Malt Roast Smoke and Tart Beer Categories

Whether your beer is in a bottle, can or glass, kick back and relax. It's better on draft. Hello and welcome to Better On Draft . This is a pominous episode while Wendy and I explore the world in the month of June. I've wanted to do an episode about beer tasting for a while now and the cl,osest we've come so far is the recent episode number three hundred and eighty eight , Beer Judging with Beer Judges I will be using an article from March of twenty thirteen that Greg Engert wrote for a splendid table. Do note that this was before hazy IPAs were really a thing . Greg presents seven broad styles of beer. I present my notes from the excellent article here to help get some beer vocabulary out there. It's easier to talk about the beers we like and find new beers if we have an idea of the words to use . The first broad category is crisp . You know these beers, they tend to be lighter and feel really clean in flavor . They're your wheats, blondes, Kolch, the straightforward loggers like Hellus in Vienna , the Octoberfest and the Pilsnurs. He breaks these into three sub categories. Fruity is the wheats, blondes and kolch , and they'll have a bit of a fruity flavor to them. The let's call it bodied bloggers are malt accented . They're not malt heavy, but there is more bread and biscuits in the flavoring . And the third group is the risk happiness. These are things like pilsners in India Pail Lagers . They're usually not hop overloaded, but they're more hops than molts . Our second main category is hops . These are the beers where hops are front and center, either as aroma, bittering or a strong accent . These are your IPAs , a bunch of styles with the adjective American in front like the amber, barley wine or p,ale ale. The three categories here are earthy and dry, and I associate these with deeper notes in the hop scale, grass and wood . We used to think they were bitter before the hop wars . Malti backbone is a second category . We all love a backbone in our beer . These are the hoppy beers where you still taste the malts, usually adding some fruit flavors, not the hot fruit flavors like grapefruits , caramel and sweet some similar sweetness . They'll still have aroma hops in them The last category is the bold herbal and citric hops . These became the hop bombs . The hops are front and center for better or worse, usually for better . This could be strong aroma, and with the hazies that again weren't part of the article at the time , they tend to be more in the mouth than in the aroma . Our third main category is malt. Most of your flavors here are derived from the malts either in variety or in roast . These will have some sweetness with nuts, toffee, caramel, toast, and fruits, they'll be darker in color than the standard yellow beer . Our two categories are toasty and nutty . These will have flavors reminiscent of a roasted nut , biscuits, or toast . They could approach raisin or fig flavors. These are your milds , darker lagers, alt beers , and box . The second category is fruit and toffee. These get deeper into fruit, toffee, and caramel flavors , and they can have that dried fruit flavor starting to approach prunes. These are going to be your Scottish Belgian pails and your bigger bitters , the Wii Heavy and English barley wine . The fourth main category is roast . These might have specially roasted grains or grains that simply roasted longer . They'll be brown to black and medium and medium to full bodied . Greg broke these into these soft and silky . These are more milk, chocolate and hazelnut flavors . It's less of the roasty flavors and more of the malti . This would be your porter , your regular stouts or a strong brown ale The second group is dark and dry . These are exhibiting the roasty flavors, possibly tasting burnt or like dark chocolate or coffee, or espresso . You can usually find the stone fruit flavors of prunes, cherries, and plums. These are the stronger stouts, the black IPA and the robust porter . The fifth main category is the smoke category . These are your beers with the smoked molts . They are usually a shade of brown and usually lighter in other flavors to show off the smokiness of the beer . Greg separated these into the subdued and the spicy meaty classes . These beers tend to call out their smokiness as part of the name. I would compare something like an Alaskan smoked porter to a Rauschbeer to get an idea of the two different groups . The sixth category is the fruity and spicy category. These beers may be less beer flavored and more stuff flavored. Those are my words, not Greg's . Sometimes the fruits or spices are there to accentuate other flavors. There is a chance you will have a garnish if you order these in a good beer bar. These come into categories. The bright category, these are the brighter flavors , so apples, bananas, apricots . They're tend to be less colorful fruits . You can also get some clove, vanilla, and coriander flavors in here . These are your wisins, your vitz, your Saisons, which is one of my favorite styles , and your paler belt's . The dark category tends to taste more like the darker fruits like figs, raisins, and cherries. These might remind you of wine . Styles include the darkened Belgians, darker Belgians like a quad and Dunklwisen, which is another one of my favorite styles. Our seventh category in the final category is tart and funky . So we have tart and funky, and these are the sours that can vary a lot in how it presents , but there is a high probability that they are acidic . Greg broke these into three groups the delicate group. These are more mildly acidic and a sour house will often start with these as a bass that they then play with. So these are your Goza and your unfruited Verliner vice and things like that . Then there's the fruitian venice . So these are more wine like and fruity and can often be gateway beers for your wine friend . So these would be fruited lambics, the Flanders , and some wild ailes . You can think of something like Frambois as one of these . And the last category is the earthy group. And these accentuate the funk , also the farmhouse flavor, horsey , those sorts of things . These are the more Saur Saisons, the unblended lambics, and gaza . So that's a simple beer taxonomy. Seven main categories, there's some subcategories . Did you recognize any particular categories that you tend to drink towards ? You may have noticed I go for fruit and spice . Where they are your categories seasonal or situational? If you keep notes on beers as you find them, you can try using these broad sort of categories to help you remember what you drink. We'll be back in July with some new shows. In the meantime, please let us know how we're doing. You can find us on the social media platforms as Better On Draft at BetternDraft. com or email us at better on draft at gmail dot com And no matter what you think of your beer we think it's better on draft