Beer Tasting with DeskBeers
So your awesome DeskBeers craft beer boxes have landed in your office, and everybody’s ready to get stuck in. Much of the time, drinking them is a straightforward enough business; but maybe, now and again, you’d like to line ’em up and drink them like the professionals do —in the form of a proper beer tasting. This is also a great way of working out your workplace’s beer preferences.
Here is the DeskBeers guide to running a beer tasting session in your workplace. We’re basing it on a selection of 6 different beers, but you can do it for any number.
For most accurate results, take a minute to put together a scoring card for everybody taking part. This is simply a list of each beer, with columns next to them for a ranking point, and any notes you might want to add (as per the image below).
You’re going to try each beer and rank them 1 to 6 on your scoring cards, where 1 = MOST PREFERRED and 6 = LEAST PREFERRED. Everyone should fill in their own card with their own preferences. You can then aggregate these scores, using basic arithmetic, giving you an average score for each beer.
To begin, arrange the beers, broadly speaking, lightest to darkest and weakest to strongest. This is important, because beers of greater strength, colour and intensity have a correspondingly greater effect on the palate. If a strong, dark beer were tried before a weaker, lighter one, the flavours of the former would occlude or impair those of the latter. A small enough problem in the grand scheme of things, admittedly, but it does kind of defeat the object of a beer tasting.
No matter how many different beers you’re tasting, we’d recommend pouring about ⅙ of a beer for the tasting session. ⅙ of a 330ml bottle or can is more than enough to taste, but not so much as to overwhelm. So, start at your first beer and get pouring!
Tasting a beer properly is quite straightforward. The thing we’d really emphasize is that so much of it is about the smell. Take three short sniffs (get your nose right in there) and think about the aromas you can detect. Is it floral? Grassy? Bready? Now, taste the beer. Does the taste confirm the aromas of the beer? Taking your time with this is important: it intensifies a process called retronasal olfaction, which is the scientific name for how the detail of our perception of a drink’s or foodstuff’s ‘flavour’ is largely driven by our sense of smell. For a more detailed breakdown of beer tasting technique, watch this video:
What did you think? How did it compare to the last beer you tried? Make notes (perhaps on the back of your scorecard or in the convenient middle column you had the forethought to prepare), and think about where it fits in your personal ranking.
At the end of the session, make sure everyone has ranked each beer (it’s OK to disagree) and collect up the results. Work out an average score for each beer, and voilà — you have just completed a successful beer tasting! If you’d like to analyze your results in a little more detail, you can take the following approach:
Work out the maximum possible score for a beer by multiplying the number of beers being tasted by the number of participants. Deduct from that maximum the total numerical rating of a given beer. Divide this number by the maximum possible score, and multiply it by 100 to give the aggregate preference of this beer in the form of a percentage — the higher the percentage, the greater the aggregate preference. Repeat for the remaining beers, and be excellent at parties for the rest of your days!
A beer tasting is great for finding out about the beer you and your friends like, and it’s also brilliant for learning how to talk about the beer you’re drinking in informed and specific terms. But most of all, it’s an excuse to rack up a few beers at the end of a long day.
