Also in medieval times people used to infuse beer with mushrooms, herbs, plants - often psychoactive. I'd argue that this might very well have contributed the dominant taste component.
Take the same base recipe from the article and ferment it with a hefewizen (banana and/or clove flavors and a resulting yeast in suspension haze), Belgian strain ( bubblegum all the way to barnyard aroma), wine yeast, bread yeast or as they mentioned the lambic yeast (resulting in a slight sourness) and you would have totally different beers.
Modern brewers have access to hundreds of different strains just for beer, resulting in different flavors from each.
In simple terms vinegar comes from bacteria and yeast. Yeast eats the sugar making alcohol, Bacteria eats the alcohol and makes acids. Kombucha style. Eventually resulting in vinegar.
Different yeasts eat themselves, and metabolize sugar, with different efficiencies and slightly different chemical pathways. It would not surprise me if this has an effect on the overall end product. Anecdotally, based on my cousin's home brewing experiments, beers brewed with standard baking yeast compared to specialized brewing yeasts are significantly "yeastier" tasting -- they start to die at relatively low alcohol concentrations and so more yeast mass ends up in the final product, I think.
up until that very insightful. but this seems rather counter logical. if the yeast dies earlier it grows less and hence mass should be also less.
having said that i guess less yeast activity means more sugar and starch in the final product.
I re-use my yeast, I have about 10x more yeast after a ferment than I threw in at the start. They are very much alive.
Pro brewers crash cool and/or filter the final product to get a consistent product. You don’t want active yeast making it into the package and creating little bombs. Consumers also expected a clear drink.
Home brewers have always had a more flexible scale in the clarity of beer, leaving traditionally clear styles hazy has been the mark of a home made (and therefore better) beer to a lot of home brewers. The hazy IPAs have flipped this logic on its head. These styles can be brewed with oats, lactose, all kinds of adjuncts that would never clear and add to “mouth feel” for this style of beer. This change in the industry seems to have left some room for the pro brewers that are local sized (like a brewpub + some distribution in the region) to leave their beers hazy for many styles. It does save a step, and running a small brewery is done on razor thin margins.
So, long way to say, yes hazy beer can have more complex flavor, it’s probably the mark of something produced on a less industrial scale, and to many that would be better. Large commercial beer really shoots for the middle, and if your tastes are more complex it won’t do it for you.
I only clear the German traditional styles I brew. Kölsch, Helles, etc. The rest is hazy if it wants to be.
Most of what we perceive as flavor in beer, floral notes, spicy notes, even banana flavor or “horse blanket” which is a real funk flavor for some English beers comes from the microbes. Even in the heavily hopped modern IPAs, the yeast do incredible things to what goes into the fermenter. If you’ve ever sampled “wort” (beer before fermentation) you’ll know what I mean. It’s foul. Hop water tastes like bong water. Yeast turn this into bright mango, pineapple, papaya flavors.
are you kidding? that's one of my highlights when brewing to sip from the wort. it tastes sweet and delicious. i love it.
For example Galaxy I usually avoid if I see it on a label because many people leave it on too long and it gets that hop burn. I’ve talked to people who brew with it well and they leave it in contact for 24 hours or less. Not sure what that process actually looks like since it’s added during primary fermentation.
You’ll get pepper flavors from the most boring grain bill and hop choices you’ve ever seen.
As you get further into brewing, and more expertise, you’ll end up caring more and more about yeast. If you’re chatting with pro brewers, usually if you’re there with a sanitized mason jar when they are harvesting yeast, they’ll give you some of their strain if it’s not something secret. Then end up with way more than they can use.
You can go down the rabbit hole trying to figure out what the best brewers use, like Trillium brewing. There are rumors but they sure won’t admit it, the yeast is the secret sauce, the hops are on the label.