Is Your Beer Beery Enough?
A couple nights ago, I had the pleasure of cracking open a can of of Mill Street Lemon Tea Ale. The beer, a wheat ale brewed with Orange Pekoe and Earl Grey teas, real lemon puree, and organic cane sugar, is about as crisp and refreshing as it gets. On a day when temperatures reached into the 90s, a beer that was light enough and good enough to pass both the thirst-quenching and tastebud-satisfying tests was welcome. The most surprising thing about the beer was that it tasted very strongly of iced tea. There was some wheat and an slight alcohol bite, but otherwise it didn’t taste too different from a pint of Lipton.
Frankly, my beer didn’t taste like beer.
Or, to be more accurate, it didn’t taste like beer in the way I expected. Despite the range of flavors you can find in the multitudinous (over 80, according to RateBeer) styles that exist, I still expect a certain beeriness from my beers. What do I mean by that totally improvised word, you ask? Well, I expect what pretty much everyone expects – some malt sweetness, some hop bitterness, and maybe some esters from the yeast.
I’m not picky. These simple factors cover a rainbow of flavors. The malt can taste like coffee, chocolate, bread, biscuit, oatmeal, roast grain… you guys know how much the grain bill can cover. Similarly, hops range from the grassy varieties of the UK to the spicy Czech families, from citrusy Cascade hops of the American Northwest to the strawberry taste of Pacific Gem hops. Yeast, the oft-unpredictable loose cousin of the other ingredients, produces everything from buttery notes (Ringwood) to George Clinton-level funk (Brettanomyces).
So, we’ve already got a world of flavors that fall under the my umbrella of beery, just from the four traditional ingredients. Stack on top of that the fact that we aren’t living in the world of Reinheitsgebot anymore. Fruits, teas, spices, and all kinds of other crazy ingredients live in our beers. Hell, Dogfish Head probably couldn’t brew most of their lineup if they were only allowed to use water, barley and hops. For better brewers around the world, creativity is now King – which means throwing in everything but the kitchen sink along with the traditional ingredients of a brew.
This has led to a slew of beers that don’t taste like what the majority of the world thinks of as beer. Even as a enlightened experienced beer geek, there are still things that make me think “is this really a beer?” The BrewDog Smokehead, for example, tastes much more like a liquid fireplace than a beer. The Dogfish Head Olde School Barleywine is another brew that tastes more like a spirit to me than beer, especially on the first sip. Syrupy-sweet lambics like the US Lindeman’s line taste more like alco-pop sweetened soda than a brewski. Quercus Vitis Humulus, the Manhattan Project, Sam Adams Utopias; the list goes on and on. Heck, the Southern Tier Creme Brulee Stout I’m sipping on now tastes much more like a dessert than a beer.
This post was inspired, like most beer writing this week, by BrewDog’s release of a 55% ABV Belgian Blonde Ale called “The End of History.” The beer, the brewers admit themselves, is much closer to (and stronger than) a whiskey than a beer, and they even suggest drinking it from shot glasses instead of a pint glass. The high alcohol content, brewing process and flavors of The End of History (and BrewDog’s other high-octane beers) have made many question whether these brews should even be classified as beer, or if they’re more akin to liquor or wine.
Does it matter? In the long run, of course not. The aim of craft brewers isn’t to make something that tastes like a random columnist’s arbitrary definition of beer – it’s to make something that tastes good. Still, the fact that there’s a distinction in my mind makes me wonder if I’m the only one that considers this kind of thing. Has a beverage ever tasted so little like beer that it a) surprised the heck out of you, or b) turned you off enough to make you toss it and seek out something a bit with a bit more beeriness? Conversely, do you think that these extreme and extremely-strange beers are a good way to convince the many folks who shun beer – folks who don’t like traditional brews because of the “beer” taste – that there’s more to our favorite libation than meets the eye?
One Comment to “Is Your Beer Beery Enough?”
Leave a Reply
[...] on RateBeer’s Hop Press, I go on a bit of a ramble this week about what gives beer it’s beeriness. Despite the range [...]