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How to sip, drink and enjoy lager
For many people, lager is a drink that slakes the thirst, cools and relaxes the body and helps the cheese and onion crisps go down. When they're after something to tickle their taste buds, they often reach for a bottle of wine instead.If you are one of them, you're missing out on a whole world of complex and intriguing flavours. It's a fact that can easily get overlooked at the pub, enjoying the company of your friends or concentrating on the football, but beer is an immensely complicated drink, full of nuances and enough hints of this and that to keep Oz Clarke going all night.
And, as Oz would no doubt agree, the best way to find out what lager has to offer, to get a real sense of its complexity and variation, is to have a proper tasting session. All you need are some glasses, a fridge, a variety of beers and some friends who are prepared to put a little time towards pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That shouldn't be a problem.
Give your lagers a minimum of four hours in the fridge beforehand, and avoid any salty or flavoured snacks, because they will only spoil your palate. Use big red wine glasses if you have them. That might feel a bit strange, but it is practical - you can swirl beer around in a big wine glass to release its aromas without getting it all over your shirt.
Uncomfortable as it may feel, swirling and sniffing is important. You might not want to try it down the pub, but a good long sniff will give you a revealing noseful of the subtle aromas of hops, malt and yeast that have gone into this complicated drink. You'll get lovely wafts of hoppiness, teasing sweetness from the malted barley and hints of citrus.
Then comes the drinking. Don't guzzle it down, but don't sip either. Instead, take a good mouthful and let it run gently over your tongue. You'll taste the juicy sweetness of the malt, followed by the gentle, tangy bitterness of the hops and, depending on the lager, all kinds of tantalising hints, sometimes fruity, sometimes biscuity, but always interesting.
Keep thinking about what you're tasting as the beer glides away down the back of your tongue. The finish can sometimes be very different from what has gone before, leaving an aftertaste of appealing, yeasty dryness, toasty grainy flavours and the tang of spicy hops.
Some lagers are, of course, a lot more interesting than others, and that is what makes a proper tasting so revealing. Tasting beers side by side and keeping your mind on what you're getting will quickly reveal all kinds of complexities, and teach you what is a balanced lager that turns its ingredients into something deeply interesting, and what is forgettable.
Once you've had a proper tasting, it becomes hard to get out of the habit of really noticing what you're drinking when you're out and about. Paying attention to your beer will reveal a whole new world of flavour, and make sure that you get more out of your lager than ever before.
In addition, just as lager's complex flavours are often ignored, so are its possibilities as a complement to food. Lager's subtlety and its delicate balance of sweetness and bitterness make it an excellent accompaniment to all kinds of food that many people would usually only consider eating with wine.
The range of foods for which lager is a great match is still being explored, but there are plenty of proven successes. The delicate but spicy flavours of Thai food, for example, are a superb match for lager. Just about all seafood and shellfish, sausages of any kind, pork, pizza, pasta and spicy foods all go very well with lager, working with the gentle hops and malt and the distinctive lager fizz to create a delicious combination.
Curiously, cheese, widely regarded as an ideal match for wine, has an effect on the palate that leads even many wine experts to discourage most wines as a natural accompaniment. Beers, on the other hand, including lager, can work very nicely with cheeses. Similarly, the vinegar used in many salad dressing clashes directly with wine, but works beautifully with lager.
So be brave. Next time you're in a restaurant and the drinks order is being taken, and the familiar formula of red for red meat and white for white meat is being applied, break the mould by checking the lager list and giving yourself a new taste experience. At the very least, you'll get a lot of attention, and you might even start a trend.