Enjoy a small craft beer tasting at home
No vacations, no shows — but you can still have fun
We’re all hunkered down for the duration, deferring business trips, vacations and any event likely to be crowded. But that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a beer at home with your family.
I used to host monthly tastings for a few friends at my house. I called them meetings of the Philopotes Society. Philopotes is a great Greek word that means “lover of drinking sessions.” We’d open a variety of beers to taste and discuss, and generally have a fun evening of beer, food and conversation.
Years ago, when I was first learning about beer, I’d host themed tastings and ask guests to bring one or two bottles. Sometimes, everyone brought beer in a single style — IPAS, for example, or porters. Other times, we’d sample beers from a specific country or state. You could do dark beers, red beers, session brews or ones with silly names. There’s no end to the theme possibilities.
There are many ways to host your own version. You can make it super easy or as complicated as you’d like, depending on how educational you want to be or how casual.
You don’t need a lot of beer for this — you’re just tasting. Each 12-ounce bottle or can should provide enough for four to six sample pours of 2 to 3 ounces each. Pick up a sleeve of small, clear plastic cups at the grocery store — clear so you can see the color of the beer. Place a dump bucket on the table, so you can pour out anything you don’t want to finish, and pitchers of water, so you can cleanse your palate.
There are two ways to conduct a tasting, depending on how serious you want to be: a blind tasting or an open one. A blind tasting means you don’t know what beer you’re drinking until after you’ve tried it. An open tasting leaves the bottles and cans in view. For a blind tasting, you can put the bottles in numbered paper bags or wrap them with paper to obscure the label. Or you can recruit someone to pour the beer where no one can see what’s what, and reveal the labels after the discussion.
Put out some finger food — cheeses, charcuterie, crackers, bread and grapes, for example. Give each taster a pen and some paper, so they can make notes about each beer, perhaps the aromas they picked up in the nose or specific flavors. After everyone has tried the beer, open a discussion about what people thought about the beer. This is exactly what professional judges do, and there’s not really any magic to it.
No two people taste exactly the same way; everybody’s taste buds are slightly different. You may have a high tolerance for butterscotch (a defect known as diacetyl) while someone else may be extremely sensitive to it. You can learn a lot about a beer by just talking about what you noticed when you drank it. Your friends may bring up something you didn’t notice the first time you tried that beer, and now it’s all you can taste. In some ways, the discussion is the most important part.
If you’re really interested in learning more about beer, pick up a copy of Randy Mosher’s book, “Tasting Beer” (Storey Publishing; $20). The Beer Judge Certification
Program has great resources online at dev.bjcp.org, including a beer judging scoresheet (bit.ly/beerscores) that’s used in homebrew competitions, but provides an excellent tool for analyzing any beer.
Hosting a beer tasting in your home is a great way to stay both safe and social during these trying times. But whatever you do, don’t bring any Corona beer. (It’s just not very tasty, at least not to me.)