The Naked Pint Read Free Page B

courage) and CO 2 (the bubbles, which produce the carbonation in beer). Thus, the fermentation process is what makes beer, well, beer.
    THE BIGGEST BEER MYTH

    If you listen to nothing else we say, listen to this: The color of a beer has nothing whatsoever to do with the strength, alcohol content, bitterness, or heaviness of that beer. We’ll say it again. Just because a beer is dark in color does not mean that it is heavy or bitter.
    This misconception stems from the mass beer market, 90% of which are either Pilsner-style or American-style lager beers. Virtually every beer you’ve bought with a fake ID at the gas station (sorry, Dad), drank in the backseat of your high-school boyfriend’s car (sorry, Mom), or pulled from the ice tub during the Super Bowl BBQ falls into this category. They are all light in alcohol, flavor, and color and have virtually no aromatics. Because these are the beers most of us have been exposed to, we wrongly associate the light color with those other light attributes.
    Because these beers are not, in our opinion, necessarily good quality or good tasting (when compared to most craft and artisanal beer), many people (especially women) want these beers to be as light tasting as possible, so that they don’t experience so much flavor of a not-so-great beer. They don’t want a beer with an aftertaste. What they are really saying is that they don’t want a beer with a bad aftertaste. If something tastes great, wouldn’t you want that flavor to linger?
    Ordering a beer by its color is like judging a book by its cover. Stand up and fight beer prejudices. Instead, order a beer based on taste. You don’t even have to worry about using the correct beer jargon. Who cares about that? We would rather you order a beer using flavor descriptors, like nutty, crisp, lemony, bitter, toasty, sweet, chocolaty, creamy, effervescent, bright, spicy, or fruity. Believe us, you’ll get a beer that you might actually like versus a beer that you are trying to choke down. You won’t just want light, you’ll want flavor.
    Since we are really examining fermentation, let’s take a quick minute to explain carbonation. Of course, a carbonated beverage is one that has bubbles in it. Carbonation, technically, is CO 2 dissolved in liquid. It’s what gives beer its bubbly effervescence and plays a big part in the balance of that beer (see Chapter 2). The head on a beer is just the CO 2 being released from that beer. The carbonation bubbles become the vehicles in which the aromatics of the beer ride from the glass to your nose.

Ale vs. Lager: Making a Case for Each
    A ll beers fall into one of two categories: ale or lager. We find that most people don’t know the difference between the two. They use the words interchangeably, guessing at the meaning, never realizing what they’re talking about. So we’re going to break it down for you here. (Please pass the information along to your friends.)
What’s an Ale?
    An ale is a beer that uses yeast that has been cultured to ferment at the top of the fermentation vessel at high temperatures (60°F to 75°F), resulting in a quick fermentation period (seven to eight days or less). Ale yeasts are generally known to produce fairly big flavors (there are exceptions). You’ll often get a lot of aromatics from the whiff of an ale. Ales tend to have more residual sugar, meaning sugar that has not been consumed by the yeast during the fermentation process.
What’s a Lager?
    The word lager comes from a German word meaning “to store.” A lager is a beer that uses yeast strains that are cultured to ferment at the bottom of the fermentation vessel at low temperatures (34°F to 50°F), resulting in a long fermentation time (weeks to months). Lager yeast produces fewer byproduct characters than does ale yeast, which tends to create a cleaner, crisper taste (there are exceptions).
     
     
    Please remember (yes, we know we’re being drill sergeants about this), the color of a beer tells