Sublime juice. Yeasty swill. The apex of 15,000 years of brewing art. Why can’t these lazy brewers clarify their beers? Deeply held opinions swirl around these controversial beers. Whatever your feeling, there’s no denying that these aromatic, fruit-tinged IPAs have upset the norms around IPA, including the level of passionate devotion to them.
While sour beers are unlikely to ever dominate our beer landscape, they’ve emerged from the shadowy backwaters and taken their rightful place on the shelves alongside so-called “normal” beers.
In the last few years, a cluster of new beer styles has been creating a lot of excitement: sour IPAs and/or milkshake IPAs. They really are quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.
In the last couple of years, this loosely defined style has turned into a feeding frenzy driven by craft beer’s hyper-enthusiastic core. These are the beers that devotees will wait in line for, hoard, covet, trade and generally lust after.
I’m not talking about the bubbles swarming into foam on top of that IPA in front of you, but something entirely different. It’s the bubble inside which every one of us lives, traveling through the world looking out at our own personal version of reality as we drift through it. The Hindus came to this conclusion millennia ago, and in many ways their metaphor is increasingly verified by science. Nothing about our perception is objective. To understand, we must abandon the comforting notion that our senses provide accurate and truthful representations of the world around us.
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…
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.
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.
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.