Everyone who is in love with the beautiful beverage called beer, sooner or later, experiences a similar situation. We order a beer with an intriguing name and origin, just to be disappointed once again. Now, most of the beers are still enjoyable, but there is something inside us, a voice whispering that something is not right. It could be the smell or the taste, but we can’t shake the feeling of not being fully satisfied.
Everybody knows that wine tasters (sommelier) can tell us so much information about how the wine was made, from which region, and much more, just from a sip. But when it comes to beer, most of us are not really sure how to identify good from bad quality homemade beers. If you are just interested in trying out some new delights, you can quench your thirst by clicking on birre online, but if you would like to learn more about what makes good beers good and bad ones bad, we will further discuss this topic.
Storing and serving
First things first, and when we say bad beer, we are talking about quality, not whether the beer has been compromised. With that clarified, even a quality product can go awry if it is not suitably stored and served. So let us go through some tips on what to keep both eyes open and try to spot. Where you should start is looking at how the beer is stored. It should be stored in a cool and dry area.
If stored correctly, it can preserve its quality for half a year longer, and it is also crucial for the bottles to be far away from heat and direct sunlight. The beer should also be stored in a brown or clear bottle so that it can remain fresh for as long as possible, and preferably, the bottle should be in an upright position. It should also go without saying the bottle itself should not be compromised.
The taste
With those basics out of the way, let us consider more complicated things. Anyone can make sure that the bottles were stored properly, but then the next step is tasting it. Now, what we need to do is to consider how does it taste and then make some conclusions about the beer. So one of the possible clues you could sense is if the beer tastes like green apple or mowed grass.
That means that there is too much of a certain chemical in our beverage. We are talking about acetaldehyde. Now, while that chemical is found in all beers, you definitely don’t want too much of it. There are a couple of reasons for that, but the most significant one is that this is the chemical that gives us a hangover, and that is certainly something we don’t want more of and would try to avoid. You can also visit baranddrink.com to find out more on How to Cure Hangover.
The next thing you should try to notice is when our drink tastes like buttered popcorn. That means there is too much diacetyl. Again, it is normal for some beers to have it, for instance, light lagers.
But if you taste something like this in some other type of beer, then perhaps consider switching to something else. The reasons why there is diacetyl in beer are because of yeast and fermentation. So while it is normal for lagers to savor like this, it’s a bad sign for other beers. After all, we don’t want to have problems with bacteria.
Then we could feel something like a creamed corn while enjoying our drink. What we are sensing is dimethyl sulfide. That is also a consequence of fermentation and the production of beer. But in this case, there was something that has gone wrong during the process. Some chemicals were added in the wrong way or in excess.
Again, it is fine if we get this flavor in lagers or ales, but if you notice this flavor somewhere else, that is a bad sign. Bacteria are definitely not something we want to experiment with too much. Another issue that could occur is that our beverage tastes like wretched stomach bile.
That is a bigger problem since this is connected with infections. If you are lucky, something like this has never happened to you, but if it has, then it has probably hit your nose pretty hard. When this happens, that is because bottles were not stored properly. Now, we are not saying that this means nothing can be trusted from the place you got that drink, but it still means that you should be careful, and it would be wise not to drink the beer that smells like that.
Carbonated too much or not
But enough about these weird flavors that our beverages could have and chemicals we don’t know how to pronounce. There are other problems that could and that are not as important. For instance, you should pay close attention to the aftertaste your drink has, and if you can sense the yeast, that means that it wasn’t fermented for long enough.
Additional concerns our beverage could have is that it is carbonated too much, and there is nothing wrong with that if that is what you enjoy. However, carbonation could camouflage the actual taste of the beer. And most people would like to enjoy that originally intended flavor. Even though this is subjective, so is what is considered good and what is considered bad.
In the end, it all depends on what we like and don’t like. To be clear, as long as the beer is not contaminated in any way, it is all about our preferences. Even with all that, the advice we gave you still stands, so pay attention and try to detect this type of taste.
Summing up
As we have seen, there are several things to consider when trying to determine what beers are better than others, and while this is still a subjective matter, there are also objective standards that help us determine if some beer has been produced in the right way. We hope that you now know more about your favorite beverages and that you will be able to enjoy them even more in the future.
