Sacre Bleu! Beer Lingo Part Deux

The Science of Skunking

In our last Beer Lingo post we covered some basic confusing terms that describe a beer’s style and how it’s made. In today’s educational edition of Just Add Beer, we’ll look at terms that specifically describe a beer’s taste.

Before the beer even hits your tongue, you get an idea of the taste through the smell. In beer lingo it’s the nose. I learned this from a bartender who kept referencing the banana nose of hefeweizens, which of course, made me giggle. The smell reinforced the beer’s fruity taste and now I can’t drink a hefe without imagining the a yellow hook of that fruit sticking out of one those tall, thin glasses. Is that a banana nose I smell or are you just happy to see me?

A word that’s tossed around a lot lately is hoppy. It is used a lot because IPAs are hoppy and also sooper dooper popular. It’s used so often, in fact, I’m afraid it will go the way of ironic, as in, “Isn’t it ironic that hoppy is used to mean bitter?” No, no it isn’t. Hoppy actually refers to the flowery, aromatic taste and smell released from the hop flower; it has nothing to do with the bitter flavor you can feel on the back of your tongue — that’s just bitterness. That twang of bitter is what is measured in International Bitterness Units, as in, “That beer has the same IBU as my high school algebra teacher.” Continue reading

Beer-Making Take II, Featuring Brita and The Bavarians

My baby is already two weeks old!

I was told beer-making was easy, and based on the Spaghetti-Os-heavy diet of the dudes who told me this, I believed it. After all, your basic beer has (or should have) only four ingredients: water, grain, hops, and yeast. This has been the basic recipe for hundreds of years. Despite our mutual distaste for following the rules, Ben and I embarked on another brewing adventure with this in mind, even as our first attempt still sat in the basement, sulkily maturing into an adolescent IPA. (They grow up so fast!)

First, of course: water. After having soundly lost the Brita vs. Tap Water battle last time, I fished the pitcher from the fridge and began the grueling process of filtering water and pouring it into the kettle. Now, I am not known for my patience…but this takes FOREVER. I’ve got to say, there really is something to be said for boiling water, like, that it sterilizes things. I’ve heard that way back in the day, before germs and public sanitation were discovered, everyone drank beer because it was safer than the water. Everyone! Or so I’ve heard — this would take far too long to actually research.

Barley: not just for horses

Next comes the grain, in our case barley. Barley is the grain of choice for most beers, rye and wheat beer being obvious exceptions. This wasn’t always the case. Before the Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, or the Reinheitsgebot (geshundheit!), laid down the literal law about what could go in beer, it was anything goes. Afterwards, only water, barley, and hops were allowed in beer. (Wild yeast fermented the concoctions, but those little guys weren’t given any credit till discovered in the 1850s.) It was less purity of the drink they were actually concerned about and more the price of bread; that is, ensuring a sizable-enough quantity of wheat and rye that they could be bought cheaply and made into affordable bread …that is, for relatively little dough (eesh, sorry). Continue reading