The Naked Pint (13 page)

Wow, “personal preference”—now there’s an interesting concept. Here’s a little example of how it works. In Los Angeles, we can get the Abbey Ale Maredsous 10 both on draught and in bottle. Maredsous 10 is a Tripel, with 10% ABV. It has big malty sweetness; a doughy richness; and spicy, peppery notes. Now, personally, we like this beer better from the bottle than on tap. Why? The whole carbonation factor. To us, the higher carbonation that’s only possible in the bottle provides a better mouthfeel, lifting up what could be a cloying beer. On tap, that crisp, effervescent snap, that balance we like, is lessened. Now, that’s just our opinion. Perhaps someone else would prefer the different flavor and mouthfeel that comes from Maredsous 10 on tap; maybe she likes a less carbonated Maredsous 10 and thinks it’s better balanced. Who are we to say that she’s wrong?

So, in the big draught versus bottle debate, you have to take a lot of factors into consideration. You have to think about what style of beer you’re drinking. You have to think about the quality of the draught lines and system, you have to consider the brewer’s intent with the beer, but most important you have to make your own decision based on your personal preferences. We defer to Sir Randy’s credo and New Wave band Devo’s lyrics: “Use your freedom of choice.”

We hope you are now inspired to go forth and taste the artful creations in craft beer. You are about to get into different styles and details about each brew, but keep your criteria for evaluating beer close at hand. Don’t judge a beer by its label or its color, but by your palate. These criteria will no doubt change with every new beer style, as one’s palate tends to embrace flavors it once abhorred. After you’ve examined every style, come back to the Art of Beer and see how much you’ve changed. You may laugh at what you once thought was a quintessential Hefeweizen. By the time you’re brewing your own, your list of favorite beers will have varied greatly and your philosophy of beer will have deepened.

A fine beer may be judged with only one sip ... but it’s better to be thoroughly sure.

—CZECH PROVERB

W
e envy you, the newly converted, the Neophyte, just setting out on your Beer Journey, with all those beautiful beers ahead of you, just waiting for you to taste them for the very first time. You are standing on the precipice of your journey, and with Beer 101 under your belt and a respect for the Art of Beer, you’re ready to make your taste buds ridiculously happy. But this moment is tenuous. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Many of the newly converted tend to take their beer info and run with it. They go to the bar and demand the strongest craft beer with the highest ABV. Yes, once you have a taste of quality, you, too, may have the overwhelming desire to go huge! But believe us when we warn you that there have been many potential beer aficionados who have been foiled by an overconfident headfirst dive into the deep end of the beer ocean. You are in danger of sampling beers that are way too big and powerful for a young craft beer palate. While we appreciate and sometimes exhibit this kind of bravado ourselves, and while this kind of maverick beer experimentation
can
lead to a happy accident, it’s more likely to lead you to a bad beer incident that could leave you doubting yourself and, even worse, doubting the goodness of beer (The Horror!). That’s not a risk that we are willing to let you take.

We believe that the right path to fully assimilating your palate means starting out with lighter, more delicate beers. This will train your palate to recognize the most delicate of flavors, from the dry to the bitter hop, from the biscuity to the nutty malt profile, and from the fruity to the buttery yeast esters. And don’t forget the extreme difference between the mass-produced and the artisanal craft brews. These beers are the same style as the mass-produced lagers, but they have more interesting, fresher flavors. This will teach your palate to pick up on nuance and quality.

These lighter beers are also great for your friends who say they don’t like beer and don’t know what to order from a craft beer list. It’s important to understand, and for you to tell them, that
light
should not equal
flavorless
. This is one of the greatest misconceptions about beer.
Easy drinking
implies that you should bypass your taste buds, but this shouldn’t be your mantra where craft beer is concerned. Start with the beers discussed in this chapter and savor their refined profiles. You will begin to acquire a taste for the true flavors of a lager, the fruity notes of a real Bavarian-style Hefeweizen, and the tartness of a deliciously sweet and sour Lambic Ale. When you begin to distinguish the lies from the true flavors, you’ll be able to carry that knowledge with you throughout your entire life of beer drinking. These are lessons you can really use in your beer life. No more drinkin’ for the man; burn those corporate beer logos and begin to live! Reclaim your beer freedom!

Pale Lagers are the most common beer style attempted by the giant beer corporations. So in some ways, you may be most familiar with this style, but sadly most of us are familiar only with the crappy kind. Drinking a mass-produced lager and then tasting a true Pilsner from the Czech Republic is like eating waxy Halloween chocolate as a kid and then, years later, tasting a bar from Italy made with 80% cacao. It’s as if you’d never had chocolate before. You laugh at your childhood notions of chocolate. One is a taste of your youth, when getting more Halloween loot than your friends was more important than the quality of the candy. Similarly, the beers of your youth were made for plentiful consumption (chug, chug, chug!) but lacked taste. The beers that we want you to begin your journey with are still often lighter in alcohol and lighter in body (and yes, still chuggable, if you must), but they give your brain some flavor to mull over. It will be as if you’d never had beer before. Trick or treat.

As we said earlier, the majority of beer produced and consumed in America today—particularly mass-produced, industrialized beer—is made in the Pilsner style. We should know what that is then, shouldn’t we? Wait, so what is that?

A Pilsner (or Pilsener, or Plzen), which means “green meadows,” is a type of lager named after the city in which it was created, Plzen, Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. The Bohemians, who had created a brewers’ guild called the People’s Brewery to improve the quality of their beer, were fed up with cloudy, funky, heavy, dark brews that seemed to turn sour. They recruited genius Bavarian brewer Josef Groll, who produced the first batch of Pilsner in 1842. Pilsner beer was a revelation and completely free of the funky look of the darker, sometimes murky ales because Groll used the German lagering method (brewing with lager yeast at a low temperature) to ferment only pale malted grains (instead of a mélange of darker malts). He also mixed in a good dose of Czech Saaz hops. This, combined with the native soft water, produced a beer that was crisp, clear, light straw to golden in color, biscuity, clean, and dry. To this day, good Pilsners still have those same qualities. So don’t be fooled by mass-produced Pilsners that claim to be light and clean but are mostly flavorless and drinkable. Yes, Pilsners are light, but they should not remind you of water.

Note: Sprechen Sie Tschechen?
Wait a minute. Couldn’t you have sworn that Pilsners were German beers? And what about all the American Pilsner styles that everyone’s been drinking? WTF? Czechs may have been the Pilsner originators, but they are not the only masters of the Pilsner. Not to be outdone, the Germans, seeing the popularity of the sparkling, clear, and clean beer, created their own version of the brew. Theirs has a similar flavor profile to the Czech style but is even more pale in color and often more effervescent. The German Pils also boasts a heftier dose of hops, with a bit more spice and citrus.

So if you want a Czech-style Pilsner, make sure to order a Bohemian Pilsner, and if you want a German-style brew, then order a German Pilsner. There’s quite a bit of confusion regarding American craft brewers and Pilsners because often American brewers will make a Pilsner in the Czech or German style or create an amalgamation of the two. An