Beertasting Quotes

“Some beers, especially canned ones, taste exactly the same all the way through. The flavour you get when the beer first hits your tongue is the same as the one you get 'in the middle' of the sip, and in the 'finish'. In the case of many cheaply made beers it's likely that the flavour, such as it is, will die away completely by the time the finish should have arrived, and that the 'aftertaste' will be slightly unpleasant ... Structure is vital to a successful beer ... Complexity is vital to the satisfaction rating of a fine beer ... Typically, a complex beer will have not just various strands of flavour chiming in all at once, like a musical chord, but flavours that are introduced at one point of the tasting process and then recede ... Some beers come up with surprising new flavours that were not predicted in anything that's come before, and just occasionally produce something really wild and wacky ...The most important question to ask of a beer is 'Do I like this, and do I want some more?' There's precious little point ploughing on with a beer you just don't like, no matter how great its international status. But it's also important to attempt a little objectivity, and separate out the question 'Do I like this?' from the quite independent question, 'Does this beer achieve what it sets out to do - is it good at being what it wants to be?”
― Andrea Gillies, Gillies Guide to World Beers