Watch an expert pick up a glass, give it a quick sniff and instantly the complexities of a wine or beer are translated into a few choice words. It looks like simplicity itself, but try to do the same thing as a novice and it’s often an epic struggle. Experts may make it look easy, but it takes a long time to get there. There are many barriers, not the least of which is that tasting is a deeply unnatural act.
You know how people are always telling you that something tasty you thought was also good for you may actually not be? Here’s another one: umami. Not the glutamate salt to which we are most sensitive, but some of its synergistic sidekicks.
As someone with a creative bent, I want to make sure I have access to the widest possible range of flavors to work with, just as an artist would want to have a lot of colored paints at hand. Some seasonings have very specialized uses and stay in the cabinet, but others are used so often I keep them on a rack right above the cooktop. Most herbs and spices are best suited either for savory foods or sweet ones. A few, like ginger, have shape-shifting characters that lets them do dual duty. Of these, coriander is the king in my kitchen.
Beer is an extraordinarily fragile beverage. It is composed of well over a thousand chemical components coexisting in an uneasy and short-lived balance, far from anything resembling chemical equilibrium. It’s best within weeks of its packaging day, a fact that few of its fans really realize.
Obviously a work this large has a lot in it, so here I’m dealing with a small portion of the book where he describes the beer styles of the day. Early on in the book Lacambre asserts that at that time, just about all (75 percent) beers from Belgium and Holland were wheat (or other adjunct) based beers, even “the ones we call barley beers.” This was prior to the arrival of lagers in Belgium.
I was involved for a couple of years with a group that was trying to put some logic and science into the often fuzzy thinking around beer and food pairing. I think we made some progress, but one of the things we knew we needed was a literature search. This meant combing through a ton of scientific papers to look for proven interactions, which was not an easy task, since they tended to be buried in research about particular receptors and other biological systems.
Specialty cheese-makers are starting to realize beer is a natural companion and great selling tool. And as I myself have found out, it’s a small and comfortable step from beer lover to beer and cheese aficionado. A few are starting to pick up on this. Rogue happens to be the name of both a creamery and a brewery, although they do not share ownership. But the two have been working a lot together to spread the message of great beer and cheese.
In terms of smell, humans are often denigrated as being much poorer than bears or dogs. Compared to mice, it’s true we have only a third as many working receptor types, but we have way more copies. It’s a fair bargain, because their extra receptors involuntarily control their behavior, while our cognitive brain does these tasks with far more flexibility—and free will. Each creature has its own lifestyle, and its sensory systems are adapted perfectly to it.
The marketing geniuses at the world’s industrial breweries have no clue what kind of beer you like. Even if they did, the best they could do would be to dump it into a pot with a hundred thousand other preferences and brew an accountant-approved approximation of the resulting mélange. Which is exactly what they do. By brewing it yourself, you can have what you want, when you want it. You are the niche market supreme.
Holiday icons seem to settle into the same old routine; beers are not immune. And while I enjoy the wassail-inspired brown brews that return every year, much of the fun of homebrewing lies in surprising people with something new.