Every beer taster can recognize the bitter snap of hops on the palate, the caramel-to-roasty spectrum of malt aromas, and occasionally the spicy, fruity signatures of certain yeast strains. We love beer’s boldness, and in recent years the volume has definitely been turned up. Amid all the hubbub it’s easy to overlook one of its most unique charms: mouthfeel.
From the glass on the table to the smells of the beer frothing up, to the sights and sounds of the barroom and beyond, our world usually feels solid and reliable enough. It is an illusion, however—nothing more than a projection created by our highly fallible perceptions. Ancient wisdom makes a point of it; modern science increasingly verifies this unsettling truth.
A single element might seem an odd choice as a theme for a beer article, but this one is truly special. Of all the things in the universe our noses are capable of smelling, sulfur compounds are by far the stinkiest. Because of its importance in a host of biochemical processes, quite a few volatile sulfur compounds are found in beer. Many of them are detectable in astonishingly small quantities.
It’s obvious that we human beings are all pretty different from one another—in appearance, experience, attitude, gender, and countless other attributes. Each of us has things that come effortlessly and others at which we struggle. It goes without saying that these differences affect our abilities as tasters…
5 Rabbit Cervecería was asked to participate in a 2016 Craft Beer Week collaboration with the Lakeview brewpub, DryHop Brewers. This would also include an art show, which I eventually understood to mean I had to come up with some actual art. While I’ve been doing beer labels and other commercial design work for decades, fine art is a little alien to me.
In 2016 I was honored to be invited to judge at the Slow Food Beer competition in Celaya, Mexico. Its state—Guanajuato—had been declared to be the least gastronomically developed in Mexico, but despite that, there are some thrilling bright spots. Celaya is the heart of Mexico’s dairy goat industry, famous for its cheese as well as cajeta, a creamy caramel made from goat’s milk. More on that later.
My friend Marcelo from Brazil was in town yesterday and brought me a couple of surprises: A small cask made from umburana wood, meant for aging cachaça, and a slab of a highly aromatic wood referred to in Brazil as “balsam” (Myroxolon balsamum). I couldn’t be more excited.
Sometimes you find the most wonderful treasures in the most unlikely places, but after some contemplation, they not only seem to make sense, but may even seem inevitable. I often search on eBay for art items with beery subject matter, like magazine illustrations or old genre prints of people drinking beer. Guess what I found this time.
This is a beer history timeline I put together for my book Mastering Homebrew. Divisions within the line show when hopped beer, lager and modern craft beers made their mark.
I am standing on the base of an upturned tree, on a ridge overlooking the jagged tips of the Cascade Range of northern Washington. It is dark, save for the blue illumination of a new moon. Around me, the ancient sun-baked roots of a toppled spruce tree fan out mechanically in all directions forming a throne Ralph calls the “Starship Enterprise.” For HopUnion’s gregarious leader Ralph Olson, this is a retreat from the high-pressure world of hops down in Yakima, just an hour to the east. The fact that he has bestowed this imaginative fantasy on a dead tree speaks worlds about those who spend time in the hop trade.