Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of Respecting the Beer. My name is Gary Arndt and with me again, as usual as Alison McCoy and Bobby Fleshman Today or in our last episode, we talked about sight. One of the senses that we use to appreciate beer, how a beer looks it's foam, it's carbonation, everything else. This episode, we want to talk about smell. Smell and taste are closely related with each other. They're kind of interlinked in a lot of ways. Something smells bad and may not taste very good and vice versa. So let me start out with the big question. Why does beer smell and where does the aroma come from?

Yeah, last time I got in the weeds about how, where these colors come from and, and it was related to the malt and the barley and the proteins and so on. And the, the main flavors of beer are coming from the sugars that are derived from the starch inside of those, those grains. The proteins give you some mouth feel in the end, which is separate from, from flavor. then you're getting some aromas that are driving from like sulfur derived compounds like dimethyl sulfide. And you guys might recognize that. If you open a can of, of raw green beans or corn, you're actually getting that in your, in your malts. And that's giving you some, some dimensionality to the finished beer. Allison's giving me a cross.

Because you're going down directly to green bean juice when you really should be talking about hops.

Well, yeah, I'm starting with barley and then I'm moving on. I just didn't want to say that I didn't want to say that barley just gives you sugar. There's there's a lot more to the story. There there are amino acids that contribute to ester production and esters are sort of fruity aromas that people will associate with break baking in the kitchen. Dark fruits. There's a lot of that going on and it's being derived from that malting process. So that's coming from the Malt side of things Allison points out that at some point. a few hundred years ago, hops were discovered as a nice balance to the sweetness in beer and preservative property are, I think the botanist's name was Hildegard von Dingen. Now

I can say a hundred years ago,

a couple of hundred years ago,

multiply that by a couple more.

That's almost a thousand years ago.

Exactly.

Oh geez. So it, but it's been adopted widely though in the brewing industry as is almost the only solely the, the, spice by which we balance the sweetness in beer. But there you have it. So in these hops, you have what are known as hard, the hops look like little pine cones, little green pine cones. And inside of them, you're going to find hard and soft resins and the resins located inside these little yellow glands. You can take these hops and pick them off the vine and open them up, see little glands. And you just take that and you roll that, that yellow gland in your hand. You'll smell these aromas come off of it.

Hops are very fragrant.

Yeah. It's kind of like cutting your lawn. You can imagine that that's actually, some of the terpenes are shared with hops across all sorts of fruits and vegetables and, and,

You said the word terpene. Let's chat for a second.

Yeah. This is where I have to nod to the expert.

So the terpenes are these oils that are in so many different plants but the, the reason that you get grass stains is because the terpenes in the grass are an oil. And so just like you can't really wash off your oil off your hands without some sort of water or without some sort of soap or surfactant or something the oils that are in grass stain your clothes and you can't get them out because, well, oil likes to stick to fabric. But those oils are really what give hops their kind of superpower. But the kicker is that the oils don't really mix with water that well. So the hops have to go through several chemical reactions in order to get them to stay in the water and that's what makes hops one of the hardest things I think in the brewing industry to handle because they're quite finicky when it comes to the chemistry that they can do.

Right. I did misspeak. Terpenes are found throughout the hop plant. The, that resin is where you get these, these bittering compounds that I spoke about, but, Allison, you could speak on that there with these terpenes, you have some that are, she'll, she'll give you the, okay, I'm going to give her, she's going to expand a little more.

Oh my God. Okay. So Gary, you asked the question of what gives a bearded smell. Well the kicker is in order to smell anything, a little bitty molecule has to leave the thing and come to your nose and go into you somehow and trigger your brain to think, oh, that's that smell. And hopefully it triggers a memory and it's a lovely memory and you're happy. But in some cases it's not so happy, especially with not so great odors. But the hops have, they have these oils and those are volatile compounds. And anytime you've walked past a nail salon, like in the grocery store or whatever and you smell that acetone, acetone is incredibly volatile, that's the nail polish remover. These are kind of the same. They do not, those molecules do not want to stay, in the beer. And so they are going to, what we call, be aromatic, they are going to float away from the beer and come to your nose. And that's really the first, so you see the beer. And you're about to taste it, but as you bring it closer to your nose, those molecules are going to start to escape and come into your nose. And then you're going to smell them. Hops contribute more of those kinds of molecules than the malts do. So if there's more hops in the beer, you're going to get more of that experience before you even take a sip because those molecules are coming to you.

And getting out, getting out of my wheelhouse, I can say that there's a difference between tasting wine and beer. And that you should, if your, if your goal is to taste the beer, you should actually swallow it and then, and then breathe back out to get the, the retronasal, attribute where I don't think that's required in wine. I think you can get most of that inside of your mouth and you don't have to consume it to, to get it. I think the CO2 is part of that is why that's true. It's evolving those aromas back. out of your system through your nasal cavity.

I know when someone drinks wine, you see them, you know, they swirl it around and they smell it and there's, Oh, it's, you know, you know, they have this, description for it. You seldom see people drink beer that way, right? Maybe because it's carbonated. You're not going to,

that's true. The carbon dioxide is going to be bringing those molecules to you much faster because the carbon dioxide also doesn't want to stay in the,

but I've also noted what you said. the double IPA that you guys make, 547 has a very strong aroma. That's one of the first things I ever noticed about it. And I don't notice that on most beers at all. Yeah. it, you know, it has this very strong orange peel scent that I noticed. citronol,

I believe is what that is.

Citronol. Yeah. Brought about by a few different hops that are high in that oil. Mm hmm.

But I've never noticed a wine that had that strong of an aroma. Whereas I don't know if it's just a unique thing with that, but I've just Like nothing, you know, you, you get hints of things in wine, but with certain beers, it's very noticeable. Yeah,

the, the double IPA is very American. It's, it's a very American style. It's nuanced. It can be nuanced and it should be, it should be balanced. It's never nuanced. So

I just had to do a quick Google search. I just looked up the chemical structure of vanillin, which is the molecule that gives you the vanilla flavor. And I know that there's a lot of, at least in chardonnays and stuff, there's a lot of vanilla character in wines. I'm looking to Gary to be like, is that true? I don't even know.

You barrel derived mostly for that. Yeah.

So the vanillin molecule has many more, what we call polar groups. And so chemists like to use the phrase, like dissolves, like, so if, if the two molecules are more similar they're going to mix better and this is actually true with humans. You can anthropomorphize molecules really well. So the more things you have in common with someone else, more likely you're going to hang out with them longer. You have nothing in common, you're like, nope, going to go somewhere else. So the wine compounds, I think, have many more similarities to the water that they're in or the wine that they're in, so they're going to stay there longer. So I'm guessing that the Sommelier folks are swirling their wines to kind of coke some of those molecules to come to their nose, whereas the hops are like, I'm not like water at all. And they just come up freely.

And you'll often pour a wine through a breather to open it, right?

That makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah. Before you drink it.

so Gary, you mentioned our five, four, seven, one of the things, I think we have it written on the can too, is please drink me fresh. folks will store our 547, which is a bad idea because the longer it stays in the can, the more of those hop volatile molecules have escaped into the little headspace.

We have about 10 mils of space in each can for them to escape.

Yeah. And so as soon as you crack it open, it's like.

It smells great!

Instantly and then it's all gone, but it's still not in the beer. And so you want to drink those hoppy beers as fast as well. Not as fast in one sitting, but you want to make sure that they don't, they don't have a long shelf life.

And no shaking the can up. Doesn't re introduce the oils.

Don't do that.

Not like that. This freshness. I was here once and I remember, there was discussion of like, you were going to submit it for an award and some of the people that work here were like, They were actually going to take a road trip to take a batch of it and drive it as quickly as possible.

To Colorado. Yeah.

Yeah. And keep a webcam moving as they went. Yeah.

And I was always kind of, again, I'm always kind of skeptical of a lot of these things. Like, yeah, it really doesn't make a difference. It's just sort of a marketing thing, but you're saying, no, it really does. Even if it's in a can, that's going to make a huge difference. If it's just canned versus something that's been sitting around just

for, well, more for beers. Like you said, our five, four, seven is the one that's like. You don't get that with any of the other beers. That's the one that's the most susceptible to that aging. The others I think would be fine.

Correlation is not causation, but to Gary's point, the winners of these competitions generally are within a 150 miles of the competition. Now that that's because Denver has a lot of good breweries. yes, that's part of it.

But it's also because chemistry still holds and those molecules don't like each other. So they escape.

So you gotta get your beer there quick.

Okay. Would it be possible to fly it? Or was it with the change in pressure?

Oh no, there's a whole thing. I never thought of that. Oh my god. Never thought of that.

I have so many thoughts. Well, this is one of the good things about the fact that our, in our brewery, we've got it set up to where the kegs and the casks are located immediately behind. Where we pull them from. So where the taps are at our house, we also have a tap system, but we've got our kegs are in the, the, the freezers and the kegs are in the basement and then we've got it drilled up. There's a hole through our living room floor and then we've got a nice little tap system there. But the pressure differential

You have taps in your house?

Oh, they're really a Belgian tower. I got from a museum and it was, it's not a brag that I spent the money. I just found this thing.

That's hardcore.

You've got it separated. We've got an ale cooler and a logger cooler as well. Yeah. But the, the, the, the, the pressure differential that you have from the basement to the first floor makes it hellaciously hard to pour the beers because of that off gassing that it goes through.

Well, since I built that, I've learned a lot. That's been 12 years or whatever since I built that. And now I've learned a lot more about partial pressures, which we can

Not go into that later date. Don't give away all the fun stuff.

In a previous episode, when we talked about color, we talked about glassware. And I also remember having this discussion where I was skeptical that glassware could have anything to do with aroma. And so you literally did a test where you poured, I think it was the 547 double IPA in two different glasses.

Were you blindfolded?

No, but it was, I could tell the difference. I think one was like a tulip shaped glass and one was a more open mouth glass that it. Concentrated the aroma for lack of a better word in that it had a small the, in the glass that had a smaller opening. Is that something that, I mean, how, how, how deep into the weeds are you going to go into when selecting glassware? I mean, you're also selecting aroma

okay, when you go to Belgium, you'll see that every brewer has their own glass, and you can't have their beer at any bar. Unless one of those glasses are available. And I think that that's because they have been meticulously designed, partially just marketing and the way they look, but partially because they are meant to enhance the aroma and the whole experience of that, of their, of their beer. And I'd like to see more of that. I like to see us, I mentioned us designing our own glass at some point. I'd like to do more of that. It, the, the trick is we, we cover so a gamut of styles here and it's hard for us to pick one, but yeah, it's, it plays into that. We have to usually make one work for about three styles. Yeah. We can't have one for every single beer.

During the pandemic we switched over to single use plastic cups because. in pandemic times, we did different things. Anyway, so when we went back to glassware, we decided to just reduce it down to just four glasses that we could get to match as much as possible and optimize the glassware to all the different styles that we serve. But one of them is our Hildegard Pilsner. So the Hildy, she's a, Czech Pilsner gorgeous glass. that's like a really tall one so you can see how clear it is it's got a really nice foam on the top, but Hildy has really subtle hop aromas and Bobby figured out that the more traditional style would be this bigger, wide open mouth dimple mug. And I think the experience of the beer is so much different, even though it is to style more in line with the checks to do the bigger, thick dimple mug. That's got a really wide mouth because of the subtle hop aromas in the Hildi. I really like her having the more closed concentrated. Hop glass.

Which was kind of confusing because that enhances the, the hop aroma, which I wouldn't expect from Allison to be into as much.

Well, I, well, it, I mean,

yep.

I'm being objective here. You know. That's true. Gary asked, does the glass matter? It does. I was like, I think it does.

I wanted to get to one little anecdote about glassware very quickly. Miller Lite was created, When was that? In the late 60s, early 70s, it launched the light beer revolution. True.

I think I want to say late 70s.

It was late 70s. Okay. So, so Miller light was created, but it couldn't be created and packaged in a light glass, a clear glass because that would have gone skunky and then we can go into the science as to why Sunstriking a beer makes it smell like a skunk but needless to say the ingredient that... it's a hop acid basically that turns into that same aroma you get from a skunk from a skunk, and, it happens in the sunlight. The only way they were able to do that in mass at the scale they were, they had to invent a new hop acid and they had the patent on that acid. They created it synthetically. they, they reduced an existing one by adding protons and boom, they created what was a more of a, it was a more stable hop acid and it didn't go skunky. B. As a side effect, it made magnificent foam, and so they named it the Champagne of Beer and so on and so on.

Is that where that came from?

It was not planned, but as they made this want to solve one problem, they solved two, or they created another benefit, and they led the charge in the light beer revolution for a good while, and they, they named it L I T E, and I think that was from the very beginning. But now you've seen many other brewers step in and use the same sort of hop ingredient, but they, but they didn't have access to that for a long time, if ever. So they had brown glass for their light beers. So they were the only ones with that presentation because they had the monopoly on that chemistry.

When you say they added protons.

Yes, it's, it's called reducing in chemistry. So you just hydrogen? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. I am a physicist, so sometimes I slip into that.

Oh no, chemists use that too, but technically we would call it hydronium as well.

Hydronium. Let's go with that. Sounds even better. No, that's H3O plus.

Cause I'm also thinking,

what

did they transmute to a different element or something,

right? That's high level. So they added four hydrogen atoms to, an ISO alpha acid. Which we can talk a lot about late in future episodes, but acid is what makes the beer bitter. And they made it stable. And then there, there've been various other ones created since then, but that was the one that really launched Miller Lite.

You know, there's a picture of the, oh, it's, it's one of the primary, advertisements of Miller High Life. There's this 1960s woman and she's looks like she's the housewife and she's so excited. And she's like, Miller High Life, you have the champagne of beers. I'd really like to think that she's the scientist behind it all. And she's like, I had developed this isomerized alpha acid and no one else knows. And it's patented. Yay. Just saying that's how I'm going to interpret that picture from here on out.

Right. We can't finish this episode, Gary, without talking about yeast, can we? There's, they, they give aromas too. Bananas! Yeah. It's gotta be about yeast as much as it does hops and malt.

Let's talk about the hefeweizen. Just, that's

the extreme. That's one of the extremes. Hefeweizen tastes, or smells and tastes like, bananas and clove. Sometimes bubblegum, and all that stuff is derived from some, some

So no bananas were used in the making of this. No,

but you can put strawberry into it and it's awesome. So that, that's just a contrast that we've come to love, a complimentary flavor. So, yeah, that, that's one extreme and then you get cleaner ones. Lager yeast tend to be cleaner, although they kick off some sulfur and, and I think that's quintessential for a good lager at a very, very low level.

When you say the yeast are cleaner, does that allude to the fact that other yeasts are dirtier?

They, yeah. They don't make as many of those fermentation derived aromas and flavors as do, say, a Belgian yeast, which you can put in the same box as that, a half a bite of yeast. And those are going

to make a lot more esters, aren't they?

Yeah. Phenols is another one. And sometimes we'll say a phenol in the extreme case is plasticky or bandaid like. I was about

to say esters. So

you want to stay away from

that to some extent. Chain up a bunch of ester molecules, you're going to get polyester, which I'm sure many of you know what that is.

We're not making polyester in our beers. That's not yet a thing. Yeah. But then in the English, in the English, yeast are kind of in the middle there. They have some really good, I would say complimentary flavors esters that they produce that plays well with the malts that are made in England. Some of the best malts in the world are made in England they've discovered their best yeast that work with those.

All right. Well, I think that concludes another episode of Respecting the Beer. Join us next week for another episode. And until then, you can go to our Patreon page or our Facebook group, the links to which can be found in the show notes.