I have ordered a beer, taken a sip and wondered what in the world I was going to do with a whole pour of this...how am I going to drink it all? It just doesn't taste good to me--something must be wrong with it.
But then I've also wondered if I was going crazy, or if my tastebuds were off, or if I had just eaten something weird that day that made the beers taste funny, because everyone else seemed to like it or I liked it last time I had it. It's not true that your palate is static. Our preferences and our judgments change all the time, based on experience, time of year, what you ate that day, what else you drank that day, or even whether or not your allergies are acting up. All of these factors make it difficult to really tell if your beer is truly infected.
A big issue too is just personal preference. I know some people are absolutely horrified by grassy off flavors in old hops. I know others are so sensitive to diacetyl that even just a touch of it ruins a beer for them.
I have tasted off flavors in beer, but I've often chalked it up to personal preference. I'll say that I don't like that one because it's a little too buttery and rich for my palate; I prefer crisp and bitter to sweet or buttery. Did that beer taste a little like green apples? Maybe, but I like green Jolly Ranchers, so why is that a bad thing?
Off flavors in beer can be subtle or obvious, horrible or simply interesting, catastrophic or part of the style. It's hard to tell when to draw the line.
Enter the Cicerone off flavor workshop. There used to be a kit you could buy from cicerone.org for $50, but when I double checked before writing this post, it seems it only comes with a webinar now (which really is a good thing for explanation and guidance) but boosts the cost to $150 for a 6 person webinar.
Regardless, I was fortunate enough to have a local Cicerone lead an off flavor workshop at a restaurant/beer bar not half a mile from my house, so I couldn't pass up the opportunity. I signed up for a lovely $48 ticket that included the workshop and some food and arrived with my notebook and a pen, eager to learn what I should NOT be tasting in your beer.
Having taken the Cicerone beer server test and been around plenty of homebrewers and experimental professional brewers, I've tasted some off flavors over the years. I was hoping this workshop was going to help me use professional jargon to put a finger on why some beers just didn't seem to work.
The workshop consisted of 5 pairs of beers. One of each pairing was "good" and the other of the pair was "flawed." We were told we would cover skunked beer (on a lager), diacetyl (on a different lager), DNS on a brown ale, acetaldehyde on a brown ale, and oxidization on a pale ale. Each flawed beer was supposed to be dramatically affected so that we could tell the difference easily between the two. The process led to some interesting observations.
Line up of the pairs of beers
Lesson learned #2: You can't taste every off flavor. Or maybe you can, but I can't. But that's ok, I guess. Each person has a palate that is naturally or environmentally tuned to certain flavors. I personally do not enjoy saffron in anything. It's just my palate. Similarly, I apparently cannot taste acetaldehyde. That's the off flavor that everyone was saying tasted like green apples in your beer. When we had the "correct" beer next to the "flawed" beer, and we were supposed to taste the difference, I was stumped. I could tell that one was slightly different from the other, but without prompting I would never have come up with "green apples." And as I previously mentioned, I like green Jolly Ranchers and a lot of sour beers so I'm not sure I could find this offensive even if it was in a style it wasn't supposed to be in. I did feel like I was failing some sort of palate test here, but I've come to accept that without further training, I'm not likely to overcome my palate's natural tendencies.
Lesson learned #3: Having someone else describe a flavor to you is like having someone describe a painting you can't see. You can get the general gist of the thing, but you really learn more about the person doing the describing than what's being described. At the end of the workshop, we were given 4 beers that were not affected in any way, but the workshop leader was asking us to describe the flavors. Half the room hated the hefe given to us, claiming all sorts of combinations of off flavors, but the other half of the room despised the sour, claiming a variety of infections. There was even disagreement on a barrel aged stout, with multiple attempts to explain where the brewer went wrong. With all these previous categories of flaws in our heads, we just didn't imagine that all these beers were actually brewed to style and weren't flawed in any way. Have you ever imagined what it would be like to describe the color red to someone who has never seen red? What if the red we're looking at looks like a blue-red to me, but an orange-red to you? Is there a definitive way to define which one of us has a more accurate experience of that shade of red? It's the same with off-flavors--my orange-red is buttery and what I really wanted was a blue-red crisp IPA. Can my description of the off flavor accurately describe my experience and convince you, who may like the beer, that it's actually flawed? Maybe, with beer, there is a way to use description as evidence to someone who can't taste it. But the existentialist in me thinks that maybe there isn't.
All in all, off flavor kits or workshops are a great idea. I think we really need them to know what we mean when we hear "buttery" or "grassy" or "skunky." However, we also need to not take the flavors the kit creates as the definitive answer of what makes a beer flawed or not or use the standard descriptive words to immediately mean flawed. Clearly, there are a million ways a beer can go wrong, and a million ways a beer can go right and still, someone won't like it. That's ok. That's why the craft beer industry is amazing. There really is something for everyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment