Building your Beer Vocabulary

Hello friends - Loy here, Administrator of Many Things here at MAP, here to help you grow what you know about beer!  Have you ever tasted a beer and thought to yourself, “that tastes like…” - and then your brain goes completely blank?  All words you know completely vanish in that moment, and you are lost for any form of descriptive vocabulary?  You’re not alone.  Even as a certified beer judge and Advanced Cicerone®, that happens to me too!  Expanding your beer vocabulary can help you combat that blank-mind-situation, so let’s talk about ways you can build that beer lexicon in your brain. 

In my experience, the best way I’ve found to expand my beer vocabulary is by tasting beer while simultaneously looking at words that may describe that beer.  By sipping the beer at the same time that I am looking at beer-related words, I am able to make connections between what I’m tasting and smelling and the words my brain has to describe those experiences.  (Your brain is essentially connecting your sensory experience with words to describe it by integrating information from your taste receptors on your tongue with olfactory information from your nose in a region of your brain called the orbitofrontal cortex - which is then able to create a “flavor map” that associates specific taste experiences with learned verbal labels. Whew!  Our brains are so neat!)

So how do you find lists of beer words to look at while you’re sipping beer?  I love using flavor wheels - of which there are many of versions online! (A quick search will bring up quite a few options specific to beer.)  For me, it’s helpful to focus on one ingredient at a time, which seems to help my brain narrow down what I’m tasting.  For example, I’ll start with malt.  I’ll sip a beer, (let’s say our Bavarian Velvet Munich Dunkel), and look at this malt flavor wheel to see if I can start to connect words to what I’m tasting.

Once I think I’ve found some good words to describe the malt flavors I’m getting, I’ll switch to sipping and thinking about hops (and I’ll use a hop flavor wheel to help me find hop words.)

And that’s how you start!  By actively thinking about your beer while you’re drinking it, you’ll open up a world of vocabulary for yourself to start to describe the beers you’re sipping and impress your fellow beer-loving friends. Cheers!