{"id":5080,"date":"2012-08-26T11:09:29","date_gmt":"2012-08-25T23:09:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/?p=5080"},"modified":"2012-08-26T23:08:54","modified_gmt":"2012-08-26T11:08:54","slug":"get-more-from-your-beer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philcook.net\/beerdiary\/2012\/08\/26\/get-more-from-your-beer\/","title":{"rendered":"Get More From Your Beer"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had the good fortune, this year, to be invited to present a little seminar at Beervana<\/a>. Given the title\u00a0Get More From Your Beer<\/em>, the idea was to help wrap up the final (Saturday evening) session with a bit of a ramble on making the most of your beer-drinking experience\u00a0with a few notes on commonly-confusing topics like “proper” glassware and temperature. There’s a\u00a0lot<\/em> of beer-drinking advice out in the wild, so I wanted to distill some of the best of it down, and simplify things a little, trying to empower people to resist some of the worst bits of snobbery and taking things\u00a0way<\/em> too seriously. For me, it amounts to this:\u00a0drink beer with your brain engaged<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I made a few simple slides<\/a>, and thought I should put a version of the seminar (which really is far too formal a word for drinking a few beers and rambling for a while) up here. It’s a little lengthy \u2014 I apparently speak at a fair rate of words-per-minute \u2014 but I offer it in the hopes it’ll help.<\/p>\n

\u2014 The Fundamentals<\/h2>\n
\"Another<\/a>
Transcribing notes from random coasters into the\u00a0Diary<\/em> itself<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Embrace subjectivity:<\/strong> Beer, like all matters of taste, is a subjective experience and you should absolutely embrace it as one of life’s rare opportunities where you are guaranteed to not be\u00a0wrong<\/em>. If you like it, you like it; if you don’t, you don’t. No one can peer into the inner workings of your noggin and tell you otherwise.<\/p>\n

Understand its limits:<\/strong> But there’s a world of difference between you liking something and it\u00a0being good<\/em> \u2014 in fact it’s hard to find a genuine sense in which the latter can be objectively true in a domain such as this. So don’t browbeat people with tastes unlike your own, and don’t ever put up with a disdainful look shot in your direction over a mere difference in subjective experience.<\/p>\n

Arm yourself with a little knowledge:<\/strong> Beer’s a richly varied and\u00a0fractally interesting<\/a><\/em> thing, but it’s always struck me (as against, say, wine or literature or technological gadgetry) as a subject which disproportionately rewards even a\u00a0little<\/em> knowledge. A good-enough familiarity with the canonical styles will let you decide whether you think the beer “does what it says on the tin” \u2014 as close to a criteria for\u00a0objective goodness<\/em> as we’ll ever get \u2014 and some idea of their usual intended timings and pairings will help you judge a beer on its best form.1<\/sup>\u00a0Some<\/em> thought given to glassware and temperature will also be surprisingly effective at improving the experience (but we’ll get to that in a second) and it’s always worth having a quick look at the brewers’ own suggestions or what your fellow drinkers have to say \u2014 as long as you don’t let their words become Commandments.<\/p>\n

Experiment, and pay attention:<\/strong> If, in the end, you enjoy something ‘abnormally’ and against the usual recommendations, that’s\u00a0fine<\/em>. You still bought the damn beer; it’s\u00a0yours<\/em>, and the brewery benefits from the sale no matter what the hell you do with their product.2<\/sup> You just have to keep track of what you like, and how you like it. That’s possibly easy for people with memories that function within the bounds of Human Normal, but\u00a0I<\/em> had to resort to\u00a0taking notes<\/em> \u2014 and I can’t be the only one, and it’s a task made massively easier by the ubiquity of smartphones and websites like RateBeer<\/a> and Untappd<\/a>,\u00a0if you think pen-and-paper just way too pass\u00e9<\/em>. (And if all other memory-aids fail, start a blog. I’ve had\u00a0heaps<\/em> of fun with this one.)<\/p>\n

\u2014 Glassware<\/h2>\n
\"Boston<\/a>
Boston glasses all stacked up at Hashigo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rule Number One:<\/strong> Use a glass<\/em>.\u00a0It really is that simple. In my bartending days, the frequency and\u00a0smugness<\/em> with which all-too-many people would turn down a glass for their bottled beer with the worn-out joke “it’s already in<\/em> a glass” was deeply depressing. This is a basic confusion of adjectives for nouns,3<\/sup> and anyone making it should be sentenced to spend a week back in primary school, trying to bend themselves into fitting those teeny little desks and chairs. Giving up on a glass is giving up on seeing your beer basically at all, and on getting its aroma in anything but the weakest hint of a waft. You have more than one sense, and it’d be a shame to not put them to use.<\/p>\n

Rule #2 & #3 to Rule #\u221e:\u00a0<\/strong>From here, things threaten to get massively complicated. There’s a dizzying array of glassware varieties available and no danger of a global shortage on advice of what “must” go in what. But I don’t have the memory to keep them all straight, nor do I have the money to make sure I own a few of each. And it really needn’t be that difficult:<\/p>\n