Sensory

In the world of brewing, we can precisely measure and define certain things—and those things don’t have a whole lot to do with how we smell, taste, and feel about beer.

From chomping on grains to hot steeps and running the grains through an espresso machine, Randy Mosher offers some simple tips and tricks to better evaluate your malt—and to improve your flavor imagination.

From the weather at the farms that grow the ingredients to every aspect of brewing and on to the climate in which we enjoy it, temperature affects beer profoundly. So, whether you’re gulping an ice-cold one in the desert or sipping a snifter by the fireside, let’s ponder beer’s ethereal, delicate nature—whatever the season.

For many of us, hop aromas are just about the most impenetrable of all smells. Yet understanding more about how the brain works with aromas can help us to make and enjoy really delicious beers.

When it’s time to pull nails and evaluate components for blending, New Image’s Brandon Capps recommends including tasters who are less familiar with the style, while also ensuring that tasting happens blindly and individually.

We know that we can get better at smelling and tasting beer, but how does it work? From Tasting Beer author and sensory guru Randy Mosher, here are some insights to help us identify and better understand our own strengths and weaknesses.

Our growing awareness of thiols and other hop compounds are just scratching the surface of beer’s aromatic complexity. Inspired by some recent research into wine, Randy Mosher outlines a new model—aroma pools—that might help us think differently about how and what we smell in beer.

From our Illustrated Guide to Homebrewing, here are some tips on serving your own beer—and on evaluating it, so you can decide how to make it even better next time.

In this clip from their video course, Hop Butcher for the World cofounders and brewers Jude La Rose and Jeremiah Zimmer bust up some T-90s and explain how to “rub” and evaluate hops as found in their most popular format today.

Laura Burns, director of research and development at Omega Yeast, explains the impact that thiols can have on beer aroma—and why brewers and yeast labs are increasingly interested in how to unlock their potential.

By taking a step back to think more deeply about why we love fruit—and why some fruit beers really shine—we can better plan a truly great one. Randy Mosher peels back the layers and gets to the core of it.

Firestone Walker beers have twice won Best in Beer nods from our editors, and they always rank high among Readers’ Choice picks. We asked Sam Tierney, innovation brewer at the Propagator in Venice Beach, to ponder what it means to strive for “the best.”

Randy Mosher dissects the intricate workings of IPAs—from the malt to the hop compounds that make them special and compelling—so we can approach our brews and our sensory vocabulary with deeper thought.

Lager is made at the cellular level—and at the cultural one. How far can you push lager—with different ingredients, fermentations, sensory profiles—until it becomes something else? Randy Mosher ponders the science, the traditions, and the pragmatism.

Pinthouse’s Joe Mohrfeld explains his technique for rubbing and evaluating hops to seek out the aromas and flavors you want in your IPAs—and to avoid those you don’t.

Sour and wild beers exist on a complex plane of myriad flavors and aromas produced by bacteria, yeast, ingredients, and by-products. Randy Mosher breaks down the building blocks of what we sense, to help us identify what we enjoy.

Once you adopt some basic rules of thumb about flavor compatibility and intensity, you can start drilling down into which beer styles tend to work best with specific dishes—making a sensory experience greater than the sum of its parts.

We are visual creatures—but color is deceptive. Randy Mosher, author of Tasting Beer, shares insights to help us widen our stout vocabulary.

Aslin Beer cofounder Andrew Kelley walks us step-by-step through the brewery's kettle-souring process, from grist composition to adjusting the pH depending on fruit or other ingredients.

Andrew Kelly, cofounder of Aslin Beer in Alexandria, Virginia, breaks down the elements of flavor and reminds us to think about what different brewing ingredients bring to the table when trying to mimic the flavors of favorite foods.