How to serve your beer

When tasting beer, always keep in mind the golden rule:

NEVER taste your beer directly from the bottle or can it came in.

To fully appreciate the finer points of a beer’s appearance, aroma and taste, it is vital to sample your beer from a glass. Glasses used for tasting must be clean and, most importantly, free from detergent residue, as this inhibits head formation and retention.

Head retention

Head retention is one of the criteria considered in judging a beer’s quality, therefore, you must pour the beer in such a way as to create a decent head of foam. To do this, move the glass progressively away from the bottle while pouring. The size of the head will depend to a large extent on the beer style (lager, ale, stout etc), but you should expect to see somewhere between 2 and 4 centimetres of foam.

The head is important for two major reasons :

1. It allows the beer’s aroma and other perfumes to escape
2. It protects the beer from possible oxidation and resultant taste deterioration.

Correct beer temperature

It is also important to serve your beer at the correct temperature. Serving it too cold (as we Aussies are often accused of doing!) will mask some of the beer’s more subtle flavours.

A list of the optimum serving temperatures for the different beer styles is given below.

Pale Lagers	7 - 10°C
Amber & Dark Lagers	10 - 13°C
Pale Ales	10 - 13°C
Dark Ales & Stouts	13 - 15.5°C