Have you ever experienced a palate change?

I don't know if anyone else can confirm...I had a bud heavy the other week and it tasted so completely different that if you did a blind tasting, I don't think I could have reliably guessed what it is. I remember it having a very distinctive taste to it and when I had it....not a single sip was nostalgic whatsoever.

 

I don’t think the beer evolution for most people is due to a palate change so much as it is basic biology. Food manufacturers spend millions researching ingredients to activate addictive receptors in the brain to get you to consume more. This is why we have junk food and fast food with little nutritional value. Craft beer isn’t intentionally brewing to make people consume more, but it should be little wonder why on most people’s beer journey they go from lighter stuff to the sweet laden 8-10% IPAs and imperial stouts that are so sweet it’s like drinking syrup. The body craves the addictive sweetness associating it with sugar. Then in reverse as you get older these high abv beers aren’t processed by the body as efficiently and you don’t feel as great drinking them and thus lighter stuff becomes more appealing if your palate can stomach the more nuanced flavors. I find the palate reset is more easily done with taking a month or two off from beer. Similarly, I’ve had the same experience with food cutting out processed food, sugar, and bread- after about a week vegetables and other things that had seemed bland and hard to stomach tasted amazing as I didn’t need the big salt and sweet flavors to make them appealing.

 

It didn't taste skunked at all. The bar gets bottles by the case from their distributor in a sealed cardboard box free from light. My issue here, per thread topic, is that it didn't taste good or as good as I remember (been quite a while since having it) it being. Has my palate changed or did Heineken change their brew?

 

I have noticed this palette change on occasion.
There was a time when I used to drink IPAs, Pale Ales and Dry Hopped beer all the time 20 years ago before they really got popular. Then I got tired of them.
I still enjoy them occasionally, but they’re generally not my go-to beers as they once were. And it’s a shame because the verity available today is so much more than it was back when I was more into them.
Another time, our trip to Munich Oktoberfest really changed my perspective on Hefeweizen. I still tend to seek it out when I travel or purchase beer.
Before that trip I rarely had it, and didn’t think very much of it.

 

Fine

 

This isn't a simple discrepancy like Single IPA vs. Double IPA when the beer clocks in at 7% abv or even English IPA vs. American IPA. We're talking about what seems to me like a complete misnomer. Put any true AAL next to any true English Pale Ale and you can see without even tasting them that they're completely different beers. If Pliny the Elder was miscategorized as an IPL, would you just shrug it off?

I had no idea that Anchor Bock was top fermented. No wonder it seems to have a bit more depth of flavor than your average Bock. But in all other aspects such as color and body, it checks out as being a Bock. Like I mentioned before, I know that bottom- vs. top-fermented doesn't automatically translate to lager vs. ale. However, I think we can all agree that the flavor and particularly the body of an AAL is drastically different from an English Pale Ale - and, once again, the color. This seems like an open and shut case to me.


I could totally believe that the first beer pictured could be any kind of pale lager and maybe where I'm getting hung up is that if Jack said that it is actually a Dortmunder, Pilsner or Helles, it wouldn't seem like as big of a deal. But an AAL is such a far cry from an English Pale Ale in so many aspects that it's simply misleading to anyone trying to study the English Pale Ale style. Lord Chesterfield is not widely available, but it's certainly plausible that someone studying to become a Cicerone could purchase it when trying to hone in on the characteristics of the style and get thrown off.

And, to illustrate my point about the marketing of any particular beer when it comes to style, take a look at the recent frustration over the mislabeling of West Coast IPAs: https://www.beeradvocate.com/commun...ries-dishonestly-marketing-ipas.680107/page-6 Where it seems to be the consensus that the consumer's skepticism on whether the brewer has brewed a "true" WCIPA or not should increase relative to that brewery's tendency to produce haze bombs. I could give two shits what the brewery calls it, but the very purpose of websites like BA is to give accurate categorizations for the purpose of reference. I'm not trying to get Yuengling to change the label on Lord Chesterfield. That's not only unrealistic and ultimately irrelevant but, hell, I haven't tried the beer in almost two decades. It could actually taste like an ale even though it's bottom-fermented. My faded memory certainly recalls it as being closer to an ale even given my limited beer knowledge at that time. I'm about to just take the day off to drive to Newport, TN so I can buy a 12-pk and let my palate decide what my next move is!

 

I still think that! Oh, and Lambics too!

 

Yup every 1-2 years it seems. Haha

 

I had a time where I liked pastry stouts, now I have zero interest.

 

Yeah, I agree and replied as much previously:.

By the time of Repeal, most American brewed beers that were simply labeled Ale were AAL-like* - brewed with adjuncts, sometimes a bit more amber than yellow, typically a bit higher in alcohol and usually much hoppier < the hops being the most striking difference to a brewers' flagship lager beer.
* So, not those labeled Stock or India Pale Ale and later Cream Ale in the low IBU Genesee model.

Some Repeal-era descriptions of American ales:


As for its listing as an English Pale Ale here, I suspect the branding influenced that. Lots of US ales, of all types, played up an "English" aspect even when the recipe didn't, with the naming convention "LORD _____ ALE" itself once pretty common, along with other British icons.

Hell, one of the oldest, besting selling US malt liquors is, after all, Olde English 800.

 

I don't think you'll like the answer. Everybody doesn't share the same universal definitions of ales and lagers - yourself included. It seems like you are mainly interested in having beers categorized according to sensory profile, ingredients and stats... and not according to marketing. Like it or not, you can't ignore marketing, because marketing is a tremendous driver of style categorization. Perhaps it's more important than the other factors.

"Accuracy" is in the eye of the beholder. You'd be surprised how many lagers are made with "ale yeast" and vice versa. One could argue that the term "ale yeast" is actually inaccurate. Styles are also way blurrier than you are making them out to be. In your AAL vs English pale ale argument, keep in mind that English pale ales also used adjuncts and have a wide color range.

Does this change things regarding Lord Chesterfield? No, but it should help erode monolithic thinking. Does the BA database include every beer style known to man? No, it's never going to. People pick imperfect categories and not everybody will agree on the best choice from an imperfect list. Maybe there's a better category on BA for Lord Chesterfield (the current one leaves a lot to be desired), but there isn't necessarily an "accurate" one. You might be better off thinking of it like that instead of BA being an "accurate reference." Changing the categorization of LC to a "lager" automatically makes the listing inaccurate in the grand scheme of things.

 

Your post is very logical and, while I had made the point in one of my previous posts that I didn't give a hoot about the marketing side of this but rather the fact that this site is used as a reference point, not only would changing it to "lager" be inaccurate in the grand scheme of things, but it would also open up a big can of worms. If anything, the onus is on Yuengling to make sure their beers are accurately categorized on beer review sites to make sure that when people buy "Chetty" they don't feel duped into buying an ale when it clearly - supposedly, I have yet to find out for myself - tastes like a lager. By the way, I checked with a local bottle shop to see if I could special order a couple cases of it because we do get the Amber Lager distro'd here, but no dice. One day I'll try it and, depending on what I think, I might make a whole separate thread about it. We'll see. But for now I think I will back off and stop trying to make it a hill I'm prepared to die on...for now...

 

Not really. I have always drank a diversity of styles. It mostly comes down to availability and quality. A basic stout or porter, love them, but don't drink them as often (I did buy two six packs of SA Stout in the last six months and have been enjoying them).

 

When I first really got into craft beer (2015) I hated IPAs. Well, anything remotely bitter. I was a German lager guy and I would do saisons sometimes. Then hazies started to be big, and I got acclimated to those. Somewhere along the way, I began to tolerate more bitter beers, and now I embrace the bitterness. Give me a nice piney, bitter West Coast IPA over a hazy any day. I drank Pliny The Elder at Russian River a couple of years ago. Never could have imagined that, or that I would max out the IPA badge on Untappd. Yes, palate changes happen.

 

Since Lord Chesterfield is a somewhat hoppy, pale adjunct lager that is dry-hopped and probably uses cereal mash can we make up the style of Pottsville Pilsner to describe it? Seems like we're making up a regional style with every other pale, hoppy lager where technique varies slightly these days.