House Tastings

[PatFiori]

Hello,

I'm currently working up in a brewpub in Ottawa. We would like to start hosting tutored tastings to the general public as we feel there is a market. I am currently trying to put together a program. Has anybody done this? I'm curious about how long it should be, should there be food and the like. Any suggestions would be helpful!

Cheers
Patrick

[PMR]

Check out Stone's "Beer University" program. They hold it once a month on Tuesdays, costs $20, and lasts 2-3 hours. They focus on educating the customer about different beers, mostly outside of their brewery. It's a fun way to teach your customers about beer, and hopefully they will appreciate your beer more as a result.

http://www.stonebrew.com/calendar/

[Dr Malt]

Patrick:

I have been watching your post for some ideas too. I have been asked to conduct a "beer tasting " for a local garden club and in late September. The people in this club are more the wine drinking crowd, but some are interested in beer. I have a rough draft of a program, but I am open to ideas at this stage. Here is my plan so far.

1. Total length of tasting about 60 - 90 minutes.

2. Ingredients in Beer - Water, malt , hops , yeast with samples of each to see, smell and taste. I am thinking base malt, Munich, medium caramel, chocolate, roasted barley. About 4 varieties of hops. These examples should coordinate with the flavors in the selected beers.

3. Beers to taste
Lager and light ale(Show yeast flavor differences of lager and ale).
IPA (Show hop variety aroma, flavor & bitterness from samples above. Cascade hops)
American wheat and Bavarian wheat (Show flavor influence of yeast strains)
Amber ale ( Show flavors of caramel malts)
Porter ( Show dark roasted malt flavors)

4. Beer defects with samples
Light struck beer
Oxidized beer
sour beer
Old hops (cheesy)


With each sample, I was planning on talking about the characteristics, flavor attributes, etc. I was not planning on a lot of history of beer.

So, I hope this is helpful and again, I am open to changes and suggestions.

Dr Malt

[PatFiori]

Thanks Dr. Malt,

What you have is definitely a good template. I'm assuming each step will be interactive? I have come to roughly the same position. We will definitely be catering to different crowds. I am thinking a little more history whilst a little less defect. The problem I'm having is that I would like this to be an on-going feature so the template has to be adaptable to new ideas. That is where I'm hitting a bit of a snag.

Patrick

[Damase]

Garden Club

Dr Malt,

I too am giving a presentation to our local garden club. But since it is a garden club, I am concentrating on the plants that go into beer. I'll be primarily discussing Hops and how to grow them (decorative vines as well as for beer) and other topics like that. After all it is a garden club. Then I will have some samples of beer.

Damase

[AlexisScarlett]

Yes food-- there is a host of involuntary physical reactions to food that help with tasting and enhances the experience (saliva formation, smell preception, etc.) plus you are really catering a party and what is a party without food?

Play to your audience. Gardeners will be impressed with hops, of course, and use all the botanical words you want. They will also be impressed with malting and barley. Malting is only germination interrupted. And barley grass is an easy and impressive take away gift. Time to reclaim the terroir and farmland aspect for beer, barley and hops too ( given the high end aspect those wine guys have been able to attach to their product)

And like a first date-- I would not be jumping into talking about defects. If they want to come back and learn more, then great you can do a bit about what could go wrong.

Also fruits veggies herbs and spices that show up in beers are fun for people that grow all of the above.

[Dr Malt]

Great idea to focus on the growing plants (hops) side. I have had a few spouses (the guys) from the garden club over helping do some homebrewing and they are fascinated with the flavor aspects of beer including defects. That is why I had a little of this in the session. One of these guys actually drinks Corona regularly and didn't real that the "flavor" in Corona is skunky until I demonstrated it in some light struck beer I produced using my homebrew on the hood of my car in front of him. One sniff and he said "yea, that's Corona!"

Thanks.

Dr Malt