Is This Beer Any Good? (The Happy-Face Standard)
Perhaps a few people out there have allowed a mouthful of beer to wash over their tongues without ever asking, “is this good?”—but not many. When humans interact with sensory stimulation, we unconsciously assess the experience. Whether it’s a song floating down from a speaker, a brightly-painted wall, or a plate of food, remaining neutral is not usually in the cards.
Curiously, most of us don’t have a strong sense of how to evaluate a beer. The issue is a matter of context. The question “is this beer good?” immediately implies a second, shadow question: compared to what? The various types of beer aren’t like ice cream—a base with different flavors. They are products of ingredient and process refracted through brewing traditions born by culture and circumstance. Flavor can’t be evaluated in isolation. If a beer is sour or bitter or sweet, those elements alone tell us nothing, since some beers are supposed to be sour or bitter or sweet—but others aren’t. More subtly, how do we distinguish quality between two beers of the same type with similar qualities? How do we decide which one is more accomplished?
No one agrees on a single approach to beer evaluation. In the early days of craft brewing, homebrewers developed a method that has heavily influenced the way Americans think about beer. They created a framework built around style adherence and technical merit. It was very useful for their purposes in the 1980s and ‘90s when brewers routinely made flawed beer and misunderstood national tradition and styles. It was good at weeding out bad beers. But since it was designed for brewers, it was mostly mute on the subjective question of aesthetics. If two beers in the table were equally well-made and true to style but notably different, the guidelines offered no advice about how to choose between them.
This has bugged me for decades. Yeah, I care about flaws and style fidelity, but only secondarily. What I really care about is that rush of excitement that comes from a truly special beer, the ones that make people beam with a glow of delight. When someone says a beer is awesome, no one thinks, “Oh, excellent, a beer that has no technical flaws and is bang-on in the center of the acknowledged style parameters!” They think: “Oh, excellent, I’m about to try a beer that will give me the same happy face you got when you sipped the beer!”
Objective Elements of Excellence
Which painting is better, Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” Mondrian’s “Composition with Red Blue and Yellow” or Dali’s “Persistence of Memory?” Well, Mondrian’s painting is a pretty poor example of surrealism, so clearly we need some ground rules. Subjective measures of excellent are relative—they cling to a scaffolding of good, objective truths on which we can all agree. They are essential in a good beer, if not sufficient to make it great.
Style Fidelity
Dealing with beer style is tricky. They don’t exist as Platonic ideals and there’s no “authoritative” body who issues citations for norm-violation. Styles change over time. People often don’t agree on they’re precise definitions. Yet for all that, the concept of style recognizes all the things that come together in the beers we drink—history, culture, process, ingredient. Identifying the style creates important guidelines to all of these things. As with the Mondrian and Van Gogh, beer style gives us a common language to discuss a beer. If it’s a witbier, it shouldn’t be red. Styles narrow the focus of our consideration and create the critical context we need during evaluation.
Faults and Execution
Homebrewers were onto something. Now that we have narrowed the discussion with the useful category of style, we can look for technical faults. A lager shouldn’t be sour. An IPA shouldn’t be metallic. The taste of vomit or nail-polish remover is never good. A note of clove is great in a weizen, less so in a kolsch. We need to be able to identify style-inappropriate or off-flavors in beers. Whatever the other merits, the brewer either didn’t or shouldn’t have intended those flavors to be present.
Equally, we should recognize excellence in execution. A particularly bright pilsner is a thing to admire, as is a rich, dense head that leaves lacing on the glass. Who can ignore the delights of especially vivid, clean aromas wafting from a glass? Many of the sense elements in beer come from careful process, and is worthy of appreciation. Ultimately, great clarity isn’t going to rescue a bland pilsner, but it’s evidence of a good process. All those elements contribute to that happy face and we need to attune ourselves to them.
Ingredients and Formulation
Brewers should know which ingredients to use, whether because of taste or style, and how to prepare the beer. This is part of knowing the craft. It’s not always obvious to a drinker beyond a sense that things aren’t coming together properly. Perhaps the brewer used a single-infusion mash and left a helles less crisp than is ideal. Or a brewer used Belgian yeast in a saison but fermented too cold to get the proper character. Or perhaps an ingredient is just wrong for the style—understated European hops in an IPA, for example. The brewer should understand which ingredients will create the flavor profile and tactile sensations they’re shooting for, and the appropriate processes to accomplish them.
SUbjective Elements of Excellence
If the brewer knows how to brew and formulates a decent recipe, they will reliably turn out a good and satisfying beer. To push into more rarefied territory like 100th percentile (or happy face) beer, however, brewers have to do more. I’ve spent years thinking about these more elusive and mystifying dimensions of excellence and although these elements are subjective, they’re not unknowable. When we encounter a beer that delights us, we can look more closely to see if there’s more at play than simple personal preference. Why does this beer seem so good? Below are dimensions, some mandatory, others optional, that describe the best beers.
Harmony and Balance
These are the subjective elements that should present in all styles, even ones that feature intense flavors. It’s the heart of excellence. All the pieces should come together in beautiful harmony. We use the term “balance” a lot in beer, and it usually refers to the contrast between hops and malt. But really, it’s the relationship between whatever elements are prominent. So in a Belgian beer, one of those elements will usually be fermentation characteristics. Often they’re balanced by alcohol warmth and attenuation. In a Bavarian weizen, that peppery clove note adds ballast to what is otherwise a delicate and sweet beer. In intense beers like lambic or IPA, if the intensity of the acid or hops doesn’t have a balancing element, it will overwhelm the beer. Finally, the balance point varies across styles. With barley wines, the sweet, syrupy malt requires a lot of booze or hops (often both) creating a high balance point, while in delicate lagers, the flavors are gentle and create a low balance point.
Distinctiveness
It’s possible to make an excellent beer, one that ticks all the boxes for quality and style appropriateness, but which nevertheless lacks interest. An exceptional beer will have a quality of distinctiveness that separates it from the crowd. As the years fall away from my visit to Bavaria, the helleses merge in my mind—except for Augustiner. The yeast they use, and the way they yeast it was unusually “rustic.” It had hints of flavor compounds I’d never encountered before. Many of the beers I drank on that trip impressed me, but Augustiner, because of its distinctive flavors, rose above the rest and remains memorable to this day. Most of the best beers will have some quality that similarly elevates them above their peers.
Subtlety
Another element I like to see in every beer is an element of subtlety. The entire beer can be a meditation on delicate flavors, but even in strongly-flavored beers, subtle flavors and aromas fill in the spaces between bombast. That whole (false) “pilsners are the hardest beers to make” notion derives from brewers’ appreciation of subtlety. Yet while pilsners are especially naked in revealing these subtleties, every style can express them. It’s where brewers show they can produce meaningful flavors through deft use of process, rather than overwhelming drinkers with tons of intense flavors.
Surprises
It’s not necessary for a brewer to add an unusual, surprising element to the beer, but when done well I always appreciate it. I mentioned Level’s clever use of acidity in a recent witbier. From a purely gustatory standpoint, it was a great move, adding crispness to a quenching beer while harmonizing with the citrusy spices. But it was also a wink to those who know that before Pierre Celis reinvented witbier after its extinction in Hoegaarden in the 1950s, it was a wild ale, something like lambic. Level’s example was an excellent use of process, but also a clever, knowing touch. I love the use of corn in Tank 7, a farmhouse ale. Those styles used hyper-local ingredients, and corn would be automatic for a Midwest American farmhouse ale, had that traditions existed. Brewers don’t have to surprise us, but it’s a delight when they do and it works.
Refinement
This is a the inverse of the item below, and a quality more often seen in older, European beers. When breweries make a beer thousands of times over decades, the brewers fine-tune absolutely every element. So for example, if an ester note is present, it is perfectly calibrated in intensity and taste to match the malt and hop notes. I began to appreciate this quality by tasting Trappist ales and comparing them to similar beers made by Americans. Both might have the same ingredients and similar processes, but the monastic examples inevitably seemed more accomplished, more focused, more refined.
Novelty
I include this one last, because it has been overused, abused, and misused far too often by American breweries. Just doing something new does not make it good. “Innovation” by itself is no virtue. Yet we would never get new beer styles or new traditions in brewing if someone wasn’t out there screwing around. Hewing to tradition is a time-honored practice in breweries, and critically important in maintaining continuity. But so is invention. What happens if we conduct a lactic fermentation in the brew kettle so we can then boil the wort and kill the Lactobacillus? What would happen if we dosed wort with dry hops during fermentation? What would happen if we did separate fermentations with regular and wild yeast, and then blended everything together?
Of course, the novelty must work on the palate. The inventions must contribute to improving the beer. If a brewer has tried something new and it works, that’s something to behold, and worthy of our respect.
Putting it All Together
I’m arguing for a more holistic sense of “good” when we consider beer. Yes, the beer should be well-conceived and well-made. If the brewer has made beer of a particular style, it should contain the elements of that style. But beyond that, really good beer has characteristics of excellence that are purely aesthetic. But, far from being unknowable, we can identify them and look for them.
If this seems inscrutable, overly fussy, or just wrong, I invite you to test it with a beer you particularly admire. Go back to a pint and try this method. If you’re actively looking for balance, refinement, and so on, can you find it? Maybe this isn’t the best framework, but I think we need some framework.
In a couple hours, Patrick and I will sit down with a fair slate of IPAs we’re going to taste for the podcast. We have hazies, classic West Coast IPAs, juicy IPAs, and some that contain multiple elements. Will it be hard to assess them across types? I’m not worried. We understand what a hazy IPA is supposed to be and we can assess whether the examples we have are well-made. More importantly, we can look for those subjective qualities that elevate the spectacular IPAs above the merely good. It’s not an exact science, but neither is it pure, blind opinion, either.