How to Speak Beer Geek

The American beerscape has changed for the better. Now, learn to navigate it.



Here’s a trick question. What is the best place in the world right now to drink beer, based on range of styles available, number of brands available, and, most important, taste?

Germany? No.

Great Britain? No.

Belgium, where all those monks make beer? Good guess, but wrong again.

It’s right here in the good ole U.S.A.

“Impossible!” cry certain kinds of people, mostly European (or worse, Australian or Canadian) beer snobs oblivious to the beer revolution that has taken place in America over the last quarter century. Since the early 1980s, when we were down to three main national brands (Bud, Miller, and Coors) and a few dozen regional beer makers, beer has made a remarkable comeback.

This is mostly thanks to “craft beer” makers operating small-production brewpubs or microbreweries, who started brewing beer for palates that had grown weary of the homogenized stuff that big beer makers were turning out. Today, 1,436 breweries (including brewpubs) populate the American beerscape, producing an astonishing array of beer styles and choices.

True, many of these breweries have only local or regional distribution. But beers from a growing number of the top 50 craft brewers—Boston Beer Co. (maker of Sam Adams) and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. among them—are available nationally or pan-regionally. And anyone really serious about beer could travel the length and breadth of America for a year and still not make much of a dent in the nation’s continually growing beer list. (I know, because I tried this.) Just do some simple math. Let’s say that each of the 1,436 breweries (or brewpubs) offers an average of six beers (and I think that’s conservative). That’s edging up toward 9,000 beers to choose from.

So, you’re a Bud drinker (or a repentant European beer snob) shocked by these revelations? Don’t be alarmed. You can join the enlightened beer conversation, and the fun, simply by learning a few new-beer fundamentals and asking some intelligent questions. You might even become a “beer geek,” as craft-beer aficionados self-deprecatingly refer to themselves.

First thing to know: Beer is made using a simple recipe of water, malt (usually kilned barley), yeast, and hops. But the great river of beer divides into two streams: lager and ale.

Bud is lager. So is Coors, so is Miller, so is Heineken, so is Corona.

Guinness is ale. So is Bass. So is Sam Adams Honey Porter and Sierra Nevada.

What’s the difference between lager and ale? And what about pilsner? On the flavor front, consider this music analogy: Lager is like smooth jazz and Top 40 and, now and then, great classical music; ale is funk, salsa, even heavy metal. Pilsner is simply a style of lager originating in the Pilsen area of the Czech Republic.

As for where the flavor originates, it basically comes down to yeast.

Ale is the world’s original beer, brewed by pharaoh and Pilgrim alike. It’s the beer of Shakespeare and the British pub; the beer beloved by Ben Franklin. It’s also the favorite style of modern American craft brewers. The very first ale was no doubt brewed accidentally in some lost millennium when free-ranging yeast “spoiled” a batch of grain that some hunter-gatherer had left soaking in water. It wouldn’t have tasted like much but, ah, the buzz.

Ale yeast’s main virtue is that it ferments at room temperature—so, ale can be made almost anyplace. The yeast does its work at the top of fermentation tanks, gobbling up sugars and throwing off byproducts, notably alcohol but also some earthy, fruity compounds. It is less ravenous than lager yeast, and leaves behind more fermentable sugars. Thus, ales can taste quite complex—too complex for some palates.

Lager, meanwhile, didn’t commercially exist until the early 1840s, but now it rules the world. About 95 percent of all beer consumed on earth is lager.

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