The Naked Pint (5 page)

Y
ou now know that real beer flavors include a complex array of sweet, salty, bitter, and alkaline. The aromatics of beer also run the gamut from caramel, grainy, and grassy to nutty, roasty, and toasty. But sometimes there are flavors present in beer that aren’t supposed to be there. We all know about “skunked” beers, but bad flavors in beer can also vary greatly. These off flavors can have tastes and aromatics like the burnt qualities of asphalt and sulfur, metallic qualities, aspects of wet moldy newspaper, wet dog, or wet leather. Detecting off-flavors can be confusing because sometimes, except for the wet dog perhaps, one of these flavors might be intended for the beer. For instance, some Rauchbiers can have burnt qualities that work well, and sometimes a Gueuze can have a funky wet-leather earthiness to it that makes it great.

The trick to spotting off-flavors is knowing the variety of flavors that you can expect from the beer style that you’re drinking and what flavors shouldn’t be there. If these off-flavors are faint, they may go unnoticed by the novice. But an experienced beer taster will be able to tell if a beer he or she had before tastes significantly different this time. When we get to this point in beer school, we actually have our students taste a beer that’s off so that they’ll be able to distinguish truly bad from an intentional sourness or funky flavor. They forgive us, but they’ll never forget that spoiled beer they sipped.

Off-flavors usually come from oxidation, bacterial contamination, an unexpected or accidental spontaneous fermentation, or cork taint. Oxidation is simply when the beer has been exposed to oxygen, possibly from an improper cap seal. Oxidation will generally give you wet-cardboard flavors. Bacteria in beer can produce acid in the beer, which creates sour and tart flavors. As you’ll learn in Chapter 6, certain beer styles, like the Berliner Weisse, actually benefit from a fermentation process in which the bacteria
Lactobacillus
is purposefully added.
Lactobacillus
produces lactic acid, which gives the Berliner Weisse its distinctive sourness and citric qualities. A bacteria that is frequently the culprit in producing off-flavors is
Acetobacter
.
Acetobacter
is a bacteria that produces acetic acid in beer and that gives vinegar its sourness and pungency. This organism is great in a Flanders Red Ale, but when it appears in an American Pale Ale, you know something is wrong. If a beer becomes infected by this bacteria, it’s usually due to improper cleaning and sanitizing.

Phenols are off-flavors that also come from improper sanitization or from some wild yeast strains. Phenols smell like Band-Aids. Yes, it’s true. If you have a beer that smells like plastic or has mediciny, burnt, or smoky qualities, it may contain phenols. Once again, not all phenolic qualities are bad. Wheat beers, many Belgian Ale styles, and Smoked Beers make good use of phenols, but if you’re tasting Band-Aids and smoke in your Pale Lager, there might be a problem.

Another fault in beer that can be caused by bacterial contamination or unhealthy yeast is the presence of a compound called diacetyl. Diacetyl gives off buttery and butterscotch aromas and flavors. Again, these qualities might be great in a British Cream Ale, but if you smell buttered popcorn in your Nut Brown, call Houston. Beer can also be contaminated with wild yeast strains that can ferment sugars in beer that normal beer yeast can’t ferment. Wild yeast doesn’t just exist in the Senne Valley of Belgium. It exists everywhere. If you get a beer that’s been contaminated by wild yeast, you could get a super-foamy and bad-tasting mug. Flavors that can come from these accidental and spontaneous fermentations can be the worst of the bunch: sulfuric aromas like rotten eggs and burning rubber. Mmmm ... sounds tasty. These flavors usually come from the autolysis of yeast, when the enzymes in the yeast cause it to start eating itself.

One more cause of off-flavors that we’ll talk about is a little something called cork taint. Sometimes, with specialty beers, brewers will finish the beer with a cork to allow aging or to be fancy. Cork taint is simply cork contamination (usually by a compound called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole). When a well-stored wine bottle is bad, the culprit is most likely cork taint. We in the industry, who try to limit our use of the word
taint
, call a wine or beer bottle that has gone bad due to cork spoilage “corked.” Generally, if a bottle is corked, it will taste musty and moldy like a damp basement. Once again, a great quality in some beers but not so much in other clean, crisp beer styles.

D
on’t worry. We won’t be doing any math here. There are only two numbers you will really need to know in the beer world: IBUs and ABVs. It’s important that you know these numbers for a couple of reasons. First, knowing them will aid you in determining what the taste of the beer might be like before you try it. If you don’t know that the beer you are ordering has 90 IBUs and you hate bitter, dry beers, you will be in for a shock when you taste it. Second, knowing how strong the beer is will help you steer clear of potential beer goggle incidents and overall whorishness. If you don’t know that the beer you ordered is 11% alcohol, you could be ass up in your neighbor’s flower garden and doing the walk of shame before you can say “three sheets to the wind.”

The first acronym, IBU, stands for International Bitterness Units. The IBU scale provides a way to measure the bitterness of a beer. The number on the bitterness scale is a result of some complicated empirical formula using something called a spectrophotometer and solvent extraction. We don’t pretend to understand that, and the good thing is that you don’t have to understand it either. The bottom line is that this scale was based on tasting beer samples and correlating the perceived bitterness to a measured value on a scale of 1 to 100. The higher the number, the higher the concentration of bitter compounds in the beer. For example, a mass-produced American lager might have an IBU of 5 on the scale, whereas an extreme Tripel IPA could have an IBU as high as 100.

We encourage you to use your own palate to determine bitterness because the IBU scale can be a bit confusing for newer craft beer drinkers. Some of the more advanced drinkers, and those who are adept at brewing, may begin to pay closer attention to these numbers. Some innovative brewers are starting to put this number on bottle labels, but more often than not, this number is not shown on the beer bottle. If you’re worried about bitterness, it will help to know the general range of IBUs for each beer style. You can usually find the IBU number for a beer on the brewery’s website. For an IBU range for beer styles, check out the Beer Judge Certification Program’s website (
w w w.bjcp.org
).

The second acronym, ABV, stands for alcohol by volume and directly relates to how drunk you are going to get. If you’re used to drinking mass-produced lagers, the beers you’ve been drinking are probably between 3% and 5% ABV. When you start getting into craft beers, the ABVs range from the familiar 3% to 5% to big beers that come in at 13% or more (drzunk!!).

If you’re going to drink a beer, or a few, you’d better know your ABVs. Believe us when we tell you that there is a
huge
difference between a 5% beer and an 8% beer. A 5% beer can make you friendly; an 8% beer can make you French kiss a tree. Of course, this all depends on how well you can hold your liquor. Can you handle your martinis, or do you get sauced after half a glass of Pinot Gris? It’s critical, especially for women, to be vigilant about how much alcohol we are actually consuming. Know your ABVs, and you, your neighbor, and her flower garden will thank us.