How To Cleanse Your Palate For Beer Tasting

Premium crackers, Daisy Cutter Pale, Pure Project hazy, Moose Drool Brown Ale
Crackers & beer: it’s a thing

You’re having a flight of beers, or you are at a beer festival, or bottle share, maybe you do your drinking from the kitchen table, or are busy sweeping an Untappd board.

Whatever the hell it is, you’re going through a lot of beers.

But you want to taste the next beer as genuine as you can. The cleanest way. I am here to try and help.

These are MY real-world picks, not generic trash results I got off the Internet.

How to cleanse your palate between beers

  • Crackers. Unsalted crackers are the best but salted still work.
  • Chips. This works for when you are out in the field drinking. Most places don’t have crsckers but they have chips.
  • Nuts. Mostly a tip for when you are in a bar or at home. Not that practical anywhere else.
  • Water. Super boring option and not the best way to reset your palate, but usually there is some around and you should be drinking some anyway.
  • Your hand. What the hell!? Your hand!? Yes. Give your hand a good lick. Taste that hand – you know where it has been, it’s fine. Almost give it a hickey even. This is the best option when there is nothing around and by the way, I do it often.
  • A different style. If you are stringing a bunch of IPAs together it’s a good idea to break it up with a Stout or Brown or something. You would be surprised how improved a hoppy beer can be, drinking one after an opposite style.

Again, these are all ones I do myself. If there is science behind this, it’s unintentional.

Resetting your palate before a different beer is something I highly recommend though.

Non-beer geeks (and even some actual beer geeks) might scoff at you. Let them. Be sad for them. They just don’t know. But now you do.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (what the Internet thinks)

a sixpack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale bottles
Sierra Pale Ale, there is nothing more important

This is an appreciation post for Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. I feel like I can’t have a beer geeky blog without more acknowledgment of the greatest of all time Pale Ale.

Yes, to many of us Sierra may taste outdated. But it is the greatest “outdated” taste of all time and the best palate-reset beer in the business.

And as we are about to see, as Craft Beer goes, so goes Sierra.

Sierra Pale is a great barometer for how beer/Craft Beer is going. Just look at the search volume for Sierra and it totally goes along with how popular Craft Beer has been in the past fifteen years

Search volume for Sierra Nevada Pale

Yes, you read that chart right, we are at our lowest level of the Internet searching for things related to Sierra Nevada Pale. What a sad world we live in.

What is everyone asking the Internet about Sierra Nevada Pale? These are the top searches:

Continue reading “Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (what the Internet thinks)” →

Does Beer Clean Your System?

A clear beer from Level Brewing to clean the system
This Level Brewing beer should clear things up

It sure seems like drinking beer cleans your system because the morning after a round of Hazy IPAs can be brutal. It feels like you must have cleared out everything.

It makes sense that it feels a night of alcohol poisoning heavy beer drinking, would purge your system of whatever weak ass crap that is hiding out in your body.

Does beer clean your system?

The boiled down answer is no, it does not clean your system. Probably not how you feel like it does anyway. But, there is some cleaning that I will look at in a bit.

Drinking beer (or any alcohol for that matter) will take water from your system. It will also make your kidneys work harder because you are dehydrating yourself with the boozing.

So all the things being “cleansed” from your body are mostly the byproduct of being dehydrated.

You are making your body work its butt off to get back to where it was prior to drinking. So it feels like you are cleansing in some weird way. But really you are just hungover.

Why Does Beer Dehydrate You When It’s Mostly Water?!

The effects of alcohol, whether it’s drinking beer (or whatever other booze you damn well fancy) for some messed up reason, makes you pee a lot.

Yes, I know what you are thinking right now “Well of course it does, you damn beer blogging idiot, it is liquid!”

Yeah well, get this weird fact I never knew, the alcohol in beer makes you PEE EVEN MORE THAN THE AMOUNT OF BEER YOU DRANK!

I guess that is the dehydrate part. (duh, Mike)

Continue reading “Does Beer Clean Your System?” →

Is Beer Good For Plants?

Is beer good for plants
Here ya go, plant, have some beer (ya drunk)!

There is a tale out there that beer is good for plants. That the minerals and things in beer are good for growth. And that there are nutrients in beer that help with garden soil, and help with the growth of your plants.

Maybe even your houseplant would be totally into an IPA or Lager.

I always felt like simply pouring a beer into a plant would be bad for the plant. But, I also don’t know what the hell I am talking about most of the time.

So that prompted me to finally figure this out for you and for me…

Is Beer Good For Plants?

No. Not really anyway. Good would be stretching it.

Your plants want clean and clear water. And maybe some occasional actual really good plant food.

It does want not some terrible Sour IPA that you tried and couldn’t finish. Or the day-old and flat Coors Light that was sitting out all night.

What people might assume is good for the plants (the carbs, the yeast, minerals, the water) is a small benefit, at best. Hardly measurable. And it would be best if you diluted the beer before you dump it in.

In fact, some believe adding beer to your plant-feeding routine, blocks the plant from getting proper nutrition.

Plants want complex carbs and beer is not a complex carb, it is a worthless card. Well, worthless to some, not to me. I rather enjoy worthless carbs.

Worthless carbs are what life is about.

Continue reading “Is Beer Good For Plants?” →