Serving beer sounds like slap in the face, duh, kind of topic, but every time I give my friends some of my home brews they end up pouring everything down and maybe even tapping the bottle to make sure no one single drop of beer is wasted…
… the problem with this is that my beer is unfiltered…
… and unfiltered beer will have yeast sediment at the bottom of the bottle… that means that if you pour the entire beer down, there is a great chance that some of the yeast will end up in your beer, make it cloudy and give it a yeasty taste…
Many brewers go to great lengths to make sure they brew clear beers and it would be a shame to mess that up by not serving the beer right…
Now, I don’t know if there is such thing as the ‘Perfect Pour’, but here is the way I would recommend you do it and the reasons why…
So, the way you go about serving home brewed beer is to pour the beer into a glass tilted at a 45° angle until it is about half full and then hold the glass upright and pour the beer hard into the glass while making sure no yeast ends up in the glass… you may have to keep a little bit of beer in the bottle if necessary…
This should give you a nice head formation (foam) on your beer…
Now, there are times when you actually DO want the yeast in your beer… beer styles like Hefeweizens are perfect examples of this… for those beers you want to get the yeast out of the bottle…
Here’s how to get the yeast out of the bottle…
The thing to keep in mind is that cold temperatures help yeast drop to the bottom of the beer… and the colder the beer the tighter the yeast will pack itself at the bottom… so if you want to get the yeast out you are better off warming up the beer a little…
The problem with that is that you don’t want to warm up all the beer just to get the yeast out…
Instead what you would do is to serve your beer as usual and leave just a little bit in the bottle. You would then cup the bottom of the bottle with your hand and ‘warm it’ up for about a minute or two. Swirl the bottle about every 15 seconds until you see the yeast dissolve into the beer and at that point you can just pour all that into your already served beer…
When you are drinking Hefeweizens, you will notice your beer turn more cloudy once you add the yeast to the beer and you will also notice a huge increase in phenolic aromas and flavors…
If you don’t like those flavors or aromas commonly found in Hefeweizens then don’t add the yeast and it will be minimized…
