Lynn Hoffman

It’s probably much too late to hope that we could ever get over the impulse to reduce every experience to a set of scores. The tendency to rank the unrankable is both undefensible and deeply set in our conversation. You can Google The Ten Best Symphony Orchestras or find numerical comparisons between wines from Tuscany and ones from Bordeaux. The world of beer is full of the same suds. You can rate beer at Ratebeer.com or advocate for your favorite at BeerAdvocate.com.

Maybe it’s wrong to enable this sort of thing, but the conversation has started, so maybe we can do something to make it a bit less silly. One of the oddities about comparing beers is that we customarily drink them under vastly different conditions. How do you compare a drink that’s supposed to be served at the freezing point of water to one that’s at its best coming from a cool cellar?

One provocative answer comes from beer writer Mark Denny, author of the immensely entertaining little book Froth!. Denny suggests that you pour out about six ounces of beer, cover it and allow it to go flat and come to room temperature. Taste it without its chill or its bubbles. Good beer, Denny says will still taste good when it’s flat and warm. Bad beer will display all its faults after the masks of temperature and gassiness are removed.  Denny concedes that without foam, beer loses it’s refreshing character, but he’s not out to make you happy here. He’s trying to offer up a tool for evaluating beer by removing some of the distractions.

It’s easy to see one objection to this idea: each beer is designed with a serving temperature in mind, so what’s the point of evaluating-and comparing-beers under conditions that weren’t what the brewer had in mind. We wouldn’t start an ice cream tasting by melting all the samples first or serve portions of pizza at body temperature. Closer to home, we've all tasted the unpleasantness of wine served too cold or too warm.

And yet there’s something appealing about the simplicity of the Denny Good Beer Test. We know that human taste buds start to lose their efficiency when tasting liquids below 40F (4C) and we may suuspect that all the emphasis on super-chilled beer is just a way of covering up some pretty foul stuff. Denny suggests that if we were able to look past the distractions (serving temperature), we could at last see the essentials (the ingredients and the brewing techniques).

I'm more curious than sceptical. I think he might be on to something even though I'm not sure what that something is. So I’d like to ask you to give the Denny Good Beer Test a try. If you can bring yourself to sacrifice a few ounces of beer for the sake of discussion, pour some out, let it sit and give it a taste. I’ll be doing this myself  and I look forward to hearing your results and publishing them here in a few weeks.

(And in the meantime, Philadelphia is the #1 rated beer town in the country. You could look it up.)

Lynn Hoffman, author The Short Course in Beer