Caveat Emptor and the Craft Beer Consumer

I recently picked up a bottle of BrewDog’s Dogma, a new imported beer from a Scottish craft brewer previously unrepresented in this area. My intent was to evaluate and properly review the beer contained within for a future article but a few tell-tale signs lead me to abandon such an attempt. As happens on occasion in the craft beer world, especially with the new and imported, I was in possession of a bad bottle.

BrewDog Ltd. is a very experimental, “American-style” microbrewery located in Fraserburgh, Scotland, with beers only newly arrived in the North Texas market. I use the term “American-style” because BrewDog differs from the standard European brewing industry—steeped in tradition and loyal to regional styles—and instead is daring and boundlessly nontraditional with their products. Only a couple of months ago, BrewDog made international news with the “world's strongest beer” at 32% ABV.

Dogma is an herb/spiced beer brewed with additions of guarana, poppy seeds, kola nut and Scottish heather honey. Sometimes one can form an expectation of the flavor of a beer before sampling, but this unique combination of ingredients proved a challenge. Based on the description, some sort of lightly spiced, nutty, slightly honey-sweet beverage should have been forthcoming.

Instead, the beer that poured from this bottle was flat and lifeless with a taste to match, somewhat of an ripe, tangy flavor and a slightly not-so-unpleasant element that just was not quite right. It did not exhibit any of the typical characteristics of an infected beer (such as obvious sourness or a green apple flavor) or of oxidation (such as a stale or cardboardy element) but something in the profile just did not add up.

Suspicious, I referenced a few online reviews of this same beer and found almost no correlation between other drinkers’ descriptions and the beverage before me. My guess is that I purchased an old or mistreated bottle—which will happen occasionally in each beer drinker’s career. Especially vulnerable are imports newly arrived on the Texas market, beers of unknown provenance that not only cross the oceans under dubious storage conditions but may also sit in state-side warehouses for months on end awaiting regulatory approval.

Texas is especially guilty of this problem. Commercial approval of new beers for sale in our state’s markets can be tediously lengthy and expensive, with delays ranging from disputes over alcoholic strength to stylistic classifications to minor elements included on the labels. During this time, beers will sit—and where they sit and the environment in which they are kept is an unknown quantity.

Naturally, heat is an enemy of fresh beer and it is doubtful products are stored in the same sort of stifling warehouses as furniture, clothing or other environmentally durable goods. But imports (as well as many domestic brands) can suffer during transport periods without cooling controls, and even some areas of storage under air-conditioned units can be much warmer than intended, such as shelves stacked high off the ground.

One obvious sign of mishandling is a thick layer of sediment caked at the bottom of a bottle. Upon disturbing the beer, the detritus floats in suspension and can leave an otherwise delicious beer rather unappetizing, almost like a glass full of dietary fiber supplement. This is a positive indication that the beer has been through relatively rough temperature ranges, causing solids and proteins to fall out of their normal suspension.

The lesson here is that there is an unwritten element to evaluating craft beers, and that is to always consider the possibility of a mishandled or old bottle. Rare circumstances such as this should not reflect negatively on a brewer, and are most often remedied once distribution channels are established and refreshed regularly. Bringing such matters to the attention of your retailer is also a good idea, as they should also benefit from as much feedback as you can provide.

Can You Take the Heat?

Possibly the most widely circulated and believed myth surrounding beer is with regard to temperature. Most people believe that beer must be kept refrigerated always, and that once allowed to warm to room temperature, it can never be cooled again. Room temperature would essentially spoil the beer, much the same way as any dairy product would spoil.

Except that beer is not a dairy product. Fluctuations in ambient temperature do not adversely affect beer any more than any other foodstuff. Beer is remarkably delicate and yet astonishingly durable at the same time, and the common room temperature is in no way harmful to either its flavors or storage life in the short term. Beer bought from the warm shelves is no different than what is retrieved from the cooler, and may be the exact same beer merely a few hours removed.

So how much heat is too much heat? Is beer something you can leave in the car on a hot summer afternoon? For how long? Can it be stored indefinitely at room temperature? And what is “room temperature,” anyway? What counts as “hot” in Minneapolis is certainly not the same as what is experienced along the Texas/Mexico border.

Beer belongs to a special subset of our food supply that are living things. More precisely, beer is several billion living things—we call them yeast. Like most living things, yeast have a temperature range in which they are happy and comfortable, and a range in which they fuss about, complain and eventually die. We forget that beer is less a beverage and more of a microenvironment, depending entirely on your perspective.

Basically, if you are comfortable, so is your beer. During fermentation, most yeast strains prefer temperatures between 55°F and 75°F (or 45°F and 55°F, if you happen to be lager yeast). These ranges qualify as “room temperature” for most anywhere, and any of us will generally be comfortable in these environments. Over 75°F and yeast begin to produce some quite nasty byproducts, lending off-flavors to the finished product. Much over 100°F and yeast start to die, so their comfort range is pretty close to that of any other organism. But all this is for brewing; what about the packaged beer on the shelf?

For most beers the commercial product is inert, the yeast having died off long ago due to lack of food, filtered out or killed through a variety of pasteurization processes. What is left in the bottle is a mix of sugars, proteins, alcohols, oils and trace other chemicals (plus water, naturally). None of these compounds is active, so the only thing left for them to do is to degrade over time.

This is where the temperature is a factor. Heat accelerates chemical reactions, making the natural breakdown processes of large molecules into small molecules happen more quickly than they would otherwise. What does this mean for beer? Simply this: it ages faster. A general rule of thumb for the brewing industry is that beer stored at 100°F for one week tastes as old as beer stored at 70°F for two months, or as old as beer stored at 40°F for one year.

Time is as much a factor in beer quality as is its ambient temperature. Storing beer in the trunk of your car during summer months is obviously a bad choice—unless it is just for that half-hour transporting it from the store. Fluctuations in temperature are not ideal but are certainly not disastrously harmful to the beer, no more than they are harmful to your own body. A good guideline is to never leave your beer anywhere that you would not leave your dog (and for the same reasons).

Beer stored at room temperature is never bad, merely not chilled... unless it has been at room temperature for many, many months. In this case, the fault is not with the environment but with the retail establishment itself. Do not blame the storage temperature for what is actually a neglectful vendor failing to sell their product in a timely fashion.