I just read Mr. Cynical’s favorite beer thread in HO and I am curious, what makes a beer good? Why do they taste different and why is it always such a big deal? I do not mean to be rude, I am just ignorant to the art of beer drinking. I am a whiskey girl myself and so I just don’t know.
I have NFC. I only said Guinness b/c I am Irish. I don’t even drink.
It occurs to me, though, that two things that make a beer good, according to commercials, are choice hops and being smooth. Whatever that is.
To the discerning drinker, appreciation of beer is much like appreciation of wine, for all of the same reasons.
To those of us who are not so pedantic, we may not know an awful lot about beer, but we know what we like. And in my opinion, a nice grainy taste is good, but something that leans toward the darker end of the beer spectrum is better, eg Guiness Stout.
What I definitely don’t like is the recent development of “ice” beers, also known as “chill filtered” beers. To me they are pale and insipid. In fact, I regard an ice beer as similar to making love in a boat - it’s f***ing cloe to water.
Good beer is one of those things you can’t explain but you know a bad one when you try it out.
There are manyy contributary factors to the taste of beer such as the hops, malt, barley or yeast type but another very important one is the water.
I live not far away from Tadcaster which is a small town in Yorkshire. It has three large breweries and they are sited there simply because of the water.
In fact many of the older breweries are situated on spring wells.
I do note that the industrial beer brewed by the giants is just a chemical process .Every pint is the same and it is so sterile that minimum care need be taken with handling and storage.
The stuff you get from the smaller breweries is finicky stuff, it has to be cared for properly and every batch is slightly differant.The reward for all this trouble is better flavour, the head stays on and the hangover in the morning is so much less.