Taste gets all the attention, but great beer really can delight four of the five senses.
There’s a beer’s color and clarity, beckoning from the glass. There’s aroma, where a deep inhale can hint at the flavor to come or bring wonders of its own. There’s flavor, of course, tickling the taste buds. But after the sip, there’s also how a beer feels in your mouth, dry or creamy, thin or full, fizzy or flat.
Brewers put a lot of effort into each one of these dimensions of a beer, so if you’re really going to appreciate beer, you’ve got to stop drinking it out of the bottle or can. Without a pour into a glass, you’re almost entirely ignoring sight and smell, and shortchanging flavor to boot, because a large portion of taste is derived from smell.
“Glassware is key nowadays when it comes to beer,” Julia Herz, craft beer program director for the Brewers Association, said in a video on craftbeer.com. “It’s not imperative, but would you drink wine out of the bottle? No. The same treatment and respect should be done for craft beer.”
So, the first step is using a glass. Any (clean) glass is better than the container your beer came in, but the right kind of glass can enhance the experience further.
There are a multitude of different fancy beer glasses, many of them traditionally tied to certain beer styles or geographical groups of styles. But the key factor that makes some glasses better than others is simple: fluting, or inward tapering, near the top of the glass helps concentrate a beer’s aroma.
And yet, if you order a beer in most bars and restaurants, you’re likely to get it in a glass never intended for drinking: the shaker pint glass. That straight-sloped, conical glass began as a cocktail shaker and gained favor as a serving vessel because it’s cheap, durable and stackable — a throwback to the industrial beer era when “experiencing” a beer was as common as twerking and planking.
(via WSJ)
