Sundown 4.3% Rich Golden
Our June seasonal is Sundown, an easy-drinking ale with a balance of berry hop and caramel malt flavours. With very low bitterness, it’s designed to be sessionable – for those times around the campfire or barbeque when you want something that tastes good but that doesn’t require a lot of analysis when you could be talking to friends.
But what if you do want to go a little bit more in depth on what you can taste in a beer? I started really trying to think about the specific flavours in what I was drinking towards the end of 2018 when I first started working in a bar. The ability to identify flavours is something you can improve with practice, so I spent the first six months or so at a very basic level, just deciding whether I thought each beer was bitter or sweet, and whether the dominant flavours were coming from the malt, hops or yeast. The good thing is this is usually fairly style dependent, so even if you’re not sure what ‘hoppy’ actually tastes like for example, trying a range of IPAs and pale ales should give you a rough idea of what to look for.
Once you’re comfortable with the simple labels, you can start to drill down into them a bit more. ‘Malty’ could mean a cereal character like cornflakes; sweeter caramel-like flavours; or a more toasty or roasted note. You can go even further than that if you want to – is the sweetness more like soft caramel or intense molasses? Does the roast flavour remind you more of chocolate or coffee? There are flavour wheels available online (just search beer flavour wheel) which can help with all this – start in the middle identifying the simple characteristics, and then they give you options to narrow it down from there.
Something it’s important to consider with taste is that it’s subjective. A good example of this is when I recently brought in a smoked beer for my colleagues to try. The flavour of that beer reminds me of woodsmoke from campfires at festivals, but around the table we had suggestions of bacon, smoked cheese, and slightly less charitably, an ashtray! Where your mind goes when you taste something can have a big impact on both what you think it tastes like and consequentially whether you enjoy it.
People are also quite suggestible when it comes to taste – writing on a beer that it tastes of orange and apricot can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as people look for those flavours. I usually try to work out what I think something tastes like before looking at the description – sometimes it’s pretty similar, sometimes it feels like me and whoever wrote the blurb were drinking two completely different things!
I guess the last question when it comes to tasting beer like this is: why bother? For me there are two reasons. Firstly, stopping to think often means I actually enjoy the beer more, instead of getting back to my table, talking to friends for twenty minutes and then wondering where it’s gone! The second reason is professional curiosity – by trying to work out how other people have created flavours that I enjoy, I might be able to emulate them and improve my own beer. Ultimately though, whether you’re paying close attention or it’s just an accompaniment to your main focus, the most important thing is to drink in whichever way you enjoy most – that’s what it’s there for!
