Malted Musings

Book review – “Tasting Beer”

One of the best books on brewing that I have come across is Randy Mosher’s “Radical Brewing“.  Published in 2004, the book contains a plethora of information about historical beer styles, brewing technique and especially how to craft beers that either straddle the lines between known beer styles, or that use unusual adjuncts and flavourings in the brewing process.  Although focusing on brewing technique and discussions of how to formulate a recipe, it does contain a very small section on tasting beer and the role that personal preference plays in evaluating beer.

This 2009 book, “Tasting Beer” from Mosher is a strong follow-up to that initial book that expands and expounds on this short section.  The book is roughly divided into two sections, the first section opens with a necessarily abbreviated history of beer production, starting with the history of agriculture, moving rapidly through the brewing done by the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians before taking the reader through the Middle Ages in Europe.  The book then touches on the development of modern beer styles in Germany and Great Britain before moving to the US to touch on the effect of Prohibition on the American beer scene up to the modern explosion in craft breweries in the US and elsewhere in the world.  This introduction is well-trodden territory, but Mosher covers it with aplomb before diving into the main meat of the section, a discussion of flavours and aromas that are associated with beer, where those characteristics come from, how they are perceived and how that perception varies from person to person.  Having just written a short story on how flavour and aroma are affected by temperature myself, I found this section fascinating and very well-researched.

Equally interesting from a beer taster’s perspective are short sections called “sensory vocabulary” throughout the front of the book that describe a particular aroma or flavour, describe where it comes from, describe whether or not it is appropriate and even gives approximate threshold limits and information on it’s appropriateness in a given style.  This is in some ways similar to information available from BJCP, but it is done in a much more approachable format.  In this way, Mosher tells his readers that the descriptor, “goaty” describes a series of organic acids that are often brewing flaws, but may add complexity in lower amounts.  He doesn’t go into great amounts of detail about how they are produced, but it certainly gives an introduction to people who are just getting into talking about flavours and aromas that are common in beer.

Another helpful feature of the book are some of the graphical representations of several characteristics of different beer styles.  These include the obvious colour scales ranging from 2 SRM for Berliner weisse and American light lager all the way up to the 60-80 SRM of an imperial stout.  There is another scale describing American light lager as having fewer than 10 IBUs, all the way up to the 80+ that typify American IPA and barley wine.  He goes a step further to describing relative bitterness in terms of a series of relationships between original gravity and hopping rates… I’ve never seen these ratios expressed this way, but as soon as I saw it, it made perfect sense (see figure below).  He also sprinkles a few tidbits throughout about a number of ways to go about carrying out a tasting, from an informal, bring-what-you-have tasting up to competition tastings.

Relationships between OG/IBU; not all data points are labeled. Lines indicate gradations in perceived hoppiness.

The second half of the book includes a long series of discussions about beer styles.  A number of Hop Press writers, including myself have covered ground on beer styles and controversies inherent to discussions of beer styles (see Oakes discussion of Dark IPA/Cascadian Brown Ale for more on a recent example).  Mosher covers a lot of ground here dissecting beer styles, talking about the evolution of some beer styles (including the well-worn but seemingly never resolved stout/porter debate), and especially talking about how technology and regulation have influenced beer styles throughout history.  The styles described here would be recognizable to most beer geeks, but there were a few that I’d never heard of including a reference to a German-style porter, Broyhan Alt, Lichtenhainer as well as the more common, but still rare Gose.  He also shows a classification scheme for Belgian beer dating to 1851 that is absolutely fascinating.

He ends the book with his take on where craft beer is heading.  This is obviously controversial territory, but he touches on a number of themes, including the seemingly endless march to higher gravity beers (which is featured in a great article by Ken Weaver on Hop Press, recreations of historical styles and experiments in barrel-aging.  In short, this book is another great resource from Randy Mosher and will make a welcome addition to any beer lover’s library.