Your nose rules
BY CHRIS KELLER
While at a brewers conference several years ago, I attended a beer tasting seminar led by a professional beer taster. This guy charges in the upper six figures to go to large breweries to fully analyze the flavors and aromas in their beers. He had trained his palate to recognize any and all of the good and bad tastes and smells that can make or break a brewing business. We lowly craft beer brewers couldn’ t afford his services so, being a lover of craft beer, he would donate his services to us for free. I’ m sure many of you are thinking that being a professional beer taster sounds like a dream job, but he works very hard at his job and he really made us work at this seminar. He lined up samples of beer in front of us that had been dosed with the common off flavors that we brewers need to recognize and avoid in our beers. First of all, however, he wanted to drive home one important thing: our tongues can only perceive sweet, bitter, salty, and sour. The rest of the flavors we taste come from our sense of smell. To do this we performed an experiment that I recommend you to do as well. He handed each of us individually wrapped breath mints and instructed us to keep our noses held while opening them and putting them in our mouths. All we could taste was sweet. No mint flavors whatsoever. We were then instructed to let go of our noses. Shocked gasps shot through the room. It was like being punched in the face with mint! We all knew through instruction and experience how important our noses were to tasting our beers. What this experiment did is give us a real visceral understanding of that fact. Malt, hops, and yeast all produce distinctive aromas in beer and they each play a part in the perceived flavors we experience.
Malted barley is the beer grain, you can make beer without it but it is difficult, costly, and, most of the time, not as tasty( there are a few exceptions). It’ s a fat grain with a lot of starch content. That starch is easily converted into sugar by the natural enzymes present in the grain during the mashing process. Malt aromas are going to be a combination of starchy and sugary depending on the types of malts used. Yeast are very picky about what sugars they will and won’ t eat. The sugars they don’ t eat, residual sugars, are left behind in the beer adding flavor and aroma. Brewers take advantage of this by using“ flavor malts” or“ specialty malts” that were designed just to add flavor and aroma, not alcohol. A lot of the aromas we get from malt are the same we get from bread. Toast, biscuit, cracker-like flavors come
from the starchy side of the grain. German helles, a pale lager with very little residual sugars, should have the aroma of freshly baked bread. Sweet fruit and candy-like aromas come from malt as well. Those tasty sugars leave caramel, nuts, raison, chocolate, and coffee aromas. American amber and Irish red ales have deep caramel aromas. English brown ales are very nutty, while American brown ales are chocolaty. German dark lagers and dark Belgian ales are loaded with raison, plumb, date, and fig aromas, and it’ s no surprise that porters and stouts smell like coffee, the black malts in those recipes are roasted the same way coffee beans are.
28 WINTER EDITION 2026