It’s a lifelong bargain many of us make with ourselves on a weekly basis – trying to balance the enjoyment of beer with the fact that we know it will likely make us feel slightly unwell in one way or another?
One of those ways is in the stomach, where beer can make us feel bloated and give us stomach ache, at the time of drinking and the next day.
Apparently, a beer expert tells us, this is all because we have been pouring it wrongly. We have been leaving gasses in the beer that end up in our stomach, when we could have released them during the pour and made the beer taste better at the same time.
First things first, use a glass
Max Bakker is a Master Cicerone, a ‘beer sommelier’ if you will. In a video posted by Business Insider, Bakker explains that first of all, we need to be sure to drink beer out of a glass rather than straight from the bottle or can.
The next thing to consider is that the slow pour into a titled glass technique is the beginning of stomach problems. This results in a small head or no head at all, and Bakker believes that “without that collar of foam it’s not really a beer”.
Pouring in that way means the carbonation is not released in the glass but is released in the stomach instead. CO2 ends up in the stomach, and can end up fizzing up inside us in the way it sometimes does in the glass. Just try dropping nachos in a glass of beer and watch it go crazy – that’s what can happen in our stomach.
The high pour is key
Instead of a slow pour with the bottle touched to the glass, we should use a high pour, resulting in a nice big foam. “Foam always turns into beer”, Bakker points out.
In that foam, we also taste the “sweetness of the malt and the bitterness of the hops,” while “the integrity of the aroma underneath the foam” is protected in each sip.
In Bakker’s demo pour, the head is around one-third of the glass, possibly almost half.
Maybe all those times we questioned bar staff for pouring heads that are too large, they were actually trying to give us the best drink all along. Some of the time, anyways…
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Image credit: Unsplash
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