Most of what we call "taste" is really smell. Your tongue handles the basics: sweet, salty, sour, bitter. The details come from your nose, like...

A beer glass does more than hold your drink and look good on the table. Its shape decides where the aroma goes once it leaves...

Ask around at any bar and someone will tell you that an IPA is just a stronger pale ale. Fair enough. They're not wrong. They've...

SRM stands for Standard Reference Method. It's a numeric scale for measuring and describing beer colour, from very pale to nearly black. At one end...

Beer drinkers often use "bitter" as a single word, but it describes two entirely different sensations. Hop bitterness is sharp and resinous, built by hop...

Sour beer gets its character from bacteria and wild yeast that produce lactic acid, giving it a tart, sometimes funky edge. Pale ale is fermented...

"Fruity" craft beer comes from two different places. Hop-driven pale ales and IPAs get their citrus, mango or passionfruit aromas entirely from the hop variety...

IBU (International Bitterness Units) is a lab measurement of the concentration of bittering compounds that hops contribute to a beer. It's a straightforward chemistry number,...

ABV shows alcohol strength, IBU measures bitterness, and terms like dry-hopped, session, hazy, malt-forward, craft and independent describe how a beer is made or tastes....

Tasting beer properly isn't about memorising technical vocabulary; it's about slowing down. Follow four simple steps: look at the beer's colour and clarity, smell it...