The Science of Skunking

In our last Beer Lingo post we covered some basic confusing terms that describe a beer’s style and how it’s made. In today’s educational edition of Just Add Beer, we’ll look at terms that specifically describe a beer’s taste.

Before the beer even hits your tongue, you get an idea of the taste through the smell. In beer lingo it’s the nose. I learned this from a bartender who kept referencing the banana nose of hefeweizens, which of course, made me giggle. The smell reinforced the beer’s fruity taste and now I can’t drink a hefe without imagining the a yellow hook of that fruit sticking out of one those tall, thin glasses. Is that a banana nose I smell or are you just happy to see me?

A word that’s tossed around a lot lately is hoppy. It is used a lot because IPAs are hoppy and also sooper dooper popular. It’s used so often, in fact, I’m afraid it will go the way of ironic, as in, “Isn’t it ironic that hoppy is used to mean bitter?” No, no it isn’t. Hoppy actually refers to the flowery, aromatic taste and smell released from the hop flower; it has nothing to do with the bitter flavor you can feel on the back of your tongue — that’s just bitterness. That twang of bitter is what is measured in International Bitterness Units, as in, “That beer has the same IBU as my high school algebra teacher.”

A term you’ll often hear used for better or worse is yeasty. This is one you’ll know as soon as you encounter it. The smell of a yeasty beer immediately takes me back to being five or six and “helping” my grandfather bake bread. (I was so impatient to see it rise that the temptation to lift the damp cloth covering the bowl was usually too much — I’d disobey orders only to be disappointed by the unmoving lump of dough.) To me, yeasty beer tastes like someone dipped their sandwich in my pint glass. Pretty sure I’ve kept drinking beer that’s suffered worse.

For sure a bad thing, in my book, is a skunky beer. A beer gets skunked when it is exposed to light while in the bottle, so it happens most often to beer in lighter-colored bottles, such as green and clear. And it really does smell like skunk and taste like the fear of those poor odiferous critters. The BeerAdvocate bros insist that not all beer in green bottles is skunky, that some are brewed to taste like that and it’s just my ignorance and poor palate that makes them all taste like ass to me. So to all of those German pilsner fans out there: congrats on your refined palates — you can have my pint if you’d like. Get drunk as a skunk.