Feb
At what temperature is beer best served? This seems to have many people and even bartenders confused. In most bars and restaurants beer is served way to cold, often in icy glasses or mugs. Serving a beer too cold destroys the flavor of the beer. There are many mass-produced mega brews around the world that just don’t taste so good. In my opinion, since the mega brews are most commonly consumed, this is why people tend to over chill beers.
Back to the original question of proper serving temperature. Each style of beer has a serving temperature at which it tastes best. The following is a useful guide to the serving temperature of the most popular beer styles.
Cold 32-39 degrees farenheit: Pale Lager, Light Beer, Malt Liquor, Canadian (these tend to be the beers that are mass-produced)
Chilled 39-45 degrees farenheit: Hefeweizen, Pilsner, Premium Lager, Kӧlsch, German Pilsner, Golden Ale, Belgian White, Sweet Fruit Lambics,
Cool 45-54 degrees farenheit: American Pale Ale, Stout, Porter, Amber Ale, Helles, Tripel, Irish Ale, Altbier, Swarzbier, Belgian Ale, Vienna, Smoked, Dunkel, Unsweetened Fruit Lambics
Cellar 54-57 degrees farenheit: India Pale Ale, English Pale Ale, Bitter, Weizen Bock, Bock, Brown Ale, Strong Ale
Warm 57-61 degrees farenheit: Barley Wine, Mead, Double IPA, Doppel Bock, Imperial Stout
Some beers like spiced winter ales are even served hot, but hot beer is rather rare.
Don’t be afraid to try a beer that is “warm”. You might enjoy the full, true flavor of your beer.
Prost!
Driveway Beers has had a very busy few months. We’ve started to brew our own beer, made friends with our favorite local beer store, sampled quite a few great craft beers and spent lots of time not blogging. Our brief hiatus has allowed us to discover a pretty snazzy beer recommendation site called Pintley (http://www.pintley.com) and we wanted to share some of our first thoughts with you.
How We’re Using Pintley
We stumbled on Pintley by accident but, have started to use it pretty extensively to keep simple tasting notes and manage a list of beers that we hear about and want to try and review.
The Good
Pintley is simple to use and has, by our account, a very robust database of beers built up. They also have a mobile application available for the iPhone which is very simple to use and has proven to be an excellent companion for the beer store or the restaurant. The website is tastefully designed and easy to navigate. Pintley aggregates beer notes from its user base to offer a very diverse set of beer reviews for the beer lover. Granted, they are not the tasting notes of a true beer connoisseur but, Pintley definitely uses the power of the crowd to evaluate a beer.
The Opportunity
We’re not big fans of the “leaderboard” when it comes to beer. There are a lot of social sites that have started with this points-for-clout concept and we’re not sold on its value. With that said, there are some opportunities with Pintley that would make it even more awesome. First, the iPhone application is nice but, there should definitely be a comparable application for Android and BlackBerry. Second, there’s a huge opportunity to add a few new features to the site that would help in the “beer discovery” department like, the ability to find the beer on your wishlist or to export your wishlist to email or services like Evernote so that you can easily reference it while you are shopping (or sending your wife out to shop).
Overall, Pintley is a great piece of beer technology. If you’re a beer drinker that likes to share what you think about beer and keep track of what you liked and didn’t then, this is a great tool for you. If you like to discover new beers that align with your tastes then, this is a great tool.
Pintley – well done.
Sep
We are building a site where we can share reviews, insights, and a bunch of other stuff on beer and food. http://www.drivewaybeers.com is being built now and in the next few weeks we should have a fresh new design and a few beer reviews up for your enjoyment.