musing

Your own personal beer aromas

A couple of months back I wrote about how our beer drinking experiences may improve as we develop a better vocabulary to discuss what we are tasting.

A paper delivered by a wine expert last month shows it is never that simple.

Decanter reports:

Clues to understanding why we all perceive wines differently were unveiled by an American scientist at the Masters of Wine Symposium in Napa.

Speaking at the June gathering of MWs, which takes place every four years, Dr Charles Wysocki, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, an organisation devoted to taste and smell, said wine is “tasted” principally by smell.

Humans have only a few hundred stimuli for taste, but can distinguish thousands of different smells. Wine aromas, however, are not the same for everyone and quite possibly as unique to each individual as a fingerprint.

No surprise that context turns out to be very important. For instance, you may forever react to a particular aroma based upon your experiences the first time you smelled it.

You may also form an opinion based on how it is presented.

Wysocki also demonstrated, using an audience of wine professionals from around the world, that putting the same aroma in differently labelled bottles produced radically different perceptions.

If a pungent, mouldy cheese-like aroma was labelled “food,” the audience tended to rate it as pleasant. If it was labelled “body,” it was considered unattractive.

But back to to aroma/taste and how it might fit in with previous experiences. Donavan Hall touched on this in writing about the character of Orval, which changes over time.

One of my friends described it as “wet saddle blanket,” but I have to say I have no idea what these people are talking about. I grew up on a working farm. I had a horse for a pet. I know what horse and leather smells like. I had my nose in my fair share of wet saddle blankets and Orval reminds me of none of the experiences.

Personally, Michael Jackson’s use of “hop sack” (he also included “fresh leather”) in describing Orval left the aroma of that beer and the term hop sack so closely connected in my mind that if you said “hop sack” I would imagine the aroma of Orval first. If you handed me wet burlap that once held a bail of hops and it smelled different I would think, “This is not what hop sack should smell like.”

When beer wishes come true

There’s a reason that the Potable Curmudgeon is near the top of the beer links (on the right). Roger Baylor wrote the entry he posted yesterday back in 1998. That’s when he most of his ramblings appeared in the FOSSILS newsletter, a photocopied homebrew club newsletter. It deserved reading more than once then and is worth re-reading this morning.

Now, through the wonders of the Internet and blogging, you can read it simply by clicking.

The account is about a visit Mitch Steele, who at that time worked in the specialty brewing group at Anheuser-Busch, made to the FOSSILS homebrew club meeting in New Albany, Ind.

It concludes:

At the same time, here’s to the hope that we haven’t lost him forever, that some day he is awakened to the reality that his professional skills are being given over to an advanced technical proficiency that by definition threatens to obliterate the spiritual and artistic natures of his field of endeavor.

Hey, Mitch: It’s never too late. C’mon over to our side.

Of course Roger dug this out of the archives because Steele recently went to work at Stone Brewing in California as the head brewer.

Who cares if beer has a tail?

Geez, take a few days to go drink beer with homebrewers (the National Homebrew Conference) and all kinds of interesting discussions break out related to our access to better beer.

First there was this: The long tail of the alcohol distribution curve in a business innovation blog.

That lead to this interesting post: Did the Long Tail just become a hit, or did it jump the shark, or is it just mainstream now?

And this one from the Long Tail itself, which might help you understand more about the “long tail” concept. (Daniel Bradford also wrote about this in his editorial in the May issue of All About Beer Magazine.)

If you’ve got this far and not clicked yet then much of this is summarized by Jay Brooks before he adds lots of thoughts of his own. It’s hard to comment on Jay’s post – other than to note he obviously has too much time on his hands – because he touches on many subjects I’d like to agree, and sometimes disagree, with him on.

So to stick with one: When he writes “we must act as a cohesive group” you may not be sure how that might include you.

Stone Brewing co-founder Greg Koch put the responsibility for keeping great beer available for all of us – and making it available to still more – on all of us. If his keynote address gets posted online somewhere I’ll add a link. For now, a quick summary from memory (disclaimer: I was drinking Stone IPA at the time, having judged beers all morning).

If you go into a restaurant, bar or beer store that isn’t offering the beer you want then demand that they do – or at least some other great beer. Remember you are the one who gets to define what a great beer is – not a fast-talking distributor.

Don’t serve your friends “stepping stone” beers because they are have more flavor than mainstream but not as much as those you like because you fear your friends (and relatives) can’t handle that much. Koch used the example of ordering a keg of beer for a wedding. Serve them great beer and they’ll thank you for it.

The access to market issues that Jay concludes his post with are real – in fact, I heard some other scary tales over the weekend – but there’s still a grass roots element to the Great Beer Movement (notice how we’ve moved up from better beer to great beer?).

That’s our part.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer

More about tradition . . .

The headline is a quote from W. Somerset Maugham and the following paragraph from winemaker Annette Hoff:

. . . a philosophical struggle I have been dealing with the last few years, and that is the idea that can a wine be made traditionally in modern times? How could it truly be traditionalâ when made with modern equipment, commercial yeast, in stainless steel or plastic bins, with modern manipulation, technological know-how, bottling lines, etc. etc.? A “traditional” wine, in my mind at least, would seem to have been made by folks who are more in touch with nature, the soil and the seasons, than most folks are today. But, in spite of all of this, I truly believe I’m making a traditional product, but my problem was that I haven’t had a whole lot of evidence to back this idea up, even to myself.

Just substitute the word beer for wine and give it a little thought.

Caracole

Worth considering whether you are arguing about lambic or considering an American (Imperial-Double-India) pale ale with more hop flavor than any other beer in history.

Promoting beer knowledge vs. snobbery

Now the New York Times has written about the city’s first beer sommelier, a already discussed here a couple of months ago.

This will lead to a whole ‘nother round of posts in various blogs, and probably touch upon some more interesting ideas (including still more discussion if sommelier is a wine specific word). I promise not to beat you over the head with too many pointers, but here is an interesting thought from Roger Baylor:

This is the part that I’m having a problem embracing:

“We don’t aim towards pub people,” he said. “We’re about the beer geeks, people who want to try a new experience.”

Whether or not there is a word that accurately describes the function of ordering and recommending beer — a beer sommelier — how can it be so blithely divorced from the consciousness of pub people?”

In my experience, that’s where the “geeks” came from in the first place.

Beer knowledge is important, and to disseminate it through the experience and wisdom of a “beer sommelier” is something worthy of praise, but to imbue it with pretentiousness is both unnecessary and potentially self-defeating.

It’s hard enough going out there every day and having to un-do the incessant dumbing down of beer perpetuated by a half-century of megabrewing theory and practice without mimicking the excesses of wine snobbery.

Feel free to discuss.