Craft Beer Guide

Transcript I’m Catherine Kyle, the general manager of the Blank Tiger here in the West Village of Manhattan where we have been serving craft beer since 1996. I started working with craft beer in 2000. It was a job that I stumbled into but I quickly became a passion. First of all, I found it absolutely …

Transcript For most of time, most beers produced have been produced with the intention of drinking them fairly quickly after they are done brewing. There are some beers however that have been aged in their process and they are specifically the Belgian Lambics. Now recently there has been a lot more interest in aging beer. …

Transcript Does beer go bad? In a short answer yes. But the answer is a bit more nuanced. Beer loses it’s freshness, beer loses so many aspects that make it delicious as time goes on in general. And that is going to be true for your Hopi Beers and many very delicate beers, you want …

Transcript First thing to remember is that beer is a live product, so you wanna think of it more like milk and less like a can of seltzer water. In that, you know, wanna keep, keep it at a constant, cool temperature. You wanna use it when it’s fresh. You don’t wanna, you know, you …

Transcript We are extremely lucky to be living in, what I consider to be, the Golden Age of beer. As a result, there as so many awesome breweries that I want to tell you about. We’re going to start off with some of the stallwoods. Firestone Walker, Green Flash, Lagunitas, Brooklyn, Peekskill. If you get …

Transcript Beer festivals are as varied as are the types of brewers anywhere. you can find ones that are put on by, you know a single brewery, but usually if they’re calling it a beer festival you’re gonna have access to, you know many other brewers to try as well. These can range from you …

Transcript A lot of breweries will offer tours and they are really fun things to do. Most of them will take you through at least part of the facility itself so you can get of, not quite a hands on idea of how to brew, but at least a real good visual idea. You’ll see …

Transcript Beer tourism is something that is building and building. For a long time people would make the trek to Belgium to see the traditional Belgian breweries and I really encourage that if you’re able to do so. Also, people will go to Germany to see traditional German breweries and England to see the traditional …

Transcript In general you’re looking for a common experience and flavor and style. I would suggest that you choose your cheese first because there’s a lot more variety, I guess, you know, in terms of the cheeses. So once you have your cheese, your you then want to think about wha-what what might need that? …

Transcript There is a very versatile beverage for pairing, some think even more so than wine. I, myself think so. There are different principles that can be used when deciding which beers to pair with which foods, one of them is complimenting, where you want to compliment a certain flavor in the food with a …

Transcript Gluten free beer is beer that is brewed with sorghum, buckwheat, or millet. Usually one of those three things, or a mixture, is what would be used in gluten free beer instead of the barely. And brewers do this to accommodate people who have a gluten intolerance. And it’s a real challenge because the …

Transcript Nitrogen beers are beers that use a larger percentage of nitrogen in the carbonation process. The ratio is usually around 70 percent nitrogen to 30 percent carbon dioxide and those are the gases that actually carbonate the beer when they come out the draft. Nitrogen beer is most closely associated with the dry Irish stout …

Transcript Cask ales are unfiltered and unpasteurized ales that are designed to undergo a secondary fermentation in the cask, which will produce some natural carbonation. A lot of people refer to them as real ales because the carbonation comes form inside the beer itself instead of being forced into it from a gas system, which …

Transcript Coffee is a flavor that, as you would imagine, would go really well with the roasted or slightly bitter flavors of a porter or stout, but you can really use coffee in a wide variety of beers. There’s been lately a few coffee IPAs on the market that are stunningly delicious. So I found …

Transcript Brewers can coat? like some chocolate-like flavors out of roasting the malt. There’s even a variety of malt called chocolate malt because of it’s chocolate-like properties that it can lend to the beer. But also a lot of brewers will put actual chocolate, work the cow into the brewing process in order to get a …

Transcript As with many things in the craft brewing community, there are many differences of opinion about what exactly a session beer is. But, to my mind, and many people will agree, a session beer is a beer that you can have multiple beers of, and that really encompasses two aspects. Number 1, it needs …

Transcript A typical example of a Belgian strong ale is the tripel. A tripel is going to be light golden in color, it’s going to be extremely high in alcohol, but it does not taste like it. Another type of strong ale is the Belgian golden ale. It’s a lot like the tripel, except it’s …

Transcript In terms of an actual style of beer, the Bamberger Rauchbier is your truest example. It’s a lager made with malt that has been smoked over well-seasoned beech wood. In terms of what’s happening today in the craft brew world, many different brewers are experimenting with smoke and smoke malt is available, also a lot …

Transcript Barrel aging and craft beer is usually done for 1 of 2 reasons. One is to extract some flavour properties from the wood or the liquid that was in the barrel previously. The other is to encourage the growth of microflora which might add a souring aspect to the beer. The most common barrels …

Transcript Fruit beers are beers that have fruit added to them during the brewing process, it’s pretty straightforward, but when you think about what fruit actually adds, if you do it you know during the fermentation process, if that’s when you add the beer, it’s gonna give the, the beer more sugars to ferment, so …

Transcript Belgium as a region held onto a wide range of their ancient brewing techniques. There are many things that set Belgian beers apart from other beers. The first primary reason is their yeast. Over the years their yeast really developed into something very distinct and special. Belgian beers can also be slightly spiced. You …

Transcript Sour beers is another style of beers that are increasing in popularity. Although they tend to be very, very hard to grasp if you don’t have a particular like for it. I remember the first time I tried a sour beer. You know, I took a sip and put it down and my mouth …

Transcript Wheat beers are beers that substitute wheat for part of the cereal. So you’ll have, you know, your normal ingredients of beer, your water, hops, you know, your barley and your yeast, but you’ll also have, you know, some of that barley taken out and replaced with wheat. They’re going to be pale, fruity, …

Transcript IPAs came about when the English brewers were beginning to sen their pale ales over to the English people that were colonizing India, and what happened is that they knew that hops was a preservative and they thought maybe the beer would last longer and actually make the voyage all the way to India, …

Transcript Stouts are an extra dark, multi-beer that are made basically by roasting the malts. That’s how you get the dark, roasty character, traditional in stouts. There are many different kinds of stouts. Some of which include wheat stout or the milk stout. That actually has lactose in it. That’s where the name milk stout …

Transcript Porters are more substantial than a brown. They were for many years just the traditional beer that produced in England and also exported from England to different parts of the world, so for a long time, you know, porter was sort of your standard beer in certain times and regions. Your normal porter, it’s …

Transcript You can tell by the name that it is an ale that uses the ale yeast. It’s kind of a broad category. It can go anywhere from the English ales, such as an ESB, extra special bitter, but really, you know, it starts out with the bitter itself, which is a, you know, quite …

Transcript Hybrid beers are beers that have characteristics of both ales and lagers. Some people say that a beer is strictly defined by the yeast that is used, but there are also brewing techniques that have come to be associated with each of those yeasts. So some examples of hybrid beers are the cream ale. …

Transcript Bock beers are a traditional style of beer that originated in Germany. They can range from the Maibock or the Helles Bock, which tends to be pale, malty. It’s made with a lager yeast so, again, those flavors come out very clean. Then you get to the next step which would probably be called …

Transcript Dark loggers use, obviously, the logger yeast. It may have a bit of darker malt use. So, you might start with, you know, a little bit of the caramelly malt that comes from roasting the malt. And, you know, you can go from , you know, a little bit dark to about medium dark, which …

Transcript Pilsners originated in the town of Plzeň in the Czech Republic. There’s a lot of lore around this, but what essentially happened is that the citizens of the town dumped a whole batch of beer because the quality was so poor. And that made the townspeople come together to build a state-of-the-art brewery. They …

Transcript The difference between a lager and an ale really comes down to the yeast used. An ale yeast is a top fermenting yeast that can ferment at higher temperatures and is a faster process. A lager yeast is a bottom fermenting yeast that requires colder temperatures and a longer process. The word lager comes …

Transcript A beer’s style generally describes the origin and character of the beer. Over years, many different beers evolved in many different locations and came to be called certain things. And when they were called that they had certain attributes that were given in that style of beer. Some styles have come to be sort …

Transcript The glass provides your initial aesthetic about the beer. If you’re served a beer in a glass like this you’re going to have different expectations than if you’re served a glass of beer in a glass like this.  Part of it is, you’re going to have your more, what we consider “basic beer” served …

Transcript How to taste beer. The first thing you want to do when you taste your beer is to get it in your glass, give it a little smell. Swirl it around, because what you’re trying to do with that is you’re trying to release the aromatics. And it’s going to give you a good …

Transcript How to pour beer. The first and most important thing is to use a clean glass. The technique is actually the same if you’re pouring from a bottle or pouring draft beer. I’m going to illustrate how to pour a draft beer right here. First you take your glass, and you want it at …

Transcript Well, if you walk into a craft beer bar, one of the first things that you’re gonna wanna do is to locate the beer list and on that beer list you’re gonna look for a section that says style and, hopefully at this point, you’re a little bit familiar with styles of beer that …

Transcript The history of beer is as long and varied as the history of civilization. When human beings stopped hunting and gathering and began to settle to raise grain, that’s also about the same time that they started drinking fermented beverages, which loosely can be defined as beer or ale. Some people really do believe …

Transcript So what are the ingredients in beer? Beer is generally understood to be beverage comprised of Barley, hops, water and yeast. However, there are many things can be substituted in the cereal side of things. So, along with your Barley you might have some wheat or you might have rye or you might substitute …

Transcript So why drink craft beer? First of all because it’s delicious. It’s really fun for me to see people have their first craft beer when they’re used to drinking you know, large sort of anonymously produced beer. The first thing they always say to me is wow this is really good. It’s very flavorful. …

Transcript What is craft beer? Craft beer is produced by craft brewers who are generally independent brewers. They tend to be smaller. Some people have specific definitions about their sizes but just think of them as smaller breweries. They’re owned by primarily themselves, the people who are making, producing the beer, bringing the product to …

Transcript How to throw a beer tasting party: There are few different ways you can go with this. One popular thing to do is get many different beers of many different styles. Have everyone who’s coming to the party bring something that they really like where that they want to share or that they’ve never …