Editor's Note: This is my latest piece for The Full Pint. In it, I explore the most common off flavors in craft beer, how they occur, and how to identify them. This is a teaser, please follow through to The Full Pint to read the entire piece. The quality of craft beer has never been higher than it is today. With the number of breweries in the United States quickly approaching 6,000, there's a lot of amazing beer being made. However, there's also a lot of poorly brewed crap getting passed off to unsuspecting consumers. Let's ignore beer that's simply uninteresting or poorly conceived but cleanly executed. Poor brewery technique or sanitation can ruin the best recipe with preventable flaws. Learning about flaws and how to detect them will make consumers more educated in their personal consumption, and a knowledgeable customer base that can reward production quality will encourage those brewers and breweries with a lax quality program to tighten up their ships.
A note on human genetics: When beginning the journey to learning to recognize off flavors, it's important to note that the sense of smell is both subjective and variable person to person. It's not just experience or training, but a person's genetics... ( Continue reading at The Full Pint)
