Aroma

       This part should happen just after the pour. Stick your nose over the glass and take a nice long whiff. A lot a breweries shape their glasses specifically to bring you more aroma. Many beer glasses are shaped similarly to a wine glass, wide in the middle and narrow at the top. What this does is allow the beer to aerate and brings the smells up to your nostrils in a concentrated form. It turns out that most of what you taste in a beer comes from what you can smell.

      Just like the flavour of a beer the aroma of a beer is created by the combination of ingredients and the brewing process. Typical ingredients in beer are malted barley, hops, water and yeast. Water doesn't affect the aroma, but the other three play big roles. Each of these can have a great affect on the beers aroma. If you can't tell the kind of beer that it is from the can you can usually get some hints from your nose.

      Beer is typically described as smelling malty and hoppy. Other aromas include alcohol, fruitiness, floral, woody, nutty, grassy, grainy, malty, caramel, burnt, cheesey, rancid, butterscotch, sulfury, yeasty, and even stale. Not all beers will have all of these smells present, and on there own some of the would smell off, but the odours exist in everyday beer if you know where to look. Each aroma can give you a hint about the beer.    

     There are different kinds of malted barley used to make beer. Typically malt has a very grainy, earthy smell, but depending on how its been roasted it can also have different characteristics meaning that the possibilities are endless. There are different types of barley, and there are different types of malting them. lighter roasted barley has a much lighter smell, whereas roasted barley can be said to have a caramelized smell, and chocolate malts (dark roasted) typically have a very earthy almost burnt and sweet aromas.

      The type of hop that is used and when its used will also affect the aroma. Hops are responsible for making a beers aroma smell hoppy, spicy, floral, citrusy or even rancid. Usually when we notice the hops through an aroma, this is due to hops that are added towards the end of the boiling of beer. Hops that are added earlier tend to lose their aromatic properties after about 15 minutes of be heated in the kettle. The type of hop will usually result in the different aromas that are noticed however when it's added will also affect the aromas as to how strong, or how mellow these aromas are.

      Yeast is one of the most important parts in beer. It changes the sugars in the malt into alcohol and also produced the carbon dioxide neccessary to carbonate beer.  Yeast is a micro organism, it needs to eat and breath just like we do. And there are over a thousand different  strains. There are institutions whose sole purpose is to document and store these yeast strains. In brewing there is really only two categories that you need to concern yourself with, ale yeasts and lager lager yeasts. Lager yeasts ferment much slower and usually don't lend much aroma to their brews however ale yeasts can develop a wide variety of aromas to add to the beer. fruitiness and floral notes are two of the more common aromas that result from yeast. Some beers will get a yeasty smell but not often. Yeast can produce sulfurous smells and can also create diactyl which can give a beer a butterscotch aroma. Yeast can have a variety of aromas on the beer.

     The brewing process itself and the interaction of all of the ingredients can change how the overall aroma of the beer will come through. How little and how much of each of these aromas you smell will change the way you tastebuds and your brain interprets the beer. Its usually best to isolate the aromas with your nose before you taste it because it allows you to better interpret the aromas without flavours getting in the way. After you have given your nose a work out it's finally time to drink beer.

Taste