The word “fresh” wields potent adjectival power.
At first glance, “fresh” unequivocally translates to better. Fresh fruit? Superior to canned or jarred. Fresh air? Good for the soul, lungs, and the rest of the pulmonary system. Fresh beats? All the better for general grinding and grooving.
But when you apply fresh to a concept that’s negative (like a fresh wound), the meaning changes. Suddenly fresh doesn’t mean better, but instead acts to grade the noun, placing it at the apex of a spectrum of intensity. Fresh connotes that your noun is at the most potent, pungent, and powerful it will ever be, and further infers that it will degrade, eventually, in some capacity.
Outside of those few styles that improve with age, it would make sense that fresh beer – beer at its most innately flavorful point – would be the ideal. If fresh means the apogee of flavor, and the reason we drink beer is for flavor, then we should drink the freshest beer possible! A+B=C, so A=C, right? Right.
Despite holding this notion for years, I’d never actually tested it. It’s hard to judge just how fresh a bottle or can of beer can possibly be, given that a case may sit for weeks or months in storage and shipping, be subjected to different temperatures, light, and environmental conditions all before you even have a chance to pry the cap. Many small breweries still don’t include bottling dates, or if they do, they’re more often than not smudged illegible marks that look like a spider got into a cask, then into an inkwell.
In post-brewed storage, as the small amount of oxygen left in the bottle reacts to the rest of the primordial beer soup, trans-2-nonenal forms and leads to paper/cardboard-like flavors. To make matters worse, long siestas in non-refrigerated warehouse resorts accelerate this oxidative process. Brown bottles will also still let in some light which will strike the riboflavin, break down isohumulones, and create skunky 3-methylbut-2-ene-1-thiol. The hoppier the beer, the more isohumulone, and the easier/faster it will skunk when exposed to light.
Cans, while totally shielded from light, aren’t perfect either, and will still oxidate just like their glassy brethren. Over time, the quality of a beer inevitably fades, it’s defining characteristics changing forever. Beer is sort of like memory that way. The fluid itself is still there in the bottle, is decidedly still beer and probably tastes OK, but when you go to drink it, it’s not quite exactly like it once was: changed, muted, revised by time’s unbiased hand.
I knew all of this, but blindly assumed our distribution system worked, and that as long as I wasn’t drinking a brew months and months (or years and years) past its prime drinking time, that it had no obvious defects and looked good in the glass, I was coming pretty close to taking in the flavors, smells, and mouthfeel the brewer truly intended.
But holy hops, I’ve never been so wrong.
Doug Smiley, fellow blogger and beer-buddy, invited me to apply some science to our theories by heading to the Heavy Seas Brewery with some bottles of Loose Cannon IPA he purchased a few months prior. He suggested we do a head-to-head taste test, to see what ~90 days tenure in that brown glass did to the spirit of the beer.
I don’t like to rely on clichés for description, but in this case one serves quite well. The differences between the November 26th 2013 bottle and the February 17th 2014 pint from the keg (that we sampled on February 22nd 2014, for the record) were night and day. The bottled beer was quiet, subdued, like long night had cloaked the ale, the hops tucked into nice cozy water beds with the malts rolling lazily at their feet, a starchy dog mid-nap. Conversely, the keg-poured pint blazed midday summer; crisp bitterness and bright, floral citrus notes from the hops: a warm breeze through an orange grove on a Floridian afternoon.
Dan, the hospitality manager at Heavy Seas, said to us as we sat down to begin our experiment, “I never drink bottles of Loose Cannon anymore.” Having tasted the IPA at only 5-days old, I can see why. Not to say the bottled beer was “bad” by any stretch of the imagination. It was still pretty excellent, and this little experiment won’t stop me from buying bottles in the future. It will however, encourage me to drink at brewery tap rooms much more often than I had before. If you’re looking to squeeze ever possible micron of flavor out of a pint, you’ve got to drink straight from the keg, as soon as possible.
While this conclusion might seem obvious, it waxes voluble about the store-bought bottles we’re drinking, and the supposedly educated judgments we’re making on the assumption that the bottled beer is “fresh.” Especially given the popularity on IPAs, and the hop’s natural propensity to break-down rather quickly. Double especially given that a very large number of beer reviewers are basing their reviews solely on bottled and canned versions of a beer. Triple especially given that bottles are the only way to sample almost every beer that isn’t served on tap near your home.
Before you commit to an opinion about a beer or a brewery, keep in mind that when you drink bottled beer that comes from the other side of the country (or the world), you may only be drinking a shade of what came out of the fermentation tank. It may be generally representative of the recipe, but unless you know it was bottled very recently, may not always a great point of reference to form objective opinions.
For me, it’s just another reason to drink local: it legitimately tastes better. Because science.
P.S. I know there are obvious exceptions to this with styles that age or cellar well. I’m talking specifically about styles (like those on the heavy end of the hop scale) that get worse with age. So you can put away the pitchforks, barleywine and RIS folks.
Tagged: beer, beer freshness, beer science, beerology, bottles, bottles vs kegs, craft beer, fresh beer, heavy seas beer, if i could save beer in a bottle, IPA, kegs
Find that keg is better across the board than bottle. I’m not even sure how much age would swing that. A well cared for two month old keg might still be better than a two week old bottle (but maybe not better than a two week old keg?). I’ve joked about the idea on occasion, but this is really where the Enjoy By series might be interesting. Collect bottle until you have 5 different bottlings (if you are like me that could take awhile depending on distribution). The last one you get you know has to be younger than 35 days, and has a bottling date. The beer is supposed to be the same. Might be interesting.
It’s nice to have Heavy Seas as your own science lab. The one I work in all day long is no where near as exciting.
I agree, fundamentally, but think it’s because kegs are better taken care of than cases of bottles. They stay colder, longer, and often sit in a custom, cool under-bar beer-spa until empty.
A bottle has no such luxury.
Theoretically though, the keg provides no more protection from oxidation than an aluminum can. It just disappears faster, so it’s harder to judge 🙂
The people at Heavy Seas are incredibly friendly and accommodating to use beer writers. If you get the chance, check out their new tap room. Great beer, great food, great people.
Last year when I visited a brewery in Brno I drank one of their beers straight from the lagering tank and then, the same beer, at the brewery’s taproom (dispensed from pressurised tanks and not with top pressure), the difference was incredible! Which gives proof to what more than one brewer have told me here “every metre the beer travels away from the brewery, it’s a compromise”.
Where I don’t quite agree with you is with your comments about reviews. If a brewery chooses to have their beer more or less widely distributed through third parties, they are assuming the risk that their product may not be very well taken care of, all for the sake of profit (nothing wrong with that, mind you). So I believe that someone’s review of a beer they’ve bought at a supermarket is every bit as legitimate and valid as if they were reviewing the same beer at the brewery’s tap room; if not more, as consumers are more likely to come across the former than the latter. Though, now that I think of it aren’t all beer reviews a bit of a futile exercise to begin with? You’re either talking about beer that is not in its best form, or if it is, few people can actually drink it.
I love that quote.
But you make a great point. You’re right that the widely distributed beer almost has to be the standard by which the brewery is measured, conditional/environmental changes included. It’s just a weird paradox for me now; I’ll just never know if what I’m drinking could be theoretically better. The beer in bottle, if it’s all you can get, is the freshest you can get. It’s fresh and not fresh at the same time.
Schrodinger’s beer?
A beer is at its best when you can actually drink it. All the rest is quite hypothetical.
That needs to go on a motivational poster in my office.
Great experiment, Oliver. Did you happen to try a fresh bottle of Loose Cannon, to see the difference between the fresh bottle and the older bottle?
No, our control wasn’t that good. We’re amateurs, after all.
Let’s get together and do a bottle freshness test!
I like the way you and Doug set things up here (although I have to read his post on it). No need to over complicate things!
Although, as I think about it, it makes me wonder about other variables involved…
Such as, do some hop varieties tend to hide behind the malt more over time than other hop varieties. Does “freshness” change slower/faster in session IPAs than in double/triple IPAs. Malt varieties, strain of yeast used, step that the hops are added in brewing…..
Now I’m just rambling…..God I love beer!
We should really make a plan one of these months! I doubt I’ll be making it to AHA or BBC though. How long is a drive to Philly for you?
“What does ‘fresh’ taste like?”, I’m often asked. “What does ‘salty’ taste like?”, I respond. I know it when I taste it.
Putting aside the issue of lightstruckedness, a kegged beer will taste ‘fresher’ than a bottled beer (assuming all other things being equal) principally because of the greater volume of liquid to the volume of packaged air. There’s more beer in a keg than in a bottle; the effects of oxidation will take longer to become noticeable. The closer, timewise, to packaging, the less the difference.
Now, repeat the experiment with cask vs. keg vs. bottle. A properly conditioned cask (at brewery AND pub) will taste ‘fresher’ than either of the two. I tell folk that a cask is NOT a keg. It is a small brewery fermenter, 10.8 gallons rather than 6200 gallons. (See Max Bahnson’s observation above about the vast difference between tasting from the lagering tank vs. tasting from a keg, AT the brewery.)
Of course, if the cask has been polluted with twigs, cherries, cocoa-puffs, etc., then all bets are off.
Thanks so much for bringing some harder science to the discussion, Tom. You make a great point about the beer-to-air ratio; I hadn’t thought of that but now it seems so obvious. Does the C02 help by filling the remaining space as the keg empties, too?
I’ll plan to redo this experiment as you suggested. We actually did drink some cask Loose Cannon that day, but it was spiked with saffron and jasmine (if memory serves).
Love how you’ve seamlessly integrated literature lessons with beer lessons: “But when you apply fresh to a concept that’s negative (like a fresh wound), the meaning changes. Suddenly fresh doesn’t mean better, but instead acts to grade the noun, placing it at the apex of a spectrum of intensity. Fresh connotes that your noun is at the most potent, pungent, and powerful it will ever be, and further infers that it will degrade, eventually, in some capacity.” It is so damn difficult to keep language fresh. Beer seems easy by comparison.
The more I get into the science and culture of beer, the more I find it’s very closely tied to the science and culture of language.
I suppose that’s true about life, or intersection passions within an individual psyche, but one seems to fuel the other, and vice versa, daily.
For what it’s worth, I think they’re both pretty difficult to keep fresh, in completely different ways.