Beer For Dummies
Overview
Become fluent in the universal language of beer
Beer For Dummies is your companion as you explore the wide world of the third most-consumed beverage globally. Learn to recognize the characteristics of ales, lagers, and other beer styles. Perfect beer-and-food pairings. And embark on the ultimate beer tour, Dummies-style! Whether you're a beer novice or a brewery regular, there’s always something new to learn. We’ll help you pick the right beer for any occasion, understand why beers taste the way they do, and give you a handy reference to their strengths and ideal serving temperatures. This updated edition takes you a journey around the world of new beers—hazy-juicy in the U.S., Italian grape ale, Brazilian Catarina sour. You’ll also get up to date on the latest beer review apps and how the internet is shaping and reshaping beerdom. Cheers!
- Make an informed choice when selecting a beer and pairing with food
- Learn the fascinating process of brewing the different types of beer
- Discover world beer culture and new beer innovations
- Heighten your enjoyment of the subtleties of craft beer
This book is an excellent resource for aiding your understanding, purchasing, drinking, and enjoyment of beer.
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About The Author
Marty Nachel is a longtime beer writer, professional beer judge, and beer educator. He has been a contributor to various national and regional print and online beer and food publications.
Steve Ettlinger is the author of 9 books, most of which are about food and food-related subjects.
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beer for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Quality beer is widely available and relatively inexpensive, but choosing among all the various styles can be a little confusing without some help. A little beer knowledge can turn a daunting experience into an enjoyable one.Start with a list of handy beer descriptors, along with some great beer styles and brands to try.
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Because beer is widely available in a variety of different styles, describing it isn’t as easy as it used to be. Knowing a handful of colorful beer descriptors comes in handy when discussing beer with others. Here’s a sample list to get you started:
Aggressive: Boldly assertive aroma and/or taste
Balanced: Malt and hops in similar proportions; equal representation of malt sweetness and hop bitterness in the flavor — especially at the finish
Complex: Multidimensional; many flavors and sensations on the palate
Crisp: Highly carbonated; effervescent
Diacetyl: Buttery or butterscotchy aroma or flavor
Estery: Fruity aromas
Floral: Full of aromas reminiscent of flowers
Fruity: Flavors reminiscent of various fruits
Hoppy: Herbal, earthy, spicy, or citric aromas and flavors of hops
Malty: Grainy, caramel-like; can be sweet or dry
Roasty/toasty: Malt (roasted grain) flavors
Robust: Rich and full-bodied
The following are two other terms commonly used to describe a beer, but they don’t describe taste:
Mouthfeel is the tactile sensory experience of the whole inside of the mouth and throat — warmth (alcohol) in the throat, dryness, carbonation, and so on — and includes a sense of body.
The first beer brewed by American colonists was at Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke colony in 1587. The beer must not have been very good, though, because Colonists continued to request shipments of beer from England. (Unfortunately, most of the ships’ consignments of beer were drunk on the transatlantic crossing by thirsty sailors.
Of the 400 or so breweries that reopened following Prohibition, about half never regained the financial ground that had been lost; they eventually shut their doors. Even as new breweries continued to open, most found that the market had changed considerably. Several factors came into play: the introduction of the beer can, World War II, improved shipping methods, television, industry mergers and buyouts, and consumer preferences.
When the United States celebrated its 50th birthday in July 1826, hundreds of breweries were in operation. By the turn of the century, more than a thousand existed. By 1920, though, none produced beer — legally, that is. An industry that was more than two centuries in the making was decimated in less than a decade and a half, thanks to the efforts of the prohibitionist Carry Nation and her like-minded friends in Washington.
The tactile aspects of beer evaluation are mouthfeel and body. You can literally feel the beer in your mouth and describe it in familiar physical terms (such as thick and thin). These aspects can be described like this:
Mouthfeel: This aspect is the sensory experience of the whole inside of the mouth and throat.
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Most beer drinkers tend to drink just a couple different beer styles without straying too far off the beaten path. But to fully understand and appreciate the wider spectrum of beer styles, here are a few types of beers that every beer drinker should taste at least once:
Belgian Fruit Lambic: Well-aged ale with surprising, effusive fruit aroma and taste; intoxicating fragrance
Doppelbock: Strong, dark, and caramel-like Bock Beer with two times the flavor and body of Bock (doppel your pleasure, doppel your fun)
Imperial Stout: Dark, rich, and creamy Stout with complex grain flavors; a brew to chew
Rauchbier: Oktoberfest beer made with a portion of beechwood-smoked malt; delicious and unique but takes somewhat of an acquired taste (great with smoked cheese or sausage)
Witbier: Perfumy Belgian Wheat Beer made with orange rind and coriander seed; like nothing else in the beer world
Certain brands of beer have become synonymous with distinctly different flavor profiles.
There’s an etiquette for everything. Any veteran of local, regional, and national beer festivals has a mental list of dos and don’ts to maximize enjoyment and learning at beer festivals.
The dos of beer festivals
The dos of attending a beer festival include the following:
Bring a designated nondrinking driver or scout out public transportation.
Quality beer is widely available and relatively inexpensive, but choosing among all the various styles can be a little confusing without some help. A little beer knowledge can turn a daunting experience into an enjoyable one.Start with a list of handy beer descriptors, along with some great beer styles and brands to try.
Buying the ingredients for your first batch of beer is easy, almost a no-brainer. You go into a homebrew-supply shop or fill out an online order form and buy an extract kit (a can or bag of malt extract), hops, a packet of yeast, corn sugar (dextrose — 2/3 cup minimum), and enough caps (crowns) for 50 to 60 bottles.
Shortly after the craft beer revolution got underway, the lion (megabrewers) noticed the thorn (craft brewers) in its paw, leading to some clever marketing and business strategizing. Megabrewers liked the craft brewer’s cachet of quality — and premium prices.
In an illustration of the maxim that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, some of the big U.
For true beer nuts, a beer’s overall flavor intensity can be thought of as a pyramid of taste, with slight but notable fluctuations from level to level. Related beer-tasting terms run through the following range:
Lacking → faint → mild → slight → moderate → definite → strong → intense
As with aroma, flavor comes from malt, hops, and fermentation, all of which are balanced in a good beer.
Drinking beer is a sensual experience. Consuming beer (or any food, for that matter) should be a full sensory experience; the more senses involved, the more you’ll remember the experience — positive or not.
When barbecuing a steak, you don’t just see the meat cooking on the grill; you hear the sizzle and pop of its juices and smell its tantalizing aromas wafting through the air.
Beers can have mixed parentage. These types of beers have been dubbed hybrid beers, and they exist due to brewers’ flouting of conventions by fermenting a beer with lager yeast at ale (warm) temperatures and fermenting a beer with ale yeast at lager (cool) temperatures.
Warm fermentations with lager yeast
Finding the exact temperatures used to produce hybrid beers and how long the beer is fermented and aged isn’t an exact science.
Specialty beers are one of the most fun and popular beer categories in the world. This category is fun for the brewers and popular for the consumers because it really has no clearly defined boundaries or guidelines. It’s kind of an anything-goes and rules-be-damned category.
So how did specialty beers come to be?
You night not need to invest in an entire keg of beer very often, but if you enjoy beer, you’ll probably find yourself shopping for one from time to time for weddings, birthday parties, or other celebrations. And buying it by the keg is the only way to have fresh, unpasteurized draught beer.
Buying a keg is easy; transporting it is the hard part.
Beer drinkers have argued endlessly over whether beer is better bottled or canned. The beer can offers the most convenience, but you can’t argue against the aesthetics of the old brown bottle. Besides, where would great bottleneck slide guitarists, like Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt, be without glass beer bottles?
To ensure that you always get the most bang for your beer buck, keep these tips in mind when buying beer. Remember that freshness in beer is as important as freshness in bread.
Don’t buy bottled beer that’s coated in a layer of dust and/or has any flakes, chunks, or floaters in it.
Always consume beer from growlers before it goes flat — usually in the first 24 to 36 hours.
Canada’s brewing roots are just about as old and well established as those in the United States. Actually, much of Canada’s history is intertwined with American history because the Great White North was discovered, pioneered, and settled by many of the same people at the same time. It stands to reason that Canadian brewing history follows a similar timeline as well.
Beer lovers love to celebrate beer. Craft beer fests seem to be popping up wherever a small collection of brewpubs or microbreweries exists. Can it be that beer is a good social lubricant? Something to ponder.
Americans have discovered that the true meaning of beer festival goes far beyond the ubiquitous Oktoberfests that take place in practically every two-horse town in the country.
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Beer brewers can’t always set a packaging date on the calendar ahead of time for barrel-aged and wood-aged beer. More often than not, the beer decides when it’s ready. Barrel-aged and wood-aged beers need to be tasted periodically to assess their flavor progression. This process can take months or even years.
Checking the beer’s oxidation
As if choosing barrel types and pairing beer styles wasn’t enough for brewers to think about, they also have to take into consideration the level of oxidation that occurs while the beer is aging.
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The chemicals used to clean homebrewing equipment include iodine-based products, ammonia, chlorine-based products, lye, and at least one environmentally safe cleanser that uses percarbonates. Following are the pros and cons of various chemicals:
Iodine is widely used in the medical field and the restaurant industry as a disinfectant.
Many different grains have been used to brew beer over the millennia. Of course, barley is best, followed by wheat and then rye. The problem with these grains — at least for people who suffer from celiac disease — is that they all contain gluten. Gluten is responsible for triggering an autoimmune reaction in the small intestines of those people with this particular affliction.
For millions of observant Jews around the world, following the kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws, is a very important part of everyday life. Food and drink that are in accord with halakha (Jewish law) are termed kosher in English. Kosher simply means fit for consumption by Jews according to traditional Jewish law.
In this day and age, an organic movement is in place toward all things, well, organic. Almost everything is available as an organic choice: coffee, fruits and vegetables, juice, and wine. Organic beer seems only the natural progression of things.
The rise of organic beer
The modern organic beer movement traces its roots to Brauerei Pinkus-Müller in Münster, Germany, where the first all-organic beer was brewed in 1979.
The whole point of having beer in contact with wood is for the beer to pick up some of the aroma and flavor characteristics of the wood. Additionally, if the beer is aged in a barrel that previously held another fermented beverage, such as wine or whiskey, the beer will also pick up the character of that beverage.
With the wide array of styles available, you need to make a choice about which beer to use in a recipe. Although the everyday, light-bodied, commercial lagers generally do fine, they obviously don’t add as much flavor as other styles. Consider the following factors when choosing a cooking beer:
Color: Beers brewed with a large percentage of dark grain, such as Stout and Porter, are likely to transpose their color to your meal — not an appetizing hue for fettuccine Alfredo or scrambled eggs.
Beer that’s unfiltered and unpasteurized (like real ale) still contains millions of live yeast cells in liquid suspension. With the help of gravity, and in due time, beer clarifies all by itself. But to expeditiously clear the beer of all this yeast, brewers use what are called finings.
A brewer adds finings to real ale when he racks or transfers the ale in its natural, unfiltered, and unpasteurized state into a cask.
Microbreweries (brewers who make fewer than 60,000 barrels of beer a year) have sort of cornered the image market on gourmet beer: Most of these beers sell for more because consumers consider them superior, largely due to the freshness that comes from being made locally and in small batches. Consumers are also willing to pay more for beer with the cachet of being small and hand-crafted, like artisanal bread or handcrafted furniture.
Beer and quiche? Why not! But this isn’t your regular high-brow quiche; it’s filled with spicy-hot chilies, peppers and creamy Jack cheese. Quiches aren’t the lightest fare, but if you’d like a lighter version of this recipe, use 2/3 cup light sour cream, 1-1/4 cups egg substitute, 1/2 cup skim milk, and pepper along with the beer.
Although they don’t necessarily come from the same neighborhood, the robust taste of a Stout or Porter can blend well with the rich flavors of Cajun food. Serve this shrimp with lots of chilled brew (a malty beer, like Oktoberfest or a Brown Ale) and crusty French bread.
Prep time: About 15 min
Cook time: About 45 min
Yield: 6 servings
4 tablespoons olive or canola oil
4 tablespoons flour
1 cup chopped onions
1 cup chopped scallions
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup fresh Italian flat-leaf parsley, chopped
3 cloves garlic, mashed
1 cup hot chicken broth
1 cup Stout or roasty-tasting Porter
8 fresh Roma or whole canned tomatoes, chopped
1/2 tablespoon shrimp/crab boil (a commercial spice mixture for shellfish), finely ground
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon crushed black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt or 1/4 teaspoon cayenne
2-1/2 pounds raw, peeled, deveined large shrimp
4 cups cooked rice for serving
Heat oil in a large, heavy skillet over medium-low heat.
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This beer batter can be used to crisp and coat meats, fish, vegetables — anything savory you’d like to deep fry. It’s best used immediately after being prepared, so be sure to have the food being battered fully assembled before you begin to heat the oil.
Prep time: About 10 min
Cook time: Depends on ingredients being fried, about 3–4 min
Yield: Depends on ingredients being fried
Oil for frying (preferably corn oil), enough to cover the food by at least 1 inch (2.
This recipe makes the chewiest, fullest-flavored focaccia around, made just for beer lovers. You can follow the first five steps to prepare dough, or buy frozen bread dough, thaw it, pat it into a 1/2-inch-thick circle, and start with Step 6.
Prep time: About 2 hr (includes 90 min for rising
Cook time: About 20 min
Yield: One 14- to 16-inch focaccia (4 servings)
2/3 cup water
3-1/2 to 4 cups bread flour, divided
1 tablespoon yeast
1 tablespoon sugar
2/3 cup Hefeweizen (room temperature)
1 tablespoon dried basil
1/2tablespoon kosher salt
1/4 cup grated Romano or Parmesan cheese
6 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup cornmeal
2 large yellow onions, sliced thin
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 tablespoon dried marjoram
1/3 cup Scottish Ale
Suggested toppings: 1/2 cup roasted red pepper strips, 1/2 cup minced Canadian bacon, 1/3 cup crumbled feta cheese, and 2 slices smoked provolone cheese cut into strips.
This simple-to-prepare barbecue of succulent shredded beef steeped in a deep, beer-enhanced barbecue sauce should be piled high on big sourdough buns and served with your best coleslaw.
Prep time: About 35 min
Cook time: About 3-1/2 hr
Yield: 8–10 servings
1 12-ounce bottle Cream Ale
3 cups water mixed with 1 tablespoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons dried oregano
8 large cloves garlic, peeled and mashed
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper (red chili flakes optional)
4 pounds boneless beef chuck (or lean pork)
1 small onion, chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
1–2 teaspoons ground cayenne (or to taste)
1 teaspoon salt (or to taste)
1 12-ounce bottle Dortmunder Dark
1/3 cup tomato paste
1/3 cup cider vinegar
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup steak sauce
1–2 teaspoons liquid smoke (or to taste)
In a large saucepan, heat Cream Ale, salted water, oregano, 5 cloves of the garlic, 1 teaspoon of the pepper, and chili flakes (if using) to a rolling boil over high heat.
Adding beer — in this case Vienna, Märzen, or Oktoberfest, but the choices are plentiful — to your chili can make the flavors more complex and robust. Try serving this chili with garnishes of sharp cheddar, a mixture of freshly minced scallions and cilantro, and a dollop of sour cream.
Prep time: About 20 min
Cook time: About 1 hr
Yield: 10–12 servings
2-1/2 to 3 pounds super-lean ground pork, beef, or combination
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 large onions, chopped
6 large cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1-1/2 teaspoons ground coriander
2 teaspoons dried oregano, crushed
1/3 to 1/2 cup mild, red chile powder (ancho if you can get it)
1–2 teaspoons cayenne (optional)
2 cups Vienna/Märzen/Oktoberfest style beer mixed with 1/3 cup masa harina (or fine-ground cornmeal)
3 cups canned broth (chicken, vegetable, or beef) or water
1 16-ounce can kidney beans, drained
1 16-ounce can black beans, drained
2 16-ounce cans pinto beans, drained
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
In a large skillet, cook the meat over medium heat just until all traces of pink are gone (don’t cook until browned).
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It’s not unusual to find liquor in the list of ingredients for a dessert (Bananas Foster, Cherries Jubilee, Bourbon Bread Pudding, even alcoholic whipped cream), but you might not think of adding beer. Rich Stouts and Porters often have deep chocolate, coffee or even vanilla undertones, and when added to a sweet dish (in this case a pie), the bite of alcohol diminishes and other flavors find their way to the top.
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Marinating meats in beer (or other alcoholic beverages) is nothing new, but this hot and spicy chicken recipe includes beer both in the marinade and in the sauce.
Prep time: About 25 min
Cook time: About 4–8 hr plus marinating time
Yield: 6–7 servings
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
1 teaspoon coriander seed
1 teaspoon cumin seed
2/3 cup Munich Dunkel or Bock Beer
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons fresh grated ginger
4 large cloves garlic, mashed in a garlic press
1 serrano chili pepper or jalapeño, seeded and finely minced (optional, for chili-heads)
2 tablespoons smoked paprika
2 tablespoons honey
1-1/2 teaspoons salt (or to taste)
3 to 4 pounds chicken, cut in pieces and washed (or boneless chicken breasts)
About 4 cups E-Z Garlic Sauce (see the following recipe)
Heat a heavy skillet over medium heat until very hot.
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The mellow, flavorful Brown Ale can be a delightful addition to a rich, hearty garlic and onion soup. You can roast additional heads of garlic for future use: Simply freeze the unpeeled heads in a well-sealed container for up to six months.
Prep time: About 10 min
Cook time: About 1-1/4 hr
Yield: 4–5 servings
3 large heads garlic
1-1/2 teaspoons olive oil
4 tablespoons butter
4 large yellow onions, thinly sliced
2 large shallots, thinly sliced (optional)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
5 cups beef or vegetable stock (preferably homemade)
1-1/2 teaspoons thyme or your favorite herb
2 tablespoons unbleached all-purpose flour
1 12-ounce bottle English Brown Ale
1 cup croutons and 1-1/2 cup fresh grated cheese (Gruyère, Kaseri, or smoked provolone)
Strip off the majority of the papery skin on the outside of the garlic heads; cut the tip end off each head of garlic to expose cloves.
Today’s beer brewers realize that much can be gained by aging their beers in barrels that once held other fermented beverages. They also realize that barrel aging isn’t an exact science; in fact, it’s much closer to an art form. And many brewers are learning as they go.
Barrel-aging beer isn’t simply a matter of brewing a beer, fermenting it, letting it sit in a barrel for a few weeks or months, and then packaging it.
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Beer makes an excellent accompaniment to many different foods. The following beer and food pairing tips can help enhance your overall dining experience:
A very general rule is to think of lagers as the beer equivalent to white wine and ales as the red wine equivalent.
The best pairings occur when beer is used to either cut, contrast, or complement the dish.
When the time comes to serve real ale, the cask has to be fitted with a dispensing device. Depending on where the cask is kept at the pub, it may be fitted with a simple tap or a beer line to draw the beer through a beer engine.
Pulling real ale through a beer engine
A beer engine is a manual device used to siphon beer from a cask.
In Ireland, the United Kingdom, and most of western and central Europe, the pub culture is still intact. Many pubs and taverns are quaint, quiet places where you can comfortably enjoy a drink with the local folk, who know just about everybody (Norm!). Women and children are traditionally part of the daytime crowd.
Belgium is heaven for beer explorers. Beer is Belgium’s claim to fame (in beer lovers’ eyes), much as wine is to France. With more than 100 breweries (and almost ten times that a few generations ago) in a country of 10 million, you can see why. And the brewers produce more than 50 definitive styles, in more than ten times as many brands, including more famous specialty beers than any other nation.
One of the best places to taste different beers in North America is at a brewpub — a pub, usually with a restaurant, that serves its own beer made in a small brewery on the premises, kind of like a restaurant with its own bakery.
By definition, a brewpub doesn’t distribute more than 50 percent of its beer outside the pub — and most brewpubs don’t distribute any — though you can usually get it to go in small kegs and growlers.
Few people are aware that beer in Germany is very localized. Because of the number of breweries, and in particular the number of breweries per capita, Germany is pretty well saturated with beer on a local level.
German beers from the north, west, and east
One generalization about beer in Germany that seems to hold up is that drier, hoppier beers can be found in the north, while maltier, sweeter beers are found in the south.
Ironically, though well known for both its wonderful pub culture (the tales! the music!) and internationally successful brewers Guinness, Murphy, and Beamish, Ireland doesn’t have many breweries, museums, or festivals, but it does have plenty of pubs — wonderful pubs.
Dry Stout is the national brew, and the major brands display a range of dryness.
The Czechs drink about as much beer per capita as any population does. And like Germany, locally produced beers can be found in almost every Czech town. Be aware that the Czech Republic is a lager-producing country (after all, it’s the birthplace of Pilsner), so anyone thirsting for ales is going to be parched.
The United Kingdom is the ale stronghold of the world. Similar to the U.S. brewing industry, a handful of large, national breweries dominate the market, but several hundred brewpubs, micros, and regional brewers produce the more interesting and more flavorful interpretations of traditional styles for impassioned consumers, especially cask-conditioned ale (unpasteurized, unfiltered, naturally carbonated, handpumped beer; also called real ale).
Usually, a restaurant is an unlikely place to find a good beer. Wine has always been, and still is, the conceptual favorite for food and drink pairing. But now there’s hope. More and more often, you can expect to find an upscale eatery that’s either decided to wake up and smell the barley or has received numerous requests for something other than Chateauneuf Dew Pop and Vin d’Pay d’ay.
What should you look for in a beer? Your eyes can discern color, clarity, and head retention (as well as price, of course, and maybe even the meaning of life). The meaning of life is something you’ll have to figure out on your own, maybe while sipping your favorite brew.
Seeing colors in your beer
The colors that make up the various beer styles run the earth tone spectrum from pale straw to golden, amber, copper, orange, russet, brown, black, and everything in between.
As part of the beer brewing process, malted barley undergoes a mashing process that leeches out the grain’s fermentable sugar, or maltose. Maltose is then converted to alcohol by the yeast during fermentation. That same grain also transposes its color in the beer and provides the beer with body, mouthfeel, and flavor.
The various shapes and sizes of beer glassware play a meaningful role in your enjoyment. Some non-style-specific glassware used in drinking games and other sport drinking can provide the unsuspecting drinker with a challenging and often surprising outcome. Please don’t try drinking from these glasses at home!
Yard glass (or yard-of-ale or aleyard): The yard glass holds about 2-1/2 pints of beer.
If all the beer-making grain in the world was exactly the same, very few unique beer styles would exist. Because grain (mostly barley) is responsible for providing beer with much of its color, flavor, and texture, adding specialty grains to your beer recipe goes a long way toward changing your beer’s character.
New homebrewers are no different from other hobbyists; they’re chomping at the bit (foaming at the mouth?) to get started with their hobby. Although this enthusiasm is good, jumping headlong into the unknown isn’t.
Homebrewing supply shopping
Before you start shopping for homebrewing supplies, locate a local homebrew-supply store.
When you’re certain that the homebrewed beer you’ve lovingly crafted is fully fermented, retrieve the bottling equipment and get ready to start the bottling procedures.
Setup starts with sanitizing all the necessary bottling equipment, which includes bottles, a bottling bucket, a bottling tube, and a plastic hose.
Making and bottling a batch of beer, like building Rome, can’t be done in a day. On the other hand, it doesn’t take a heck of a lot longer than a day, either. You need to set aside two days, about a week apart, for the job. Allow three hours each day to set up, brew (or bottle), and clean up. Patience is a virtue; good homebrew is its own reward.
Raw, sweet wort must undergo fermentation before it officially becomes beer, and bottling can’t take place until fermentation is complete. Fermentation of a 5-gallon batch usually takes a minimum of seven days, depending on the yeast, and fermentation activity can start anywhere in the first 12 to 24 hours after you add the yeast to the wort.
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When a cask of real ale arrives at its destination, the landlord or cellarman is now in charge of seeing that the cask is properly cared for before serving that beer to the public. Doing so requires much more than simply putting the beer on tap. Suffice it to say that the cellarman’s role in the quality of real ale is just as crucial as the brewer’s.
Anywhere wine, broth, or water is called for in a recipe, beer usually offers a unique alternative. Imaginative cooks can have a field day experimenting with beer as a substitute for at least part of the other common cooking liquids.
The easiest place to start fooling around (with cooking and beer, that is) is with steamed food, soups, stews, marinades, glazes, and bastes.
Mexican beer is far from glamorous; it’s never been considered much more than another thirst-quenching beverage in a hot and parched country. But a number of major and craft beer brands are available.
Major beer brands in Mexico
Only two companies have had a stranglehold on the Mexican brewing industry for decades: Grupo Modelo and Cervecería Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma.
When craft brewers (also known as microbrewers) first came on the scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, just about everyone ignored them. Consumers didn’t take them very seriously, and as far as the big brewers were concerned, well, they weren’t concerned. Early craft brewers were like a gnat on an elephant’s backside; when the elephant swishes his tail, though, the gnat knows it has the elephant’s attention.
Religious orders have been brewing beer in Europe since the Middle Ages. These monastic brews are always widely praised and prized but often misunderstood — mostly due to their origins. Many people believe that monastic brews are both rare and of high potency. Though some are, indeed, rare and many can pack a punch, the exquisite brews made by the Cistercian, Benedictine, and Trappist orders can’t be so easily defined.
One of the best and most amazing ways to experience beer as a dinner beverage is to attend a beer dinner, where the chef has teamed up with a brewmaster or a beer importer to develop and pair food and beer recipes that call for the perfect beer as either an ingredient or a beverage. If you’re even moderately intrigued by the concept, go for it.
Although vintage wines and aged spirits can boast of a long companionship with haute cuisine, beer — until recently in some places — is often relegated to the backyard barbecue. But that’s wrong. Beer is only for thirst quenching as much as computers are only for number crunching and sports are only for boys. Get with it, folks; beer is for dining, too!
Chasing after beer experiences far from home involves effort and investigation. Thankfully, because people now live in a more global community and have all-hours access to reliable and up-to-date information, making plans for beer trekking many miles from home is pretty easy.
Here are some general ideas and suggestions you may want to consider if you intend to do any serious beer trekking — particularly out of the country:
Do as much planning as possible.
Because of the wide availability and reasonable pricing of beer, you may want to keep a record of the beers you taste and your reactions to them. You can write down a full profile of a beer in only a few sentences. You can use the form prepared by the American Homebrewers Association, or you can easily organize your own notes on plain paper.
A choice of beer usually depends on time and place. Whatever beer satisfies on a hot summer’s afternoon hardly suffices on a cold winter’s night. A beer you choose to be the last one of the evening might not be the one you start the evening with.
Different beers are best enjoyed according to the time of day or the season (that’s why breweries produce seasonal beers).
One of the finer points of beer enjoyment that’s too often overlooked is proper serving temperature. Serving beers at their proper temperature may take a little extra effort or planning, but the rewards are significant. Drinking beer at the proper temperature allows you to really taste the beer.
Quality beers shouldn’t be served colder than 44 degrees Fahrenheit.
To fully enjoy your beer-drinking experience, it helps to follow a few simple serving suggestions. Here are some very simple and easy ways to increase your beer enjoyment:
Make sure the beer is at proper serving temperature. Lighter bodied and lighter colored beers can be served cold (40 to 44 degrees Fahrenheit, 4 to 6 degrees Celsius), but darker beers should be served a bit warmer (44 to 48 degrees Fahrenheit, 6 to 9 degrees Celsius).
Most people aren’t the least bit self-conscious about squeezing tomatoes, thumping melons, sniffing ground beef, or reading the freshness date on bread wrappers at the supermarket. And don’t wine enthusiasts pay great attention to the harvest (vintage) year? Why, then, should beer drinkers be willing to dash into a store, grab any old six-pack off the shelf, and assume that the beer is fresh?
Although the four ingredients — barley, hops, yeast, and water — are all you need to make beer, they’re by no means the only ingredients used. Additional grains, natural sugars, and flavorings are often added to create special or unique flavors or to cut costs. These little additions are referred to as adjuncts.
Beer
If you want your beer to taste fresh and be drinkable and enjoyable, you need to protect it from the millions of hungry microbes that are waiting to ambush your brew. Germs are everywhere; they live with us and even on us. Look out! There’s one now!
The importance of sterilizing and sanitizing when homebrewing
Whoever first said that cleanliness is next to godliness probably brewed beer.
Drinking beer is easy, but evaluating it as you drink requires a little more diligence. Here’s a good step-by-step process to evaluate beer like a pro:
Purposely pour the beer to create at least two fingers depth of head in the glass.
Creating a decent head also creates a fuller aromatic bouquet.
Experience the beer’s aroma first because aromatics dissipate quickly.
As a generic word, beer includes every style of fermented malt beverage, including ales and lagers and all the individual and hybrid styles that fall under those headings. Within the realm of major beer categories, you find some truly special brews, such as real ale, barrel-aged and wood-aged beer, extreme beer, organic beer, gluten-free beer, and kosher beer.
Ale is the beer classification that predates written history. Presumably, the very first beers brewed by our hominid forebears were a crude form of ale spontaneously fermented by wild airborne yeasts. These yeasts became known as top-fermenting yeasts for their propensity to float on top of the beer as it’s fermenting.
All beers are made as ales or lagers; ale and lager are the two main branches (classifications) of the beer family tree and are closely related branches at that. Ales are the older, distinguished, traditional brews of the world, predating lagers by thousands of years, whereas lagers are a relatively modern creation, less than 200 years old.
When you hear the words cereal grains, you might think of Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, Wheat Chex, or Quaker Oatmeal. But you may be surprised to know that cereal grains (not the flakes — the grains) and many other grains can be used to make different kinds of beer. But the cereal grain that lends itself best to beer making is barley.
Hops are the pinecone-like flowers of a female climbing plant in the cannabis family of plants. They’re grown on enormous trellises as tall as 18 feet (5.5 meters). Traditionally, hops were hand-picked because they’re so delicate, but that’s a rarity these days.
Hops contain pinhead-sized glands of lupulin, a sticky substance that’s secreted when boiled.
What is beer exactly? By excruciatingly simple definition, beer is any fermented beverage made with a cereal grain. Specifically, beer is made from these four primary ingredients:
Grain (mostly malted barley but also other grains)
Hops (grown in many different varieties)
Yeast (responsible for fermentation; based on style-specific strains)
Water (accounts for up to 95 percent of beer’s content)
Grain provides five things to beer:
Color: The color of the grains used to make a beer directly affects the color of the beer itself.
Beer aromas are fleeting, so start with a sniff even before you take a look. Also, flavor is partly based on aroma — a full 1/4 to 1/3 of your ability to taste is directly related to smell, so don’t underestimate the role your nose plays in your beer enjoyment.
Like wine and whisky critics, beer evaluators use the term nose in two ways: to describe aroma and bouquet (if aroma were a sound, bouquet would be the volume) as well as the act of takin in a beer's aroma.
In the United States, the TTB (the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau) doesn’t allow the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Nutrition Facts chart to appear on a beer bottle or can. And in the European Union, proposals to mandate the listing of ingredients have fallen by the wayside.
In a February 1993 article in Seattle Weekly, Jack Killorin, an ATF spokesman, is cited as saying that listing a beer’s nutrients would suggest that beer is a food.
Before you pour a beer, make sure you have a glass that can hold the contents of a whole bottle or can plus a head. That makes everything easier. How to best pour a beer depends on the type of beer. For most craft beers, the best way to pour is right down the middle of the glass — again, a glass big enough to hold the whole bottle of beer — and tilt it or slow the pouring only after a big head has formed.
In order to fully understand and appreciate the various beer styles that exist in the world, knowing how beer styles differ from one another and how those differences are measured is helpful.
Defining beer styles with three parameters
All beer styles can be easily identified and differentiated by three simple measurements:
Color: All beers have color, whether it’s light, dark, or somewhere in between.
Looking back through beer history, ales are considered the beer of antiquity. Ales come in a very wide range of flavors and styles. The following list covers some of the best known:
A hefty ale with fruity and caramel-like aromas, complex malt flavors, and as much alcohol as some wine, Barleywine is one of the few beer styles that’s noticeably stronger than other beers.
Traditionally, certain beers have a specific glass style associated with them. Using these glasses is a sign of your high regard for great beer. The nice thing about beer glassware, though, is that it doesn’t involve hard-and-fast rules. Not using these styles is a sign of being a normal person without really cool glassware, so don’t freak out if you lack a certain glass.
Some beer styles don’t fit perfectly into the ale and lager categories because brewers mix the ingredients and processes of both categories into one beer. For example, a brewer may use an ale yeast but a lager fermentation temperature.
Where do hybrids, like the following, fit into the beer family tree? Think of an exotic, mysterious, well-traveled uncle: a bit off the chart, not to everyone’s liking, but with a definite appeal for some of us.
The name lager is taken from the German word lagern, meaning "to store." Most of the mass-produced beers of the world are lagers, but a wider range of styles exists than what those commercial brands may lead you to believe.
American Pale Lagers: Although these beers differ greatly from brand to brand in the mind of the unknowing consumer (thanks to advertising campaigns), they’re, for the most part, identical in taste and strength (about 4 to 5 percent alcohol by volume).
The specialty beers category is more or less a catch-all for the beer styles that don’t fit elsewhere. When it comes to specialty beers’ place on the beer family tree, the wild artiste cousin is the model: bold, loud, experimental, often goofy, usually quite memorable, and lovable despite having flouted convention.
Even though all other alcoholic beverages are required to clearly list alcohol content on their labels, listing any indication of strength, including percentage of alcohol (unless the beer has no alcohol at all), was prohibited for beer labels until 1996. For years, the government had been afraid that people might sell or buy beer based on strength alone.
Real ale refers to beer that’s made the old-fashioned way. Real ale is brewed from traditional ingredients and is allowed to mature and age naturally. Maturing and aging naturally means the beer is unfiltered and unpasteurized, which means it still has live yeast in it and continues to condition and develop flavor and character even after it leaves the brewery.
Your evaluation of newly purchased beer starts with the removal of the bottle cap. Did the bottle give a quick, healthy hiss? Did it gush like Mt. Vesuvius or fail to release any carbonation at all? Unless the bottle was allowed to get very warm or you did the hokey-pokey with it just before opening, a gusher indicates a potential wild fermentation in the bottle — not a good thing, but not anything that’ll kill you, either.
In the United States, the American brewing industry (along with American wine and spirits industries) is overseen by both the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). As far as the production of beer goes, the ATF is more concerned with illegal diversion of alcohol for criminal purposes, whereas the TTB is now the governing body behind all the do’s and don’ts that control beer labeling and marketing.
Although the equipment needed to brew beer traditionally was fairly simple, large commercial breweries today use equipment that does everything from crack the grain to seal the cases and a multitude of chores in between. These are the basics:
Most folks visiting a brewery immediately recognize the large, round brew kettle that usually dominates the brewhouse.
Yeast works hard but really enjoys itself. This little, single-cell organism, one of the simplest forms of plant life, is responsible for carrying out the fermentation process in beer making, thereby providing one of life’s simplest forms of pleasure (and its production of carbon dioxide is what causes bread dough to rise).
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