analogy here, please bear with me. Drinking a beer is like taking a hike, a nice stroll through a beautiful forest. If you stroll along without a care in the world, not really paying attention to anything, perhaps conversing with a friend, you'll have a wonderful time! The same can be said of drinking a beer; when done with friends or in a totally casual manner, it's a great thing.
Let's say, one day, you decide to really look around you as you go for a walk. You amble along slowly, stopping to smell some flowers, watch what the squirrels are doing, admire how beautiful that red pine is. Perhaps you go even further, learning a little bit about the native plants and animals, and using that knowledge to make your hike all the more interesting.
That's the same thing as taking notes or just THINKING about beer while drinking it. When you stop to think about what you're smelling, what you're tasting, you'll delve into flavors you might not have noticed. You'll pick apart the complexities of the beer, thinking about how well that particular note works with the beer as a whole. Perhaps you read up on brewing a bit and come to understand just how much skill and craftsmanship it takes to make a brew so tasty and complex.
However, like learning any skill, learning to truly taste a beer in a thorough and thoughtful way takes time and practice (which means drinking lots of beer). It takes time to both develop your palate, so you can actually pick out flavors, and to get better at articulating just what you're tasting.
One of the first beers that ever truly blew my mind was Trappistes Rochefort 8. This is a Belgian Strong Dark Ale, brewed by the Trappist monks of the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Saint-Rémy. The rich history of brewing by Trappist monks is something I'll cover another time.
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| Served in a Westmalle glass, but it's a Rochefort... |
The point is, I first had this beer in Athens on September 2nd, 2013. This was one of my first beer reviews ever, and it went exactly like this:
"Pours hazy brown. Very small head. Comes on with a stinging feeling, perhaps from carbonation or alcohol. Very roasty, with deep caramel notes or even dark chocolate with raspberry. Warming aftertaste but no harsh alcohol. Dark fruits, molasses. Like a dark fruitcake if that makes sense"
About 2 months later, on November 20th, 2013, in Rome, I re-reviewed this beer. The difference between the two reviews illustrates how my palate and my review-writing abilities had improved. Here it is:
"Pours a fairly hazy deep nutty yellow brown, capped with a big fluffy head of light, light tan foam. Nice small bubbles, very fluffy. A good layer lingers a long time. A few nice steady streams of bubbles keep the head going.
Nose is nice dark chocolate and molasses, with some hints of dark, boozy fruit. Some real nice Belgian yeast character, a bit of candy sweetness.
Taste is nice sweet, bready malt, soaked with molasses and even maple syrup. Follows with some dark fruit like figs and plums but also some tart cherries and raspberries. Finishes with a touch of hop dryness, not much hoppy flavor, but a touch of bitterness to balance he sweetness and slightly dry out the finish. That real Belgian yeasty character is present along with that Belgian candy flavor. Maybe just a tiny touch of alcohol warming near the end, but the 9.2% is hidden crazy well.
The mouthfeel is medium full, really rich and creamy. Carbonation is medium high, higher than I'd remembered. Carries the flavor away a tiny bit but not a ton. The malt is pretty toasted is how I'd describe it. Sweet and toasty. There's that warming alcohol feeling that pairs with the Belgian yeast. That back of the throat, vaporous sort of taste. It's very pleasant though. It gets a little stronger as it warms, but it's still not bad. The tart fruits are stronger than I remember. Ooh this beer is as good as I remember. Rich, complex, beauty of a beer."
*Note: these reviews are in the format I type in my phone, for my own use. If you haven't seen any other posts, the reviews on this blog are a bit more polished.
Moral of the story: I'm not asking all of you to write reviews of beer. I'm just suggesting that there are many ways to drink beer, some more thoughtful than others. Some beers are meant to be chugged, some are meant to be sipped and thought about. I hope that you might have a beer after reading my review of it and start to think about the flavors I mentioned, perhaps finding them, perhaps not. Either way, I hope I can turn some people on to good beer and the appreciative drinking of it.
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