Part 3 of my “Tasting Beer” series. The first two posts are here and here.

Thing one: wine-ification is a terrible word. Thing two: I’m pretty sure my first exposure to wine was out of a box, so it took a while before I understood the idea of wine being fancy. That is not to say that beer ever had a “fancy persona” in my mind either, but I guess that’s kind of the point to all of this.

Lately, thanks to the rapid growth of craft beer in America, there has been an increase in restaurants that feature craft beer, and programs like Cicerone have been getting more attention. This is of course is when the opinions start to come out about craft beer’s role, and often times, it is compared to wine. The New York Times had an article associating beer bottle sizes with “wine-ification,” Food & Wine compared beer glassware and food pairing with snobbery, and NPR recently discussed Cicerones.

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I mentioned before in part 1 that statistically when wine is blind tasted, interesting things happen. For a full explanation, read here, but I want to highlight two specific examples:

– The same wine, judged by the same judges, received varied scores when judged blind multiple times
– The same wine was presented to the same set of judges twice, but with two different labels. One label was for a standard table wine, and the other for a pricer grand cru. When judged as a table wine, descriptors were “weak, light and flat” compared to “complex, balanced, long and woody” when judged as a grand cru.

To an extent, I believe that the same can be true of beer as well, but it also depends on the situation.  (more…)

While I was studying to take the Certified Cicerone® exam, there were several books that I read, and studied, to prepare myself. One of those books was Randy Mosher’s Tasting Beer. There is likely not a single other book that eloquently goes into such detail that Mosher does, in describing and understanding sensory evaluation and taste perception of beer. (more…)