Educate me about Beer

Cafe Society
1

I think this is the right forum for this.

I spent all my life thinking piss in a can was what “beer” is, and therefore, believing that I didn’t like beer.

A couple of months ago, however, I tried a glass someone poured for me of a beer called something like “Heffeweisen.” To my incredible suprise, I didn’t just find it tolerable–I liked it.

Since then, I’ve had a couple more, and found the pleasantness remains.

Yesterday, I tried something called “Piranha Pale Ale” and found I liked it as well.

So now I’m wondering what I’ve been missing all this time.

I am wondering a few things. What’s the difference between a “malty” and a “hoppy” beer, in terms both of taste and makeup?

Is “Heffeweisen” (however you spell it) a brand, or a kind?

I see that beers range along a color dimension. Besides color, what’s the difference?

Is there a set of characteristics which is thought of relatively universally as determining the difference between a good beer and a bad beer?

Is beer like wine in that one should pair different kinds of beers with differnt kinds of foods? (I don’t really drink wine either, btw…)

And so on.

Thanks for any comments!

-Kris

2

Try here.

http://www.ratebeer.com/Story.asp?StoryID=103

3

Wow, are you in for a ride! Welcome to the wonderful world of beer.

You probably thought you didn’t like beer because all you tasted was mass-produced American crap. But there are hundreds of marvelous craft-brews out there today. Something for everybody and every taste.

Malty = sweet
Hoppy = bitter
In very general terms. The pale ale you had was of the hoppier end of the spectrum, the hefe towards the malty end, but with wheat malt predominating instead of barley malt.

Hefeweissen is a style of beer. It is made with a large measure of wheat in addition to barley, and is very lightly hopped.

The AHA recognizes 28 styles of beer. Read the guidelines for general taste, color, etc. Then go forth and imbibe! :smiley:

4

If you like hefeweissens, you might also check out wheat beers. See if you can find some Delirium Tremens–that’s good beer.

5

A recent [thread=347992]thread[/thread] on beer. Just don’t drink any Corona, regardless of what Campion says. :wink:

Stranger

6

Do not delude yourself - beers are just as complex and satisfying as wine though they don’t cover the same spectrum that wine does.

Just my 2 cents!

7

Frylock–I had your same experience about 3 years ago, and since then I have been beer crazy. Stouts, porters, lagers, wheat, fruit, lambics, ESB’s, ales, pilsners, and so on have been rocking my world.

I frequent a site called beerpal.com almost daily. They have an updated ranking of the top beers in the world overall, and by type. They also have reccomendations from members living in different areas of good pubs or retailers to try out.

Feel free to e-mail me if you have any other questions Frylock.

8

This is not uncommon. Did you have an experience with a bad beer at some time in the past, or did you instead have a preconceived idea of how beer would taste? If it wasa bad experience, do you remember the brand, by chance?

Silenus is correct above. I’d like to add that some beer drinkers really like hops a lot, and for them, beer isn’t beer if hops isn’t the dominant taste. You sound like you’re more like me – not a fan of the bitter hops flavor, but a fan of a solid malt flavor that can compete, or even overbear, the flavor of hops.

A style.

One thing to point out – beers do differ by color, but the color of a beer is not correlated with either the fullness of taste or the alcohol content of a beer. That is, a dark beer is not necessarily more flavorful than a golden-colored beer (i.e. a dark beer can still be swill), nor is it necessarily a stronger drink.

Beers obtain their color by how much roasting is done to the grain before it is used to make beer. Highly-roasted grain will yield a dark colored beer … and lightly-roasted grain will yield a pale golden beer. Now then … with any random dark beer, you will normally taste something quite different from a typical light colored lager, but there’s no guarantee that the dark beer will taste good.

Among most all beer critics (and armchair “beer snobs”), there are two factors that can mark a beer as subpar:

  1. use of a proportion of cheap and/or poorly processed grains like rice and corn (prevalent in mass-produced American brews) instead of using exclusively barley or wheat.

  2. overuse of hops to mask a weak or bad malt flavor. Also a feature of your Buds, Millers, and Coors, but also of most of the weaker European labels (Heineken, Beck).

I don’t personally feel that one has to make this complicated. Some will say that a malty, dark beer goes with red meat, and that a lighter, hoppier beer should go with chicken or fish.

What I find is that most any beer that I’d care to drink serves more or less as a palate cleanser from which to partake every few bites of a meal. The idea is that the beer should be a refreshing accompaniment … but not something that you keep on tasting while eating your actual entree. There are a few beers that I enjoy alone that are so strong of taste that, for me, they make a poor choice for a meal-accompaniment beer (e.g. double bocks, lambics).