Fresh Trumps Damn Near Everything

A couple of guys from the club and I have been studying for the Beer Judging Certification Progarm (BJCP) exam since last January. In the course of doing so, we've tasted a lot of beers. They've been all over the map in terms of style, age and quality. Most of what we've tried has been out of my wheelhouse in terms of what I'd typically drink and some of what we've sampled has legitimately blown my mind.

The examples of Eisbock and Weizenbock we tried were nothing like what I anticipated. Eisbock is a somewhat eccentric style in which a doppelbock (think a malty, rich, but very drinkable beer) is freeze concentrated up to anywhere between 7 and 30% abv. I expected it to be hot, sharp and far more alcohol focused than the example we tried. It wasn't. It was just richer, maltier, and perfectly balanced. The brewer somehow managed to keep the beer in balance and the net result was just a bigger, more flavorful version of the base style.

On the other hand, we've tried a fair amount of shitty, stale beer. It's tough to get many of the classic examples (at least in the BJCP guidelines) here in the states. A long, bouncy trip across the ocean in a container without any sort of temperature control (presumably), followed by an indeterminate amount of time on a warm shelf in a liquor store just doesn't bode well for freshness.

What starts out as an amazing example of an English Bitter (a low-gravity, balanced session beer) or a fantastic German Pilsner (clean, grainy and assertively hoppy) can both fade into boring, lifeless, cheesy, almost grapey beer. And that's a damn shame. Not only because they're merely a shadow of what they were leaving the brewery, but because they also make it difficult to appreciate just how amazing those beers can be.

Contrast that with taking a trip to your local brewery and trying that same German Pils (Half Acre Pony Pils) or that Bitter (Adam's Best at Revolution this past weekend). They might not be dead nuts on for the style, but they're going to be damn good. You'll get that huge noble hop character and be able to taste the subtle malt complexity before it fades away under the impact of heat and time. Do yourself a favor and try a style you wrote off a long time ago because of a bad "import" example. A great, fresh pilsner can have hop character that might blow your mind.

 (Yes, yes. I know that there are beers that age well and travel better than the examples I cited. But that's not the point. It's about giving the styles that get a bad rap because they don't travel well a chance.)

The Evolution of a Palate (Continued)

I was out last night with a few friends and ordered a bottle of Firestone Walker's Union Jack IPA. This is definitely one of my favorite beers and one that I'd say I know well. Unfortunately, this one tasted a bit off. The hop aromatics had largely dropped out, leaving a sharp bitterness and some yeast / malt character behind without the balancing notes which make the beer so good.

I don't fault Firestone for this one - I'm guessing that the offender was the bar which served the beer and that they sat on their inventory for a while prior to serving it and may not have stored it properly. (We had multiple bottles and they all exhibited the same characteristics.)

But the fact that I noticed this and neither the fiance nor the other person drinking the beer did is just the latest example of a somewhat disturbing trend that both Jeremy and I have noticed lately. After making the jump up to all grain, getting really critical of our own beers and starting to really notice the contributions of different ingredients in finished beers, I'm starting to pick out off-flavors and imperfections in commercial beers in a way which I haven't previously.

And I'm not saying this as a "beer snob" or to say that I have some freakishly evolved palette which is capable of picking out every flavor in every beer. I'm saying this as someone who loves to drink beer who is now finding it more difficult to genuinely enjoy a really wide spectrum of commercial beers despite their imperfections which I just never noticed before. This isn't necessarily a good thing. (Outside of the Cicerone or BJCP courses of study, which I have been thinking about pursuing. But I know that I can easily get caught up in being esoteric and I don't want to indulge that here...)

Anybody else out there notice this?