The Art of Beer Tasting: the basics

Today, I am going to start a new series of posts on how to taste beer. Hopefullly, this will build into a step-by-step guide on the art of beer tasting which will be useful to both the casual drinker and the expert brewer. The aim is to give you the tools asses the quality of your beer whether commercially produced or homebrewed, to better appreciate the unique qualities of a good pint, or even organise your own beer tasting evening.

I future posts I will provide a step-by-step tutorial, with various digressions to discuss more detailed issues. But here, I give a very brief introduction.

It seems to me that most people don’t choose their beer based on taste. This sounds ridiculous, but I think its true. People choose on the basis of price, name or image more than taste. With the rise of binge drinking, beer has become pretty much a functional item – its purpose is to get you drunk, rather than something to be enjoyed in the drinking. And yet, at the same time craft brewing is becoming ever more popular and appreciation of the complex taste profiles of beers has meant that good beer is being tasted and talked about in the way once reserved only for wine.

In fact, the art of beer tasting is based on many of the same priciples, though the things you are looking for are rather different.When tasting beer, there are three major areas to be assessed:

• appearance
• aroma (nose)
• taste (palate)

I will look at each of these ares in future posts, explaining what you should look for in each area and how to evaluate the quality of a beer.

But the first step is ensuring that you serve your beer in the correct manner. If you don’t serve your beer properly you wont be able to fully appreciate the above qualities. So that will be the topic of my next post in this guide.