What are you looking for when you taste a craft-brewed beer? Appreciating beer, oddly enough, can involve more than just your sense of taste. You’ll find that all five of the senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—will help you evaluate and enjoy beer. While you don’t need to be a microbiologist to know when a beer appeals to you, some pointers may help you tune your senses to the particular delights of a well-made brew.

Begin by looking at the beer. What color is it, and is it cloudy or clear? Is there sediment on the bottom? Is the head thick and creamy, or light and billowy? These details can tell you a great deal about the style of a beer before you even taste it. While probably the least important of your senses, hearing can also affect your appreciation of a beer. Professional tasters claim that they can actually hear the amount of carbonation in a beer, from the sound the gas makes as it escapes from a newly-opened bottle.

Next, swirl the beer in its glass a bit to release the aroma. Take a few good sniffs close to the head of the beer before drinking. Since taste is actually 80% smell, you can notice many flavors by judging the aroma of a beer.

Look for malt and hop aroma; the proportion of these two will change drastically from, say, an obsessively-hopped pale ale to a lusciously malty dry stout.

Finally, take a good sip of the beer, “chewing” it to move it over all areas of your tongue. Your tongue tastes in four distinct areas: sweet at the tip, salt on the sides near the tip, sour on the sides near the back, and bitter in the very back. Notice flavors that seem prominent to you: fruitiness, hoppiness, bitterness, tartness, or sweetness. As you swallow, the aftertaste or “finish” of a beer will also have a distinctive character. Some finish crisply, while others linger on emphatically.

All of us are prone to sensory fatigue. That is, after a certain number of tastes, our sense receptors get a bit weary, and we begin to lose the nuances of flavor. If you’re new to beer, tasting some of the lighter beers first might be a good idea. Professional tasters usually work their way from the lighter to the heavier beers, because once you’ve gotten the wallop of a smoky rauchbier on your palate, you may have difficulty tasting much else.

Educating yourself about beer, and about your own tastes, can be a richly rewarding process. Start with this program. Take note of a beer’s style and name when one strikes you as earth-shatteringly good. Mark down a few of your own tasting notes in the margin, putting some of those heavenly flavors to words. Take note of any brewing details, like final gravity, type of malt used, or variety of aroma hops. That way you’ll remember what you like and, more importantly, why you like it. Next time you’re looking for a nice bottle of Belgian ale to take to dinner, you can refer to your notes. If you can’t find the specific beer you tasted, you’ll at least be able to find one similar in style.

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