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The Smell of Beer
Dec. 15th, 2013 02:29 amHad a fun evening tonight with my brother Alex. He had a couple of his friends over to demonstrate how he judged beers. (He's a certified beer judge. Or maybe certifiable... :) It was interesting to hear him discuss the criteria on which beer are officially judged. It's kind of like sommeliering, only less snooty. (Given that I can't smell, I didn't even try to follow along in the actual judging, and just enjoyed the samples of the beer while I watched and listened to them discuss.)
The neatest thing of all, though, came when he cracked open a canned "mystery" beer that he described as a world-famous beer, one of the best in the world, and served it around. His friends thought it tasted good, but couldn't recognize it. Then he revealed it was canned Heineken, and he brought out a glass bottle of it to serve to show the difference.
The interesting thing to me is that they didn't recognize it as Heineken because it didn't taste like (bottled) Heineken. Because the bottled Heinekin was "skunked" due to the green glass used in the bottle. (The green glass doesn't block out the frequencies of light that cause the hops extracts in the beer to break down into the very same chemical compounds that give skunk spray its aroma.) They actually "recognized" the skunking as being part of the "accepted" flavor of Heineken. The canned version tasted like an entirely different (and better) beer to them.
I had read about people doing that kind of trick in Pete Slossberg's Beer for Pete's Sake but I hadn't ever expected to see anyone do it in real life...or for it actually to work so well in real life.
My brother is awesome.
The neatest thing of all, though, came when he cracked open a canned "mystery" beer that he described as a world-famous beer, one of the best in the world, and served it around. His friends thought it tasted good, but couldn't recognize it. Then he revealed it was canned Heineken, and he brought out a glass bottle of it to serve to show the difference.
The interesting thing to me is that they didn't recognize it as Heineken because it didn't taste like (bottled) Heineken. Because the bottled Heinekin was "skunked" due to the green glass used in the bottle. (The green glass doesn't block out the frequencies of light that cause the hops extracts in the beer to break down into the very same chemical compounds that give skunk spray its aroma.) They actually "recognized" the skunking as being part of the "accepted" flavor of Heineken. The canned version tasted like an entirely different (and better) beer to them.
I had read about people doing that kind of trick in Pete Slossberg's Beer for Pete's Sake but I hadn't ever expected to see anyone do it in real life...or for it actually to work so well in real life.
My brother is awesome.
