musing

Best way to be a better drinker is drink bad beer and learn what has gone wrong with it. https://t.co/gCvOGwJLAu

— Em Sauter (@PintsandPanels) January 3, 2020

In Drink Better Beer, author Josh Bernstein writes about spending a day with the sensory panel at Allagash Brewing in Maine, acting briefly as a panelist himself.

I ponder my sample of White, the brewery’s flagship witbier, which should taste slightly sweet and sour, mildly bitter, and faintly of minerals. “Tastes overly harsh,” I write in the iPad set up with sensory software from DaughtLab, which collects data on panelists’ impressions. “Too astringent.” I move on to the Belgian-style Tripel, a beer evocative of honey, bubble game, grapes, and green apples. “This is a sourness I don’t love,” I write. The coffee-infused James Bean, a triple aged in bourbon barrels, has a “drying sourness that turns me off,” while the smoothly malty House Beer hits its pear and grapefruit notes.

Whow, that was a lot of flawed beer, I think.

Except, it turns out only the Tripel was adulterated, dosed with acetic acid.

Later Bernstein tastes three different samples of White, and documents the flaws in each. Except, it turns out two are flawless, and in fact, the same beer. “It’s a combination that I use often with guests and new tasters to show when they are overly critical,” says Karl Arnberg, who manages the sensory program as Allagash.

Think about it for a moment. Why look for reasons not to like a beer? No doubt, quality is important. That’s why Bernstein invested a day in Portland, Maine. There’s good reason for those in the beer business to learn to identify what are classified as off flavors, and it useful to some to understand what causes them.

Read more

The Unicode Technical Committee recently announced it would not add a white-wine emoji to Unicode’s standard emoji mix, despite a 19-page proposal and well-organized petition campaign supported by winemaker Kendall-Jackson.

“If certain news outlets are to be believed, white-wine drinkers everywhere were devastated,” Stephen Harrison wrote in Slate. He doesn’t particularly care one way or another, and instead poses a question “. . . more philosophical in nature, namely, whether emoji are supposed to represent broad emotions and concepts or something more specific.”

Coincidentally, last week Jonny Garrett traced “the origins of beer language, from Michael Jackson to emojis” at Good Beer Hunting.

So what changed since Heinrich Knaust wrote Funff Bücher, von der Göttlichen und Edlenn Gabe, der Philosophischen, hochthewren and wunderbaren Kunst, Bier zu brawen in 1573? (Plenty was written about beer centuries before that, but this is a blog not a complete history of beer writing, and Richard Unger calls Knaust’s book the first extensive and comprehensive work on brewing.)

Read more

Monday beer links and musing remain on hiatus, but here are a few “just the links” that shouldn’t be overlooked.

– The Calamity of Cultural Confusion: Appropriation vs Appreciation.
and
– A Look At Cultural Appropriation Within The Hip-Hop Culture.

– In Trump era, breweries and bars wear politics on their sleeves.
and
– The Beer Politic.

– Lagunitas brews Newcastle Ale.
and
– Light Beer, Big Opportunity — Lagunitas Enters the Low-Cal Market.

– Brewer Lee Hedgmon Learned the Rules in Order to Break Them.
and
– Lee Hedgmon Oral History Interview.

– Just the Essentials — How Distilled Oils are Expanding the Impact of Hops.
and
– The Complex Case of Thiols.
Disclaimer: These are my stories. If hops interest you consider signing up for Hop Queries.