Demystifying Craft Beer Jargon

When drinking beer around some beer snobs, "holier than thou" beer drinkers or even on the bottles of some beer, I sometimes run into terms and jargon that I have to take note of to look up later. This will be the first of many posts that will look at these words and define them and give them context. We will eventually not get lost when talking about beer with others or maybe even get to the point we can show off our beer knowledge.

• Barrel
• In the U.S. a barrel of beer holds 31 gallons or 2 kegs.
• Keg
• One keg of beer is 15.5 gallons or half of a barrel
• Case
• A case of beer is traditionally 24 12 oz bottles or an equivalent of that. This comes out to be about 7 cases of beer per keg.
• Body
• How thick a beer is. I usually only see this word being used in the positive, as in "a liquid has body", not "a liquid doesn't have body".
• Mouthfeel
• Describes how a liquid feels while in a person's mouth. This can be very similar to the body of that liquid, but can also describe the maltyness, acidity, and dryness of a liquid
• Dry Hopping
• Adding hops after the boiling process to the wort either immediately after the cooling process, during fermentation, or even sometimes (rarely) in the kegging/bottle conditioning stage. This adds aromatic elements to the beer and in some cases cuts the overall bitterness.
• IBU
• International Bitterness Units is a scale used to illustrate how bitter a beer is. Most beers fall between 1 and 100. However some brewers are pushing the envelop of their beers and raising the IBUs beyond 100. In my opinion, at a certain point, like Scoville units and hot sauces, the beer just becomes flat out bitter and I cant tell between one high IBU beer and the next.
• IPA
• India Pale Ale is a style of beer that comes from the colonial and imperial ages of Great Britain. Before the advent of refrigeration and pasteurization British brewers added more hops and increased alcohol levels preserving lighter beers for a long trip around the Cape of Good Hope of Africa to the Indian Subcontinent, which was a colony of the Empire (UK not Star Wars).
• Trub
• Sediment made of hop particles, proteins, and inactive yeast in the bottom of a brew kettle, fermentor, or even in a bottle from conditioning.
• Wort
• The result of boiling water with malt and hops before the addition of yeast in beer making process.
• Zymurgy
• The science of fermentation or brewing beer.

Next time I will review a reader's choice beer and I will also look at why distributors are important in the beverage industry, maybe even with some inside source information.