Throw out your drinking conventions

Convention dictates that when tasting beers we go from dainty lagers and lighter golden ales on to maybe sours and saisons, before moving on to more hoppy brews and darker beers. And then finally ending on the hoppiest double IPAs or the richest, blackest imperial Russian stouts.

Not in my house thank-you. Yes, rules are there to be broken, but only if it really makes sense. And I’ve come to the conclusion that it makes sense in the beer world to ditch the out-dated tasting-order convention.

It’s relevant for wine because once you’re deep into the reds then the tannins make it tough to then get any value out of drinking whites. But this is beer and it doesn’t work like that. Well, not in my opinion anyway. It’s possible to seamlessly go back and forth across myriad styles.

This interchange makes so much sense because by breaking up the conventional tasting ladder it’s possible to more fully appreciate the different styles of beer – with it working most effectively when drinking contrasting beers side-by-side.

Switching back and forth across pairs of beers does not nullify nor balance out the flavours but rather it accentuates the profile of both beers. Taking a few sips of a sour and then dropping  into a sweeter rich milk stout or a Belgian Quad say, highlights each flavour more intensely.

Some might view mixing richly unique and individual beers as almost sacrilegious to but I’d say just give it a go.

It’s pretty much the same principal as the accepted convention of employing palate-cleansing beers. Switching out to a lighter beer after some intensely hoppy brews can help to reset the clock before heading back in there again to do battle with more IPAs. Rather than waiting until your olfactory sensors are almost busted out before you take the palate cleanser why not keep on doing it continuously during a tasting.

Nothing has been personally more revelatory on my co-tasting journey than an evening in London’s Old Coffee House drinking a Brodie’s London Sour (3.8%) alongside a Brodie’s Mocha Coffee Milk Stout (9.8%). The sour was akin to sipping the vinegar out of a jar of shallots, so to marry this up with the smooth, sweet, fatty mouthfeel of the milk stout gave a gloriously contrasting tasting that I’m unlikely to forget easily.

For all the naysayers out there – and the hostages to convention – I’d recommend living a little and throwing out the accepted world order. Enlighten your taste-buds. There might just be a chance it will change the way you drink beer and hopefully appreciate more fully its many and varied nuances.