Dispelling the Most Common Misconceptions of Beer Drinkers
By: Chris Ashby
Tags: Culture, Drinks, Craft Beer, Beer, Drinking

So let’s get it out of the way right off the bat. YES I am a craft nerd, YES I work for a craft brewery, YES I do have a beard, YES I do love me a super foggy New England IPA (dry-hopped out the wazoo), and NO I do not have any tattoos, or plan to ever get any.

Ok good. Now we can carry on.

(If you‘re confused about that New England thing I mentioned, don’t worry, I’ll cover that later.)

So for those of you reading, beer geek or craft newbie, casual drinker or hop-head extraordinaire, here are some of the most common misconceptions of beer drinkers all over the world, and why they aren’t true.

Misconception #1: Dark beer is bitter

2 words for you.

Milk Stout.

Milk Stouts are brewed with lactose added during brewing, aka: milk sugar. The milk sugar balances the bitterness from the malt and hops to make an overall sweeter, smoother beer. Milk stouts are often creamy, and can taste like chocolate, praline, or even have a nutty flavour.

Case in point: dark beer does not always equate to bitter beer. Dark beer simply relates to the colour of the malt used in the brew. Generally the darker the roast of the malt, the darker the beer. This can make a more bitter beer, but that often isn’t the case.

Just as coffee pairs well with sugar, caramel, toffee, hazelnut, vanilla and even chocolate or fruit, so does dark beer!

In fact, it’s useful to think of coffee as a good analogy here.

As in coffee, with brewing beer we look to balance sweetness and bitterness, to create something that is enjoyable. Some beers lean one way, some lean the other.

In the process of brewing, we want to balance sugar extracted from the malt in mashing, with the bitterness imparted from either the level of malt roast or the hops added to the boil.

The second part of this is adjuncts. Let me explain.

An adjunct is simply anything added to the beer that is not one of the fundamental ingredients, ie: malt, yeast, water, and hops.

Lactose is an adjunct yes, but there is far more to adjuncts than meets the eye, and far more to dark beer than just the malt.

Adjuncts add a different flavour, aroma or complexion to beer. For dark beer that could be cocoa nibs, for a chocolatey flavour. It could be coffee, to make it more bitter. Or it could be something as crazy as fresh raspberry. One of the biggest and most successful craft brewers in the world: BrewDog, recently released a sour stout, fermented on raspberries and brewed with cocoa nibs. It tasted like nothing I had ever tasted before, not necessarily my style, but delicious nonetheless…

Misconception #2: Dark beer is strong

The darker the beer, the stronger it is, right?

It makes logical sense, but unfortunately it’s not as easy as a dulux colour chart to decipher beer strength.

Case in point: Guinness.

It’s not a craft brew sure, but it is dark. And it’s only 4.1–4.3% ABV.

On the flip side, you can also get light beer that is incredibly strong. Cloudwater just brewed a 12% Quadruple IPA. Light coloured, and dry hopped like a beast, it certainly is strong, and it certainly is not dark.

Or perhaps this misconception is actually just that ‘dark beer tastes strong.’ In a kind of, ‘don’t drink this as a session beer,’ or ‘one of these is more than enough,’ way.

Well prepare to have your minds melted and brains blown again. No sarcasm of course.

There is something called a black lager. It is black. It is a lager.

Crispy, delicious, slightly roasty, thirst-quenchingly dry and ultimately: sessionable. Beer misconception no more!

Misconception #3: Clear beer = good beer

In the days of yore (ah, yore, how we miss you so), people who drank beer would attribute the quality of beer often to how clear it was.

Beer stored in cask would have finings added (like isinglass), which in non-technical terms, just kind of clumped together all the yeast left in the beer at the bottom of the cask, keeping it clear, and stopping the yeast from ending up in a punters glass. Mmm, yeast.

So naturally, if you got a hazy beer, it must have meant it was bad, or at least, full of old fish guts (thats basically what isinglass is, gross).

The thing is though, there are actually A: plenty of beer styles that are now much more accessible (shout out to better beer transportation, logistics and beer shipping methods), and are supposed to be cloudy, and B: the cloudiness attributed to certain styles of beer is often a sign of good rather than bad. Cloudiness happens for many other reasons than just having old bits of fish floating around in it.

Example 1: German Hefeweizen has all the yeast left in it after it is brewed. When serving it, that same yeast that has settled to the bottom of the bottle is served with the beer. That’s the style. And why not, it tastes delicious, and nobody gets ill from delicious beer (unless you’ve had too much).

Example 2: New England IPAs are brewed with adjuncts like flaked oats, and usually a sack load of hops that makes the beer naturally hazy. The haze is inherent through the method of brewing. For a New England IPA to not be cloudy means it would have probably been brewed incorrectly.

Misconception #4: Hoppy beer is bitter

We are told hops add bitterness. Seems simple to understand.

This isn’t always true though. Sure, some hoppy beers are bitter, American Double IPAs for example, are brewed with a tonne of hops, and they can also be bitter beer bombs that blast your tastebuds to hell and back.

What adds the bitterness to hoppy beers though is not the amount of hops, but when they are added to the boil during brewing.

If you add hops at the beginning of the boil, it adds bitterness. If you add hops at the end of the boil, it adds flavour and aroma. If you add hops after the boil, that is called dry-hopping, and it adds hop flavour and aroma out the wazoo. Dry hopping is a beautiful thing.

So, it seems logical to that point that a beer could be super hoppy, but have almost no bitterness at all, if all the hops were added at the end of the boil and during fermentation. Which is true. Or a moderately hoppy beer could be very bitter, IF the hops were all added at the start of the boil. Also true.

Simple. Sort of.

Misconception #5: All lager is commercial tat

Correction, a lot of widely available commercial lager is tat.

Ok that’s better.

Commercial lager is often brewed with corn or rice instead of malt because well, it’s cheaper, and it ferments to alcohol. Nice one. Economic success! Way to make more money and be good at capitalism. Pat on the back you.

Problem is, it also adds practically no flavour to the beer. Boo! Flavour failure. My tastebuds are sad.

Lager as a style was made popular by big commercial breweries using rice and corn to brew, but originated from the Pilsner style of lager made famous in the Czech (Pilsen to be precise).

Pilsners are lagers, but fruity, a little spicy, complex, dry, and crisp as a crisp linen shirt, freshly ironed to a crisp.

Crispy.

Outside of commercial lager though, plenty of craft breweries are also now brewing super summery, deliciously dry and thirst-quenching crispy boi lagers that are all kinds of good. Tastebud excitement! Rice and corn begone.

So yes, lager is good, you just need to look for the right ones…

Misconception #6: Sour beer is not proper beer

I get it, it looks like it’s not beer, and it tastes like a tart raspberry smoothie, how can it be beer.

Well it is. That’s kind of it. It’s a fact.

Sour beer is brewed using the same process as regular beer, bar a few small alterations.

The first difference is that it is fermented with wild yeast rather than regular ale or lager yeast, and that wild yeast give the sour beer it’s funky tart, farmy, tangy flavours. Those wild yeast need time to develop as well, which means sour beers take much longer to ferment.

The second difference is that sour beer is also often fermented in barrels instead of big metal fermenting tanks, giving them whisky, oaky, smokey or loads of other flavours depending on the barrel used.

Malt, water, hops and yeast are all present. Brewed like a beer. It is beer. It just tastes different.

Misconception #7: Beer tastes better from a bottle

That boy needs therapy, psychosomatic.

Wise words from the frontier psychiatrist.

Basically this is all in your head. It’s a psychological fallacy. In actual fact, because, well… science, it’s easier to keep beer fresh and tasting better in a can.

The seal on a can is better, meaning less oxygenation (oxygen makes beer go off and taste like wet cardboard), and the can is more opaque than a bottle, meaning less chance of the beer being exposed to UV (UV damages hop compounds making the beer taste like weed).

Plus it means there’s more surface area for those super dope hipster beer labels we all love right?

Right?

I know it’s not what you want to hear, I get it. Your mind is tricking you.

There is a slight caveat to this, in that bottles actually are a better way to store very certain types of beer, but for the most part, can is superior in every way. Science tells us that, and I’m not one to argue with science.

Which leads me nicely on to…

Misconception #8: Bottle colour doesn’t matter

Remember that thing I said about UV being damaging to hop compounds, well, here’s how that can be avoided as much as possible when buying bottles.

Generally, if you buy bottled beer, buy beer in brown bottles.

Brown bottles exclude almost 100% of UV (not quite, see previous misconception), and so have the most chance of keeping the beer tasting as it was intended, out of any bottle colour.

Green is ok, but still pretty bad, letting in the majority of UV light. Generally avoid green bottles unless you are looking for a specific style that is suited to green bottles (see below).

Clear bottles are just the worst. They let in 100% of UV, and give the beer no protection against lightstrike (the technical name for UV damage to hop content in beer).

You can tell a beer that has been lightstruck because it smells like weed, hence the term ‘skunking’ that is used to describe lightstruck beer. It is rumoured a particularly famous beer served in a clear bottle uses the slices of lime they are served with purely as a way of masking the ‘skunky’ smell of the usually lightstruck beer they sell. You didn’t hear it from me.

There is a slight flaw to this misconception though. Bottle colour does matter, but you don’t always have to make sure you only buy beer in brown bottles.

Certain styles of farmhouse ales, and traditional saisons, can actually become more complex and interesting when partially skunked. The skunked flavour actually adds a pleasant flavour to that style of beer.

It pays to match the bottle colour to the style of beer. For hoppy IPAs, sure, go for brown. For funky farmhouse sours and some traditional European styles though, green bottles might add that little extra something you weren’t quite expecting.