Beer talk used to be simple. You drank your favorite brew because it tasted great and was less filling. Or maybe it came from the land of sky-blue waters. Then along came a raft of homebrewers and microbrewers with terms like “dry-hop” and “bung,” which sound like words that don’t belong in a family newspaper.
Misuse of this beerspeak will quickly telegraph your ignorance to upstanding members of the beer subculture. Say “vat” instead of “tank” and you’re instantly branded an outsider. That’s not altogether a bad thing: Start spouting the argot too expertly and your friends will brand you a beer geek, which renders you fit company only for others similarly afflicted.
(The Real Ale Festival March 2-3 will give you a chance to test your wings, or observe beer geeks in their natural habitat; see accompanying box.)
Basic beer terms aren’t that difficult. Let’s start with ingredients and their role in the brewhouse.
The trinity, plus one
Beer is made from malt, hops and water. The malt is mashed to produce fermentable wort, to which yeast is added to ensure fermentation. When the yeast is done, you have beer. That’s a pretty impressive feat for a pack of single-cell organisms that don’t even drink.
Brewers routinely tout their pristine water sources, but the fact is that they can take pretty much any water and alter it to suit their needs. How else could they make Budweiser taste exactly the same from coast to coast?
Beer is made primarily from malted grains, mostly barley, sometimes wheat, and occasionally other grains. Malting consists of letting grain sprout, then drying it and sometimes roasting it for additional color and flavor. This unlocks enzymes that turn the grain’s starches into sugars when mashed. Which brings us to our next word.
Mashing has nothing to do with the singles scene, except possibly in a brewpub toward closing time. Mashing is the soaking of malted grain in hot water, activating enzymes that transform the grain’s starches to sugars.
Once that happens, brewers drain off the sugary liquid, or wort. Now there’s a word, and it rhymes with “dirt,” by the way. Wort is fermented to produce beer.
Fresh from the vine
Hops are vines that grow (rapidly) up to 18 feet tall. Brewers add the green hop flower, or cone, to the boiling wort, where it acts as a preservative, its original role in brewing history. But hops also give the beer bitterness and floral, herbal, spicy or vegetal aromas and flavors, depending on the variety. They also have great names like Fuggles (typically used in English ales), Chinook (a very bitter hop) and Tettnanger. Hops give a classic pilsner its spicy flavor and an India pale ale its bracing bitterness.
Most hops come from Germany, the Czech Republic, England, and Washington and Oregon in the U.S.
Dry hopping is actually less vigorous but more aesthetic: It’s the practice of adding fresh hops to beer in the fermenter, giving it a heady hop aroma, such as you’ll find in Anchor Liberty Ale. Hops must be boiled to release their bitterness, but this process drives off hop aroma. Dry hopping brings it back, and then some.
Original gravity (OG): Winemakers measure “potential alcohol,” the amount that a given sugary solution is capable of achieving, with a number called “brix.” Similarly, brewers determine the specific gravity–the beer’s density relative to water–before fermentation.
Before fermentation, beer wort contains fermentable and non-fermentable sugars that cause it to be denser than water. The beer’s density decreases as sugars are converted into relatively light alcohol. An average beer with 5 percent alcohol by volume will have an original gravity of about 1.05, while a barley wine with twice the alcohol might clock in at 1.10. The original gravity can be used to predict a beer’s alcohol content, but not exactly, because the brewer can control the ratio of fermentable and non-fermentable sugars, and hence the beer’s body and alcohol content.
Attenuation: This figure quantifies the completeness of fermentation. A thoroughly fermented beer will be crisp, dry and lean. Brewers talk about actual numbers when discussing attenuation, but lay people can get by with saying a beer is “well attenuated” if it has a clean, crisp body, or “under-attenuated” if we believe it’s flabby.
Microbrew: Twenty years ago microbreweries were truly micro. But companies like the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. left the garage long ago. In 1999 Sierra Nevada cranked out 436,000 barrels–more than 100 million pints–but is still considered a microbrewer. These days a microbrew reflects a style, a state of mind, more than a specific size. It’s even possible for one company to make microbrews alongside products aimed at the mainstream. For example, the Boston Beer Co.’s Samuel Adams Boston Lager certainly fits the definition of microbrew, while its BoDEAN’s Twisted Tea (lemon-flavored, alcoholic tea) definitely does not.
Barrel: In the United States a barrel of beer is 31 gallons. But you can’t buy beer by the barrel. A large keg of beer is a half-barrel (or a bit less if it’s a metric keg) and the smaller ones are quarter-barrels. Walk into the liquor store and order a “full keg” and you’ll surely be the subject of gales of laughter in the backroom.
That should get you started. For further study, you could consult The Dictionary of Beer & Brewing (Brewers Publications, 1998, $15.95). But hey, this writer learned it on the street, and it’s working for him.
Hop head lexicon
A hop head, in beer circles, is a brewer (or drinker) infatuated with the aromatic and flavoring possibilities of hops, often to excess. Here’s some more jargon to fling around. But don’t spill.
Belgian lace: The lacelike pattern left in the glass as the level of beer goes down.
Bride ale: an Old English wedding feast for which the bride brewed a special batch of her finest ale. Source of today’s “bridal.”
Bung: the stopper that goes in the hole in the side of a traditional keg. Modern beer kegs lack this feature.
Canette: No, it’s not a small can. A canette is a type of mug used in 16th Century Germany and Switzerland.
Godisgood: The English used this name for the mysterious agent, which we now know as yeast, that fermented beer.
Krauesening: Old Style Beer used to brag about its krauesening. This is the addition of actively fermenting beer to finished brew to induce a second fermentation and carbonate the beer.
Lamb ale: Thankfully, this was not made with a lamb, but was rather made in medieval England for the sheep-shearing season.
Piwo: The word “beer” in Russian and Polish. In today’s small world, you really should know how to say this word in as many languages as possible.
Reinheitsgebot: This 1516 German law requires that beer be made only from water, malted grain and hops. Struck down by the European Union, it’s still observed by German brewers.
