Subtlety is the defining characteristic of lagers. Rather than the “in your face” personality of ales, lagers are suave and reserved. If ales are frisky puppies, lagers are purring cats. They’re not climbing up your legs; you have to meet them where they are. But lagers offer easy drinkability, a transparent showcase for brewing ingredients and sublime delights—beer after beer. It’s the unique characteristics of their yeast that sets them apart.
My Forbidden Root partner has drawn me into a project to formulate and launch a line of premium 100% agave Tequilas flavored with natural extracts. To talk to distillers and get a feel for the business, we spent a few days in its heartland.
Malted barley is the backbone of beer as we know it. And why not? It’s delicious, versatile and has a satisfying sweet aspect. But: it’s not the only grain in the brewery. Since its earliest days in the Neolithic Middle East, when cereal grains were still being domesticated, beers incorporated not only barley, but emmer and einkorn wheat and spelt as well.
The mysteries and uniqueness of Belgian beer are what drew me into the world of beer and brewing, and I still find them delicious and captivating. However, this tiny country’s beers cover so much territory, it seems wise to limit the scope here. So, let’s put all of Belgium’s tart and funky lambics, oaky oud bruins and creamy witbiers off to the side for the future. That still leaves us with a treasure-box of conventionally fermented beers in a variety of strengths, colors and personalities.
IPAs currently accounts for about half of all craft beers sold in the US. Their bold flavors and shape-shifting characters, plus the fun of terroir and varietal characteristics make them endlessly fascinating. Like most beers, they’re mostly malt, hops, water and yeast, but obviously the hops are the starring attraction.
When beer culture was a shiny new thing decades ago, experts often divided the world into lagers on one side and ales on the other. Some even equated lagers with white wines and ales with reds. The idea was that ales were bolder, stronger and more bitter than lagers. Assuming that lager meant only pale, pilsner-like beers, maybe there’s some logic to it.
Love them or hate the very idea, hard seltzers are here to stay—at least until the Next Big Thing comes along. They’re here for several reasons. First, they were consciously created to suit a general trend towards more healthful alcoholic beverages. With their transparent spritziness and lightness in alcohol and calories, seltzers deliver on this request. Second, they’re “my own” drink for a chunk of the younger drinking generation. Additionally, there has been a decades-long trend in candy, snacks and other products for ever more explosive, “hyper” flavors, delivering more intensity than conventional ingredients can.
Rich, dark, deeply flavored and sometimes beastly, stouts are a style that people don’t like, they love. Or hate. There’s no “meh” in stout-land. The near-universal rap from the haters is that “it’s heavy” or strong, or filling, and sometimes they are, just like any style. But one of the world’s most popular stouts isn’t even as strong, or rich, or filling as your average mass-market lager—it’s as light on its feet as a ballerina—and you can dance with her all night long.
No question, people love IPAs. A prime reason is that they are supreme showcases for the heady aromatics of hops: resin, pine, herbs, citrus, stonefruit, tropical fruit and more. As most of these vocabulary terms describe foods, this suggests a question: If these food flavors are so delicious in IPAs, why don’t we just add them directly? Despite some purists out there, we’ve done exactly that.
Wassailing conjures up images of scarf-draped, rosy-cheeked carolers singing to orphans and shut-ins in their snow-globe village, Hallmark card style. You can think whatever nostalgic thing you like, but the fact is, “wassail” is a noun, not a verb, and the custom is about drinking, not singing.