Beer Tasting Review: Kinda Fun, Still Weird

A College Drinker Review:

 

To pregame last weekend, the CD staff did something a little out of character. We found ourselves in possession of a beer tasting kit from Tasteyourbeer.com. As College Drinkers, we doubted that our pallets were refined enough to fully appreciate this, but naturally we had to give it a try. To prepare, we got as wide a variety of beers as possible, cleared our schedules for the rest of the night, and opened up the box.

This “Beer Tasting and Hop Appreciation Kit” they sent us contained a booklet on the taste of beer, a beer color chart (fun), and about 13 little jars of hops. I’ve never seen hops before, but apparently it’s what beer is made from, so that makes it OK in my book. Basically what we were supposed to do is drink some beer, smell some hops, then sit back and enjoy the enhanced flavor. Ok, why not? We knew that Sam Adam’s was made with the hop Hallertauer, so we started with some Boston Lager.

1^st Beer – 9:47 pm

• Name: Sam Adam’s Boston Lager
• Color: 10-12
• Smell: beer?
• Taste: Harder, better, faster, stronger
• Hops: Hallertauer

Drink, smell, contemplate. Yeah, um, I guess I can taste a difference? We had to test it out, so we blindfolded a friend to see if he could pick out the right hops from like five choices. He was close, but wrong. We decided that we’re definitely not refined enough to appreciate the finer qualities of taste. We did however appreciate the Sam Adam’s, and decided we should finish our entire beer to analyze the taste diligently.

 

This beer tasting kit, while probably not intended for the College Drinker, sparked a pretty fun beer tasting event. We are so used to drinking mass quantities of the same beer, it was kinda cool to have a bunch of different types to exercise our taste buds. Soon enough we were on our third beer, Carlsberg. No one knew which hop this beer was made with, and wikipedia was no help. By this time we were pretty confident in our hops-smelling-and-beer-tasting abilities, and believed we could find the right one. But, inevitably, someone spilled a beer around this time, and all the labels got wet and rubbed off. So, we no longer had any idea what it was we were smelling, but it started to matter less and less. If you’ve never smelled hops before, I recommend trying it. It’s a pretty unique smell.

Long story short, the Beer Tasting and Hop Appreciation Kit is a little bit beyond the scope of our collegiate-level drinking, but it made for a fun night. And I do recommend tasting lots of different beers. Because the more types of beer you drink, the more type of beer you’ll have drunk.

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