6 Top Tips For How To Review Beer

Beer tasting note cards can help you to structure your review. Check my Etsy Shop for kits

As members of the craft beer and beer tasting community, we like to write reviews of the beers that we're tasting and share them with other people. But how do we get across our thoughts on beers to other people? And where can we share these? Here are my top tips for how to review beer, and where you can share these thoughts.

How To Review Beer Tip 1: Get Ready To Taste

Tip number one -  you want to get yourself in the correct mindset for beer tasting.  This may mean that you need a particular glass, maybe you sit in a particular place, maybe you have a little ritual of cleaning your glass and pouring the glass out before you start. By doing a similar thing repeatedly, your mind will remember this as muscle memory and know that you're putting yourself into a situation where you want to fully appreciate a beer. Beer tasting and writing a review can be very different from enjoying a few beers with friends. So if you want to seriously review and assess a beer, then put yourself into a comfortable situation where you can do that meaningfully.

How To Review Beer Tip 2: Always Use A Glass

A snifter glass is good for dark beers

Make sure that you always use a glass. Part of our beer tasting senses include looking at the beer.  This will inform what our brain thinks we're going to taste before we start. Sometimes this can be deceiving, but we are going to drink beer with an open mind. By putting our beer into a glass, we're also opening up the aromas and flavours, and using an appropriate glass for the beer that you are tasting is always really useful. I like a Teku as a standard or rounded glass, you may want to consider using tasting glasses, which you can put about a third of beer into so that you can just sip on it and taste it in a meaningful way. You may want to find the exact glass that goes with the beer style that you are tasting. Or you could use a nice snifter glass which is particularly good for dark beers.

Want to know more about beer glassware - here is my blog post Beer Glassware: An Introduction.

How To Review Beer Tip 3: What Order Will You Assess The Beer Elements?

Remember that beer aroma is volatile

Tip number three is what order you are going to assess the beer elements in. I like to write down my opinions on appearance, then aroma, then taste. However, I will be assessing the beer as soon as I open the can because you're going to get some volatile aroma notes at that point. I like to take a sip before I really get into the beer tasting so that I can get an overall impression straightaway.  This helps me to also find out what ingredient is most prominent - hops, malt, yeast or something else. I then assess appearance, aroma, and taste. You can do these in whatever order works for you. Having a structure for your beer reviews is really useful so that you can do them the same every time and so that people you are sharing them with can see what you are trying to put across.

A good beer vocabulary is very useful at this point.  Think about words that everyone can understand and relate to. For example, a beer can sometimes remind you of something personal that only you know, like your grandma's perfume. But if you say ‘this smells like my grandma's perfume’, no one else is going to know exactly what that means. It might mean that it reminds you of lilies and floral notes. So when you have those sensory moments where you remember an event or a person, you then need to pick that apart and think of some universal descriptors that other people can understand as well.

Need beer tasting tips? Check out these blog posts on how to taste beer.

How To Review Beer Tip 4: You Are The Expert In What You Taste

You need to remember that your opinion is valid, and that you can have an opinion that is different from others. You are an expert on what you taste.  I’m going to say that again for you: You are an expert on what you taste.  So if you find a beer to be minty, but nobody else does, that doesn't mean that you are wrong. It just means that that's how you are picking up that flavour.  It is also a good idea to avoid reading what's on the can or any tasting notes until after you have done your beer review as this can influence what you think you are tasting. Listening to what other people say about a beer, if you are in a situation where you are with more people, can also alter what you taste.  If someone says a particular flavour or an aroma, you may start to pick that up even if you didn't before. When you want to mindfully review a beer, a quiet environment is key.

How To Review Beer Tip 5: Beer Style Knowledge is Helpful

Try different beer styles whenever you can

Top tip number five - keep in mind the style of beer that is in your glass.  A black IPA, a West Coast IPA and a New England IPA are all from the IPA family. But they are all very different. If you tried to review and black IPA thinking about the characteristics of a New England IPA, it will be very surprising to you. It wouldn't be what you would expect at all, and you might not like it as much as if you had thought about it in terms of the correct beer style.  It's important to have an understanding of beer styles. These help you to use the correct descriptors and to understand what is in your glass.  Beer style guidelines also help you to determine if it's something you're going to enjoy or if it's something new to try and to pick apart.

Bear in mind though that lots of beers will cross over beer style guidelines. There's always some experimentation and something new to learn in beer.  Having a good grounding of a beer style and having some basic understanding of what that beer might be like when you try it is going to help you to really assess what's in your glass, but remember to also have fun and an open mind!

If you would like to learn more about beer styles, why not join my beer membership The Beer Tent Society where we look at a new beer style every month? Find out more about The Beer Tent Society here.

How To Review Beer Tip 6: Where Will You Share Your Review?

My final tip for how to review beer is to think about where you are posting, or where you plan to put your beer review. Shorter reviews are good for places like Untapped or Twitter.  You might want to write a very long review going really in-depth into what you're tasting on somewhere like a blog, on Facebook or in Facebook groups. You may want to have a really good photo of your beer and then a medium-length description on Instagram. Thinking about where you're going to share your beer review and who you're sharing it with will help you to tailor the way that you write it.

A beer journal can keep your reviews in order, you can look back at what you’ve had and it’s creation can be very mindful.

Of course, there are other ways that you can share your beer reviews, or you can just keep them for yourself. I like to keep a beer tasting note journal. I started this originally when we used to go on craft beer day trips, and phone batteries weren't as good. My phone battery would run out while I was trying to write my reviews and I had nowhere to put them. So I wanted something that was pen and paper-based and with me all the time. I found with my beer journals that I can look back at the beers that I've tried and it brings back good memories. It's quite a nice mindful way of keeping a journal that really helped me during lockdown in 2020.

Having a beer while updating my beer journal

I leave little spaces to put pictures of the beers next to my reviews. You can do this any way you like – I’ll often also use coloured pens and crafting tape to jazz up the pages.  I've kept several of these now and I keep them in little archive folders in my beer studio to refer back to.

When a beer journal is full I archive it and keep it in my studio for reference

You can also keep notes on your phone, or save them in cloud storage, like Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive so that you can look back at them to see what you've tried.

So those are my tips for how to review beer. Remember that beer is subjective and taste is subjective. We all taste things in different ways and we will enjoy things in different ways. You don't need to really like a beer just because somebody else says that it's the best beer ever.   Like the beers that you like and try the beers that you want to try. Remember that there is a brewer behind that beer, and they are trying to be proud of their product. There's a big difference between a beer that has faults like off flavours and what some people call a ‘bad beer’, but actually is just a beer that is not to their personal taste. Think about the wording that you use in your beer reviews. And sometimes it's better just not to review a beer at all. But most of all, make sure you have fun. Beer is about enjoyment and finding a shared interest in something really creative. Have fun, and just enjoy the beers that you're drinking.

If you need help with your beer reviews, I have a beer tasting kit on my Etsy shop that includes beer tasting note cards to help you structure your reviews and a 6-page beer tasting guide.  Head on over to the Etsy Shop here to find the beer tasting printables kit now.