A huge part of a craft brewery is educating people on the beer they are drinking. As you know more about what you are drinking and can identify more of the ingredients/tastes, you start to experiment more and have more fun with actually drinking beer (drinking itself usually takes care of having fun in the social aspect of beer). As with wine, there is more to drinking beer than just getting drunk. The biggest eye opener I had when I started making beer was hops, after handling them, making different styles and knowing exactly what was in what I was drinking, I really started to enjoy them much more. Hops is a very good starting point for educating and expanding knowledge of beer, that is where the hop sampler idea comes in.
With all the variety of hops in the world, it really is hard to pin down one specific hop taste that encompasses all varieties. Flavors from hops range from fruity and citrus to grassy and pine. My current pale ale recipe uses 3 different hops, Amarillo (spicy) Cascade (citrus) and Simcoe (grapefruit). When you drink this, these flavors are there individually, but also blend together to make up the hop profile of the beer. The "hop sampler" idea is to make a different pale ale with each of these hops individually then one with all of them and sample them at the same time. I would make a barrel each of the different beers and have some sort of event for people to try them. The beers would be the same in every step of the brewing, except each one made exclusively with one hop variety. This would be a really cool way for people to taste the flavors individually then combined. It wouldn't have to be limited to just those hops, there could be ten, fifteen different beers made to further increase the hop knowledge. How often do people grab a beer in the store, read the label, and truly think "I really like the flavors of Brewer's Gold and Hallertauer hops?" There are people that do it, but most people read that and don't actually know what that means. After doing something like this you could.
This same technique can also be used for different yeast strains, malt bills and other variables in the brewing process. This is also the basic way that recipes are developed and perfected, change one thing and see if it improves the beer. I do think providing a side by side hop sample like this is pretty unique and can work really well
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
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I'm a huge fan of the idea. One of the things that I've started to do is write quick reviews on new beers I try and then go read online reviews from Beer Advocate to get a sense for what flavors other people taste in that beer. I usually have another one after reading the other reviews and find it far easier to identify certain flavors. I suppose this is part of the process of developing a palette, because once you get a sense for what flavor Cascade Hops contributes to a particular beer, you can start to pick out that flavor in other beers. This type of offering might be best served in-house as a Hops 101 sampler.
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