Is That Grapefruit in My Beer? The Rise of a Global Taste Community for Craft Beer

Jeffrey M. Pilcher and Valeria Mantilla-Morales, University of Toronto

Many people think of beer as a light, refreshing beverage that is enjoyable mostly for sociability and alcohol rather than taste. Some of the best-selling brands in North America, such as Budweiser, Molson, and Corona, are indeed pale, fizzy, and light -- some would even say bland. But with the rise of the craft beer movement since the 1970s, more flavorful beers have begun to appear in bottle shops and brewpubs.[1] Known in Britain as the “Campaign for Real Ale” (CAMRA), the movement also comprises a growing number of consumers who take their beer seriously -- looking, sniffing, tasting, and appraising in a manner more often associated with fine wine. There are now websites such as Beeradvocate.com and Ratebeer.com where tens of thousands of participants from around the world rate, review, debate, and at times exchange beers. Although wine appreciation is often considered to be a more serious and exclusive pursuit than drinking beer, modern cultures of connoisseurship emerged simultaneously around the two beverages and in some ways brewing professionals actually influenced winemakers.

In this short essay, we examine the craft beer movement through a historical and textual analysis of the language of beer connoisseurship[2] We start with the canonical works of the beer writer Michael Jackson, known to his legion of followers as the “Beer Hunter.” Jackson’s works provide a historical lexicon of the development of beer criticism, from the 1970s when he began writing with the technical language of industrial quality control to the 1990s when he employed rich, poetic metaphors to evoke the aesthetic qualities of exceptional beers. We also seek to move beyond professional beer writing to explore the larger taste community through a “distant reading” of beer reviewing websites.[3] We begin with an ethnographic exploration of how amateur beer tasters interact with the technology and community of these social media platforms. We then sample the reviews of various popular beers and use word cloud software to identify the most commonly used descriptions. In order to visualize this data, both the close reading of Jackson’s work and the distant reading of the larger beer tasting community, we use a popular tasting tool called a “flavor wheel.”

Wine has long been considered a drink of wealthy, who developed elaborate rituals for its consumption. Nevertheless, the modern culture of connoisseurship has emerged quite recently through attempts to market wine more broadly to growing ranks of middle-class consumers around the world.[4] This promotional work takes place in bottle shops, restaurants, and tasting seminars under the guidance of wine masters (sommeliers), whose authority is based on their ability to identify the year of harvest (vintage) and the regional origins (appelation) or even the precise vineyard for any wine from around the world. The 2012 documentary Somm, directed by Jason Wise, follows the intense training of aspiring masters as they memorize winery data and hone their senses, while drinking enormous quantities of wine and spitting it back out.

Perhaps the most valuable learning tool for the aspiring connoisseur is the “Wine Aroma Wheel,” a device introduced in 1983 by Dr. Ann Noble, Professor Emeritus of Enology at the University of California, Davis. The wheel is essentially a pocket guide to wine vocabulary, classified hierarchically, to assist users in identifying common aromas. At the highest level (innermost on the circle) were general categories such as fruity, spicy, woody, earthy, and chemical. Each level outward added more specificity; a fruit could be citrus, berry, tree (or stone), tropical, or dried. A tree fruit, in turn, could resemble cherry, apricot, peach, or apple. The terminology was strictly metaphoric, with the purpose of learning to associate olfactory perceptions with sensory memories. Although originally intended to facilitate communication among researchers, the wine wheel has become widely popular among consumers too and is available from www.winearomawheel.com in laminated plastic and printed on t-shirts.[5]

The inspiration for the wine wheel originated with sensory researchers in the cider and beer industries, and particularly Morton Meilgaard, a Ph.D. flavor chemist from the University of Copenhagen working in the 1970s at the Strohs Brewing Company of Detroit. In seeking to create a common flavor terminology for chemical researchers, quality control tasting panels, and other industry professionals, the researchers avoided aesthetic judgments such as “good” and “bad” as well as metaphoric terms whose meaning could vary according to circumstances. In a 1979 article introducing the beer flavor wheel, Meilgaard and his coauthors provided chemical reference standards where possible; for example, the organic compound 6-Nonenal evoked a “melony” aroma. They also included a column of “comments, synonyms, definitions” with the warning that these terms “have been used in the past but should now be discouraged in favour of the more precise description given by the recommended terms. Thus the term 0910 Acetic is preferred to ‘vinegary’.”[6]

Unlike Noble, who foresaw a popular application for her wine wheel, Meilgaard intended the beer wheel to be used strictly by professionals. He explained in a New York Times article: “Brewers don’t want beer drinkers to be aware of beer’s major and minor components, only its overall taste.”[7] It was not until 1989 that advertisers emblazoned the flavor wheel across a pint of beer in the British newspaper The Guardian under the headline: “Perfect Draught Bass. A delicate balance of fruit, grass, and leather.” The ad explained that skilled flavor testers offered “the only sure way to keep every pint of Draught Bass we make as distinctive as the original 1777 brew.... Naturally, we would never expect you to worry about the subtleties that keep our experts engrossed for hours." [8] The decade’s delay in publicizing the flavor wheel may have been caused by intra-corporate rivalries between brewing and marketing departments.

With the growth of craft beer production in the 1980s, however, consumers began to reclaim brewing skills and language from professionals, while demanding more flavorful beers than the pale lagers that dominated the North American market at midcentury. The craft movement grew in large part out of homebrewing, which had been technically illegal in the United States until 1979, and the rapid proliferation of brewing clubs, beer festivals, and competitions encouraged amateurs to pay more attention to subtle and not-so-subtle flavors. Homebrewing also provided the impetus for microbreweries, as amateurs came to believe they could turn their hobby into a successful business. While most of these early entrepreneurs went bust, enough of them succeeded to create a viable market for small-scale equipment manufacturers and suppliers, which in turn made it easier for newcomers to enter the market. By 2014, the Brewers’ Association counted 3,814 microbreweries and brewpubs in the United States alone.[9]

The bard of modern craft brewing was a rumpled British newspaperman named Michael Jackson. Born in 1942 to a working-class, Jewish family in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, he loved modern English literature and Samuel Smith’s beer, which led naturally to a career in journalism. His first story, published in a local paper at the age of sixteen, was entitled “This is Your Pub,” and after twenty years as a London reporter and foreign correspondent, he returned to his original muse. In doing so, he became a pioneer in the field of lifestyle journalism, which served to guide cosmopolitan tourists to the world’s best hotels, resorts, food, wine, and beer. [10]

Jackson’s first major work, The World Guide to Beer (1977), focused primarily on Europe, especially Germany, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and the United Kingdom, but also included breweries from Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America. His next book, the Pocket Guide to Beer (1982, with regular updates thereafter), kept readers informed about the best new microbreweries opening around the world. A six-part BBC series, The Beer Hunter (1991), and a comprehensive volume entitled Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion (1993) gained him countless new followers. With these and other publications, as well as ceaseless travel and correspondence, Jackson situated himself at the center of an elaborate network of craft brewers, writers, and consumers, as well as corporate brewers and professionals, a position he retained until his death from Parkinson’s Disease in 2007.

Jackson’s early publications provide an ideal source for tracing the historical development of the language of beer connoisseurship. Craft brewers and industry professionals alike have testified to his influence in defining regional beer styles and in shifting the emphasis of judging and criticism from dry industry terminology used to identify defects toward a more colorful language for celebrating the unique flavor characteristics of individual beers.[11] Jackson researched the original World Guide on a shoestring, largely by surveying breweries on available styles and production methods. This resulted in more quantitative data on original gravities and alcohol by volume and only general descriptions of the actual taste of these beers.

Just five years later, with the Pocket Guide of 1982, Jackson began to develop a bold new vocabulary for reviewing beers, influenced by wine writers such as Hugh Johnson. A decade on, with the Beer Companion, the descriptions had become still more nuanced and poetic. In reading the 1982 Guide, we listed 83 separate descriptive terms, while in the 1993 Companion we counted almost 50 percent more or a total of 128 terms. Admittedly, the latter volume is about twice as long as the former, but much of the additional material focused on production methods and beer culture, so the larger number of reviews in 1993 mostly reflected the growth of microbreweries since 1982. Having generated raw data in the form of these descriptive terms, we input them into spreadsheets and sought to analyze and display them.

Figure 4: Raw data for 1982

Figure 5: Raw data for 1993

Technologies of spatial visualization -- commonly known as maps -- have been used for millennia to produce and convey geographic knowledge, but the microcomputer revolution makes it possible for non-experts to create compelling visualizations for all kinds of data. Nevertheless, these new visualizations are only as accurate as the data in their spreadsheets and the algorithms that process and display it. Flavor wheels can be generated using the same methods as the family trees produced by DNA testing, but their validity depends on biological assumptions that do not easily transfer from one field to another. Rather than toss the data into the black box of a computer program and trust what comes out, we constructed our flavor wheels by hand to make explicit the assumptions behind them.

We started with the neuroscientists’ observation that human experiences of flavor represent a gestalt constructed from all five senses, sorted through taste memories of meals past.[12] Although sight (color and clarity) and sound (the fizz produced by carbonation) contribute to our enjoyment of beer, we limited our analysis to words for taste, smell, and texture or mouthfeel. Even here, there can be considerable overlap between the senses, as Meilgaard acknowledged in his beer wheel. Indeed, he included mouthfeel under taste, although subsequent research has considered these two categories to be distinct.[13] Noble avoided these dilemmas by listing only the aromas of wine.

Having established the highest-level categories of taste, aroma, and mouthfeel, we tentatively assigned each term to a category, while recognizing the possibility of overlap. After sorting the spreadsheet, we broke each category down into subfields. For this step, we consulted Meilgaard’s flavor wheel as well as alternate versions developed by the popular beer writers Randy Mosher and Marella Amato.[14] To keep as close as possible to Jackson’s language, we named categories using terms from the original sources.

At times, Jackson provided hints about his personal categorizations in his writings and archive, for example, by describing the term “old books” as “earthy.” Moreover, because he had a deep technical knowledge of how brewing affected taste, we tried to use categorizations that reflect brewing processes. Nevertheless, we must emphasize that we are historians, not beer professionals, and the placement of a particular term in one category or another was arbitrary.

Michael Jackson might well have rejected the schematic notion of a personal flavor wheel, preferring a more flexible and holistic approach to tasting. He once declared: “More than one brewer has attacked me with his flavor-wheel.”[15] Nor can we claim any intimate knowledge of his life, much less his command of beer. We are using this approach and publishing these spreadsheets only to illustrate a research process based on primary source data in the hopes of encouraging future work by more knowledgeable experts.

Figure 6: Spreadsheet for Jackson 1982

Figure 7: Spreadsheet for Jackson 1983

We generated the flavor wheels with XLSTAT software. (For a tutorial, see XLSTAT's Sensory wheel tutorial in Excel). We ran the program multiple times, adjusting the spreadsheet along the way, to produce visualizations that would be more comprehensible to non-experts. The labeling tended to overlap to the point of illegibility, so we found ourselves consolidating categories more often than we originally intended. Such choices are no different from the artistic decisions involved in drawing any maps. And as with any map, the question for our flavor wheels is whether they provide useful information without leading viewers astray.

Despite the limits of our methodology, the flavor wheels illustrates the evolving nature of Jackson’s literary corpus. In 1982, his terminology still depended largely on beer industry professionals’ descriptions of common beer faults such as “pasteurized,” “skunky,” “cardboard,” “damp paper,” the more “sulphury” smells of “cabbage” and “corn,” and “carbonic,” a British term used to distinguish unnaturally gassed beer from the milder sparkle of hand-pumped “real ale.” But unlike Meilgaard, who offered only a single term for “fruity,” Jackson distinguished “apple,” “orange,” “peach,” “pear,” and “plummy.” Expanding the vocabulary of beer criticism was clearly on his mind when he wrote that an Irish dry stout “even deserves the same adjectives used by Hugh Johnson to describe a genuine amontillado in his World Atlas of Wine: ‘Dry and almost stingingly powerful of flavour, with a dark, fat, rich tang’.” [16]

By 1993, Jackson had developed a rich metaphoric language to describe beers. For example, his description of the Belgian brewery Liefman’s Gouden Band (Golden Band) Special from the World Guide in the 1970s had emphasized its stylistic character as “a medium-strength brown ale, with a dry palate and a slightly sweet aftertaste,” while in reevaluating it for the Companion in the 1990s he detected a “Montilla palate and champagne spritziness.” In drawing comparisons with sherry proper, he distinguished between “cream,” “dry,” “olorosa,” and “Pedro Ximenez.” He constantly pushed himself to extend his palate and olfactory range. The “coffee” and “smoky” flavors he detected in 1982 had become “strong coffee on a winter’s night” and “fire from logs of fruitwood.” Likewise, he disaggregated sourness into “lactic,” “citric,” “vinegary,” and “acidity worthy of Dorothy Parker" [17]

This new vocabulary of beer criticism also led to a greater emphasis on aroma and taste instead of mouthfeel, which had arguably been Jackson’s richest category in the early years. In 1982, he used almost as many terms for mouthfeel (33) as for aroma (35), making up 45 and 48 percent of the total. By 1993 terms for aroma (73) had expanded to 68 percent of the total and those for mouthfeel (22) had fallen to 20 percent. While the 1993 Companion still employed such descriptive terms as “velvety,” “fluffy,” and “mouth-drying moreish finish,” earlier descriptions such as “gutsy,” “rocky,” “creamy,” and “sticky” had disappeared. Terms for taste more than doubled over the decade; in 1982, he used a very basic listing (5 terms) of “sweet,” “bitter,” and “salty,” separating only the “sour” into “lactic” and “tangy,” whereas in 1993, he offered multiple (13) nuances of “sweet,” “sour,” “bitter,” and even mineral “saltiness.”

This shift may well have been part of a generally more positive approach toward reviewing beers. This is not to say that Jackson no longer had unfavorable reactions when tasting. His personal archive contains numerous unpublished notes such as this one for a mass-market pilsner: “Flat as a fart, greeny, cloudy, cough-mixture aroma"[18] But he generally kept such observations to himself and friends, preferring in his public writing to encourage brewers rather than engage in partisan attacks. Jackson was not alone in this promotional mission of inventing a new language of criticism. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he participated in tasting seminars organized by Mark Dorber and the Campaign for Real Ale in the United Kingdom and Charlie Papazian and the Brewers’ Association in the United States.

While Jackson and other professionals helped to define a culture of connoisseurship, their success in this mission ultimately depended on nurturing a broader community who would take a similarly appreciative attitude toward beer. And indeed, such local communities now exist at every brewpub and dinner table where people gather to drink beer and reflect seriously on what they are tasting. But there is also an “imagined community” of beer appreciation that has emerged on social media. The first beer website, the Oxford Bottled Beer Database, began as an aggregate of supermarket listings in 1992, in the early days of the commercial internet. Tom Fryer and his colleagues at Oxford University maintained the site as a hobby, gradually updating it to allow users to post reviews, but with no income and a flood of spam, the site never became a stable platform.[19]

A more permanent online home emerged with the establishment of the Beer Advocate website in 1996. The cofounders, Todd and Jason Alström, started it as a venue for their own reviews and later opened it as a public forum. Sensory metaphors predominated from the first review posted, for Berkshire Brewing Company’s Steel Rail Extra Pale Ale, “a very light ale with an extremely refreshing amount of carbonation. Lovely honey, lemon, and nut overtones followed by light sweet malt afters.”[20] A rival website, Ratebeer.com, went online in 2000, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, but unlike so many failed tech companies, these beer sites attracted a large following. More than 6,000 reviewers published nearly 300,000 reviews in Ratebeer’s first four years.[21]

Like users of other social media platforms, aspiring beer advocates and raters must navigate a flood of information.[22] When logging onto the homepage, the two websites offer a similar range of options to review beers, find events, and join discussion forums. To encourage more activity, the websites award levels of status; on Beeradvocate, “Beer Karma” points accumulate to different levels of expertise, including “Crusader” and “Poobah.” Ratebeer is a more cosmopolitan community, allowing non-English-language reviews, while Beeradvocate is the site of choice for beer traders in the United States. Users debate the relative merits of the rating algorithms, especially after the giant conglomerate AB-InBev took a minority stake in Ratebeer. Regardless, there is a striking convergence in the highest rated beers on both sites -- imperial stouts, double IPAs, Belgian Quadrupels -- full-bodied, heavily hopped, and high in alcohol.

In addition to a numerical score, reviews on both websites can include a narrative that both expresses an individual’s encounter with the beer and also affirms their connections to the larger community of connoisseurs. The numerical ratings, and for many, the reviews as well, follow the Beer Judging Certification Program (BJCP) criteria of aroma, appearance, taste, mouthfeel, and overall experience. Those who tell a story often begin by setting the scene, with a description of where the beer was purchased or an acknowledgment of who provided it, especially in the case of highly coveted, limited-edition brews. The narrative then proceeds to the pour, discussing the glassware used as well as the color and foamy head. Accounts of aroma, taste, and mouthfeel often draw comparisons with other beers in the same category, and they engage explicitly with community members’ experiences of the same beer. Reviewers also take into account their own expectations; which often takes the form of saying whether they found highly rated beers to be “worth the hype.”

In analyzing the mountain of data, we drew our sample from the Beeradvocate website because of its (perhaps undeserved) reputation for more verbose reviews. Instead of following individual reviewers (which could be a very interesting research project of its own), we chose to focus on different styles (Belgian ales, British ales, IPAs, pale lagers, stouts, and wheat beers), and in some cases we broke those down into sub-categories (lambics, saisons, and quads, for the Belgians). For each style, we chose a sample of beer brands, and for each brand, we downloaded yet another sample of about 200 reviews (see attached listing of brands).

Figure 10: Detail of Beer brand listing. View full listing.

To find the most common flavor descriptors for each style of beer, we ran the reviews through simple word cloud software. [23] We started by cleaning the text to remove the brewers’ own tasting notes, which could contaminate the sample. Of course, those brewers’ notes could shape the individual reviewers as well, but far more sophisticated textual analysis would be needed to detect such influence. For our purposes, we were just interested in finding the most commonly used terms to discuss different types of beers. Once we had the word clouds (see Figure 11, for Belgian lambics), we sought to identify the relevant terms. We skipped over some of the most commonly occurring words, including judging categories (“aroma” and “overall”), statistical measures (“rDev”), brands (“Cantillon”) and styles (“beer” and “kriek”). The smaller, less frequent terms (“tart,” “sour,” “acidic,” “funky,” and even “barnyard”) were often the most revealing.

But as scholars who use textual analysis emphasize, to separate the revealing terms from statistical noise, it is not enough simply to count words. It is just as important to examine the use of those words in context. For example, we found the word “green” appearing commonly in reviews of pale lagers. At first we thought that this might have been a reference to immature beers, but it turned out to be simply the “Heineken effect” of reviewers mentioning the green bottles. Having identified common terms for each style, we then created a spreadsheet and used XLSTAT to generate the following flavor wheel:

From this admittedly limited sample, we can see that the language of beer flavor more closely reflects the ingredients used than the strictly metaphoric terms of Noble’s wine aroma wheel. The grapefruit smell in your craft beer may come from large doses of aromatic, citrusy, American hops, which had been used cautiously by brewers until the 1980s because of their overpowering fragrance. Or it may be that the brewers actually have added grapefruit or other nontraditional flavorings to the beer in pursuit of novelty and higher ratings on the websites. Two of the Belgian lambics sampled were fermented with apricots and cherries, respectively, while the coffee, maple, and bourbon were common ingredients in the imperial stouts that dominate the highest level of rankings. Nevertheless, the banana and spice notes of the wheat beers were a product of the malts, while the citrus and pine of the IPAs resulted from American hops. Thus, while the goal of the winemaker is to ferment a single ingredient, grapes, in such a manner as to evoke the soil (terroir) from which they grew, the alchemy of the brewer is to create an infinite variety of tastes from malted grains, hops, yeast, water, and other ingredients.

The community of taste can reveal itself through both figurative descriptions and concrete terms. Reviewers may show their affinity for the group with terms such as “quintessentially beery” and “blissful ignorance.” Although at least one reviewer declared that Budweiser “tastes like America,” the patriotism of the national community was more often outweighed by the loyalty to the beer community and its disdain for pale lagers such as Bud. Common descriptors in this category included “watery,” “thin,” and “grassy,” as well as “corn” and rice,” references to the adjunct grains used in place of malted barley, and in a surprising number of cases, simply “nothing.” Perhaps the most damning term of all was “skunky,” which comprised an entire spectrum in the reviews including  “slight skunk,” “mild skunky,” “subtle skunkyness,” “just a hint of skunkiness,” “a mesh of skunk,” “buttery, skunky,” and “weird skunkiness.” On some occasions, reviewers felt obliged to acknowledge “no skunkiness.” Whether regular consumers of these beers would so readily detect “skunk” is another question.

The data presented here can also help to think about the importance of flavor in defining particular categories. We started out by dividing IPAs into three categories: American (often called “West Coast”), Imperial (stronger versions), and New England (characteristically “hazy”). While the New England category stood out with a wider range of tropical fruits (mango, pineapple, tangerine) and fewer “floral” notes, the American and Imperial IPAs displayed a common set of characteristics, and so we collapsed them into a single category. Likewise, the largely American drinkers on Beeradvocate found considerable commonality across the range of British ales with “toffee,” “earthy,” “caramel,” and “bready” appearing prominently in each category. Distinguishing characteristics included “fruity” and “bitter” for pale ale; “floral” and “bitter” for Extra Special Bitter; and “toasty” and “vanilla” for Scottish. These are just preliminary observations based on a small sample. Further research could reveal far more about the community, particularly the ways it developed over time, since two decades of reviews with dates attached are now archived online.

Social media platforms such as beer reviewing websites offer invaluable new sources for studying the lives of ordinary people. While the massive quantities of data may at first seem overwhelming, by following an ethnographic approach and learning to navigate the websites as users themselves do, it is possible to develop research and analytical strategies for making sense of the data and gaining new insights. The digital archive of taste, like any source, must be used with care and awareness of how it was constructed. The tens of thousands of participants on Beeradvocate and Ratebeer are overwhelmingly white males from North America who derive a sense of social distinction from their beer connoisseurship. The tens of millions of beer drinkers who find pleasure in pale lagers are equally worthy of study. With research such as this we can gain new insights on how communities of people create meaning through everyday activities such as drinking beer.