There were days and weeks at the beginning of the year when we at least pretended that this column was about the art of tasting beer, as opposed to whatever it's become today—some hobbled, sniveling nostalgia crutch, a putrid excuse to allow more hot air to escape my fingertips, a wallowing cesspool of the self-pity of a self-proclaimed problem drinker. No, there was a while there when all I typed about was how beer was made and how it should be appreciated. Those were the halcyon days, pure in intent, dry but informative. Let's try to now return to those days past. Let's give just a little refresher on the ins and outs of beer tasting, here, now, a few weeks before we wrap up this column with a bow and never drink another beer forever.
The first big lesson we learned back then was that smelling was important, but it was a skill that the brain was woefully inadequate at performing. There's like 10 million scents out there, and humans have like five words to describe them, so good luck sniffing a beer and telling me what it smells like. My Tröegs Dunkel, then, smelled like... I dunno, malty? Bready? And those descriptions highlight in exactly what way humans are inadequate at the art of smelling—the only words we have are food words, borrowed from the arena of taste. Try to break it down further, and we can't do it. What kind of malty? No fucking clue. (And this is even ignoring the fact that "malty" was a word that I learned in January and have used as a crutch over and over again this year when my inadequacies rear their ugly heads.)
The second big lesson we learned was that water was important, and this was not really a lesson that was implemented at all during my beer tasting this year. I don't know how to apply the lesson to today's Dunkel. Maybe the fact that Tröegs is in PA (Hershey), so maybe I am comfortable with this beer because I'm a big fan of PA water already? Or would Hershey's water be different than Philly's? I don't know. I know from rereading Tasting Beer that if today's beer was "dark," then that means it was "hard" water that was used (as opposed to pilsners' "soft" water). Whatever the fuck that means.
The third big lesson we learned was about how the creation of beer is a chemical reaction. "Enzymes" help these reactions occur more easily (i.e./e.g. at less extreme temperatures). And the funny thing about barley, the star grain of the beer brewing process, is that not only do its grains break down to simple sugars necessary for the yeast to feast on, but also barley itself comes with these enzymes that help the process along. Barley kills to birds with one stone. Sometimes the enzymes are so numerous that you can add other bullshit like corn or rice or rye or oat and the enzymes will break those down too. It's a beautiful system.
The fourth big lesson we learned was the general process of making beer, step-by-oversimplified-step. Okay, so you have the barley. You soak it. You let it sprout. You apply heat when it's sprouted enough. You place it in the kiln, and you roast it to any number of specifications. In general, the longer you roast the malt, the darker the beer will be (though math dictates you can achieve many colors from many variations, e.g. a medium-roast malt will result in the same color as some light-roast and some heavy-roast mixed together). This is called the maillard reaction.
The fifth big lesson we learned was that all this is pretty important, and yet you don't necessarily need to know any of it to appreciate a good fucking beer. That's the problem with this project and the goals that I originally had for it. Sure, it's cool knowing about malts and kilns and barley and all that shit, but I've found that I'm less interested in any of this than I am how the beer makes me feel, the emotions it evokes within me. And so this fifth and final lesson was one that I learned in the last ten months or so—one can know beer without knowing what's in beer.
I know this could come off as me just being lazy again, like I don't feel like learning any more than I have to. Maybe that's true. But I really do feel like I got a lot out of my explorations of beer this year, and I really can't attribute any of those emotional discoveries to any technical aspect described above. That's all chaff. Beer isn't in your nose or even in your mouth. It's in your heart. I want to keep it there.
NOTES
BEER: Tröegs Dunkel Lager
BEER: Tröegs Dunkel Lager
STYLE: Munich Dunkel
ABV: 5.2%
BREWED BY: Tröegs Brewing Company
LOCATION: Hershey, PA
PURCHASED AT: Giant Huntingdon Valley
PAIRED WITH: a couple random Xmas cookies
GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5
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