Beer Primer Part 1 (Pardon the Beer Geekdom)

Before I get started with my regular posts, I wanted to briefly highlight some of the qualities of a beer that contribute to the overall beer drinking experience. Beer stimulates your senses; not just your taste buds, but the beer's appearance, aroma, and feel on your palate all play a role in what I'll be referring to as the "beer experience." Throughout my posts, I will be using some beer jargon and wanted to provide this background information up front. Surely anyone can drink a beer and say whether or not they like it, but as any wine connoisseur will tell you, understanding the different attributes of a fine wine enhances your appreciation of it. Though beer is not often treated like wine, I contend that beer can be just as complex as wine and deserves to be treated as such. I may get a little technical, so please pardon my beer geekdom!

What is beer?

At the most basic level, beer is simply water, grains (typically barley), hops, and yeast. That's all that is needed to produce the wonderful flavors and aromas of beer. In this post, I'll discuss the role of malted barley in beer and discuss the other ingredients in a later post.

Interesting Fact: The Bavarian "Reinheitsgebot" law (or "purity order") of 1516 mandated that beer can only contain water, barley, and hops.  Yeast was later added to law once microbiologists discovered in the 1800s that it was yeast that fermented beer. Thank you, Louis Pasteur. Some version of this law still exists in Germany today, a likely topic of another post in the future.

Malted Barley

Malted barley (aka malt) provides the foundation for beer. (Note: other grains such as wheat, sorghum, oats, rice, and corn can be used depending on the style but barley remains the primary beer grain).  Barley, a cereal grain, contains starches and proteins that the brewer uses to create the beer's flavor profile.  Before the barley can be used in beer, it first has to be malted, a process involving varying applications of wetting, drying, and heating the grain.  Malting  activates the enzymes in the barley that will convert the starch to sugars (in a brewing process called mashing), that can then be converted to alcohol and CO2 by the yeast.  Malt can is usually categorized as either base malts, which provide the majority of the fermentable sugars, and specialty malts that provide more complex flavors and colors depending on the malt used.

The malt plays a huge factor in the beer experience.  First, it is the primary source of color for the beer and influences the beer's head retention (the amount and color of foam on top of the beer). Beer color is often scaled by a measure known as the Standard Reference Method (SRM). The scale, seen below, is a measure of how much light is attenuated through beer, or in other words, how light or dark it is.  Small SRM values correspond with light beers like light lagers (2-3 SRM) and pale ales (6-8 SRM) while larger numbers correspond with dark beers such as stouts (20-30 SRM) and porters (30+ SRM).

SRM Beer Color Scale
2	3	6	8	10	13	17	20	24	29	35	40+

Eating and drinking is as much a visual experience as it is tasting one.  Your eyes provide your brain with the first impression of what you are about to consume.  When you see a well-poured glass of light beer with a light, fluffy head, your mind will have preconceived notions of what to expect when you drink it.  How the taste matches the visual (or doesn't match in some cases) the visual, plays into the overall experience in drinking a beer.

Soapbox Rant: Please drink your beer in a glass for the fullest experience!  Drinking from a bottle or can masks the beer from your eyes and keeps the aromas from your nose, which plays an immense role in how you perceive taste.  If you don't have a glass, even a cheap plastic Solo cup would be preferable to the bottle/can.  Time to step off my soapbox with pint glass in hand!

The malt also provides a lot of aromas and flavors to the beer.  Depending on the style of beer, you may get sweet malty notes, especially if the malt has a lot of unfermentable sugars.  The use of some dark (more roasted) specialty malts will give the beer more of nutty, chocolate, coffee, and/or roasted aroma and flavor.    The malt also affects the body (or viscosity) and mouthfeel of the beer, that is how it feels in your mouth.  Malt can provide proteins and other carbohydrates that can influence whether the beer feels thin and watery, heavy and chewy, or something in between.  Lastly, since malt also provides the yeast the fermentable sugars, the malt directly contributes to how much alcohol is in the beer, which can definitely affect the beer's taste and mouthfeel.

That's enough beer geekdom for now.  Look, smell, taste, and feel your beer and enjoy!