For brewers, taste is the test of a good beer

The palate is final step in process

Roger Fillion, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, May 4, 2007

FORT COLLINS - For Todd Hansen and a half-dozen others here, drinking beer in the afternoon is a vital part of the job.

But it's way more involved than simply kicking back each day and popping open some cold ones.

Call it hands-on quality control.

Hansen and a select group of Anheuser-Busch employees taste each ingredient that goes into making the beer, plus whatever else might sway quality. They do it daily.

"Absolutely everything that touches the brewing process will get tasted," said Hansen, resident brewmaster at the Anheuser- Busch Inc. brewery here.

The members of the "taste panel" sip "teas" brewed from rice and beechwood chips to make sure the ingredients are up to snuff. They chew on grains of barley malt.

The taste panel also samples the water that goes into the beer. That includes the water the city of Fort Collins pumps to the brewery. And it includes the water that's carbon-filtered at the brewery. That water is then used at every step of brewing.

And the tasters sample the beer at various stages of production. That includes: "alpha" beer that's undergone primary fermentation; "lager" beer aged for 21 days in beechwood chips; finished beer ready for packaging; and bottles ready for quaffing.

The tasters even sample the air that transfers the grain through the brewery's automated grain-handling system. They want to make sure that air doesn't influence the beer's taste. So they bubble it through water and sip the water.

The tasting amounts to quality control that goes beyond reading lab data about the beer's chemical makeup.

"Is it tasting the way we want it to? That's what it comes down to," Hansen said.

The brewery here is Anheuser-Busch's eighth largest. It produces some 24 brands and 9 million barrels annually. All beers and ingredients are sampled.

The daily tastings gets repeated at Anheuser-Busch's 11 other U.S. breweries. At Anheuser-Busch corporate in St. Louis, a panel samples packaged beers produced from the 12 breweries. Daily.

"They're kind of a corporate cross-check to make sure the plants are uniform," said Hansen.

Added Hansen, who's been brewmaster here since 2001: "Every brewer is going to have a taste panel of some form."

Anheuser-Busch's tasting panel meets afternoons at 3:30 p.m., seven days a week. The half-dozen members gather in a fifth-floor room that looks more more like an executive board room.

Dark cherry paneling covers the wall. A large rectangular black granite table sits in the center, surrounded by eight chairs.

Large ultraviolet-filtering windows look west out on the brewery, surrounding fields and snow-capped peaks.

"This is where the rubber meets the road. Have we done it right? Or not?" Hansen said.

Everything must pass the test

On a sunny March day, about 100 bottles sat neatly arranged on the granite counter that snakes around three sides of the room.

They contained, among other things, Fort Collins city water, beer at various stages of production, and bottles of Bud, Bud Light and a new handcrafted wheat beer. It's a Bavarian-style dunkel weiss dubbed Ascent 54, in honor of Colorado's 54 peaks topping 14,000 feet. It's a draft beer brewed for Colorado distribution.

Small metal trays containing rice, corn grits and two types of barley malt - all pulled from the brewery's grain silo - rested on the counter, at the front of the line of bottles.

"It starts with this: Mother Nature," explained Steve Presley, senior assistant brewmaster.

To start the process, Presley poured the contents of the bottles into dozens of glasses.

Jeff Jenkins, group manager at the brewery, swirled the water inside one glass.

"You're looking to coat a little bit (of the glass) just to see if you can pick up an aroma," he explained, inserting his nose into the glass.

No unwanted odors. "This is going to be a great water," said Jenkins.

Water is key.

The panelists look for a "clean" taste that won't affect the beer's taste.

Beginning their work, the tasters moved in a line, swirling the contents of each glass to get the aroma. They took a sip, enough to analyze the contents of the liquid to ensure there were no off or unwanted tastes.

"Like any manufacturing process, things go wrong sometimes," said Hansen, the brewmaster.

A power outage, for example, could produce a stuck valve. As a result, the sugar-rich amber liquid called "wort" could get left to boil too long in the brewkettle, a large vessel where hops are added.

"You're going to get left with a scorched-tasting beer," said Hansen. The brewers would then look for a way to "blend off" the undesirable taste.

Usually, however, the beer's "flavor profile" doesn't swing significantly during the brewing process. The tasting panels' results allow the brewers to perform any necessary fine-tuning.

To ensure the tasters keep their edge, the brewery sometimes slips something into the samples, such as a naturally produced aroma and flavor compound known as diacetyl. It has a buttered-popcorn aroma and taste. The Anheuser-Busch brewers want the taste to show up in the beer in a subtle way.

"Do we slip unknowns in there from time to time? Yeah. Just to check and keep everybody on their toes," Hansen said.

Amusing slipups have occurred. Once, a half-dozen tasters were seated around the granite table in the tasting room sampling bottles of Bud. They jotted down comments as they "scored" the beer.

Presley, the senior assistant brewmaster, recalled the tasters looking up simultaneously, with one saying in effect: "This Bud is not right."

The panel accidentally had been supplied with a sample of beer that had been "punished" to see how it would react if, say, a consumer had left it in the trunk of a 100-degree car for five days.

"We had been supplied the punished beer, not the fresh beer," laughed Presley. "You couldn't miss it."

Each taster is unique

For the daily tasting panels, Hansen taps people from a pool of about 20. Skills are mainly learned on the job. But tasters also receive formal training to detect various tastes.

Because of genetics, people's taste buds vary.

"We all taste different," said Hansen. "There are people who are sharper at different taste characteristics than others."

Among other things, the Anheuser-Busch tasters look for the components that make up the hops, a vine that provides flavor and aroma.

Tasters, for example, look for the bitterness the hops contribute. A certain type of bitterness might suggest a problem with the six-day fermentation process.

The tasters also look for the components the barley malt contributes and whether it's, say, a nutty, malty or grassy taste. A beer's sweetness is examined, too.

In the process, tasters use a language of their own, noting whether the taste a beer delivers is "fast," "dragging" or "suppressed."

"I can dissect a beer with my tongue," said Hansen. "You're looking for balance in the beer. You want to balance the malt character and the grain character with the hop character."

And what's the desired effect the brewers are striving to deliver to a consumer tasting a bottle of Bud?

"Damn, that was good! I want another taste," Hansen said.

Back in the tasting room, the tasters completed their work. The process usually takes about an hour. No problems were found this day.

There's still one important task left. Each must blow into a Breathalyzer.

"You blow. If you're OK, you go. If not, you hang out," Hansen said. "We never get too high."

And it's not a problem this day.

"I blew zeros," declared Jenkins, the group manager, reading the Breathalyzer results.

The test marks the end of the tasting panel's work for the day, and the end of a satisfying experience.

"It's the culmination of the day," said Presley, the senior assistant brewmaster.

But can he ever just sit back and savor a glass of beer without bringing work into the equation?

"My wife says to me: 'Do you ever really enjoy your beer? You're always evaluating it,' " Presley said with a laugh. "It's true," he added. "At least the first beer I have I'm always evaluating it and its condition."

Todd Hansen, resident brewmaster for Anheuser-Busch Inc., Fort Collins

• When tasting a beer, any beer, what do you look for? Balance. I look for a clean, balanced beer.

• What makes a beer taste good to you? Again, I'm looking for beer that's balanced. I'm not looking for something that's way out of bounds on the hops or the malt. I'm also looking for a beer that's undergone a clean process, one not affected by a mechanical issue or some other process issue.

• What makes a beer taste bad? I don't think a brewer makes a bad beer. A brewer can make a beer taste better if more attention is paid to a beer's recipe, the raw materials used or the process.

• Say you walk into a beer store to buy a 12-pack other than your own. What would you buy for $11 or less? I'm personally partial to wheat beers. I would buy as much wheat beer as I can for $11.

• What would you buy for $15 or more? More wheat beer.

• What do you like about these beers? Wheat offers a softer style than the more traditional beers made exclusively from barley malt. That opens up a whole new spectrum of beer tastes for the brewmaster to work with.

Marty Jones, "lead singer/idea man" for Oskar Blues Brewery, Lyons

• When tasting a beer, any beer, what do you look for? The key to a good beer for me is that it tastes fresh, not oxidized or light struck and skunked out. Before buying, I always look at the bottle through some light to make sure there aren't things floating in it that don't belong in beers other than bottle-conditioned ones. Or those that get a deliberate dose of yeast.

• What makes a beer taste good to you? A well-made depth of flavor with some complexity is key. I'm a fan of hops, so I'm usually looking for a rich hoppiness in bitterness, flavor and aroma. All nicely tempered with some hearty malts.

• What makes a beer taste bad? The off flavors I mentioned above. To me, there are very few beers that taste better to me with age.

• Say you walk into a beer store to buy a 12-pack other than your own. What would you buy for $11 or less? Non-Oskar Blues beers by the dozen? I don't know of any craft beer in the less than $11 range. I like beer with flavor.

• What would you buy for $15 or more? The Duchesse de Bourgogne and New Belgium's Trippel.

• Q: What do you like about these beers? While they aren't hoppy, they're rich and satisfying. They're also immensely refreshing. And they're wonderful with a wide array of great foods.

Peter Bouckaert, brewmaster for New Belgium Brewing Co., Fort Collins

• When tasting a beer, any beer, what do you look for? I always try to taste something local, something I cannot find elsewhere.

• What makes a beer taste good to you? The harmony in flavor is most important. I like to see most flavor and aroma complementary to each other. A twist or "wow" factor needs to be part of the whole.

• What makes a beer taste bad? Off flavors, since as brewers we are so trained to hate them.

• Say you walk into a beer store to buy a 12-pack other than your own. What would you buy for $11 or less? I get too many samples to keep my fridge stocked.

• What would you buy for $15 or more? Hommel, Witkap, Boon, Girardin, Duvel.

• What do you like about these beers? Belgian beers that hold up well during traveling.

9 million barrels and 24 brands of beer are produced annually by the Fort Collins Anheuser-Busch plant. The Colorado brewery is Anheuser- Busch's eighth-largest. All beers and ingredients are sampled.

fillionr@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2467