Look, Smell or Feel

The flavors you experience in beer are the result of both the sense of taste and the sense of smell. Take away the smell and you take away most of the flavor. Using only the sense of taste is like having a stopped up nose from a cold or like pinching your nostrils closed while drinking the beer.

Appearance makes a difference and tells me something about how the beer was brewed, etc. Mouthfeel should also be good and fit the style of beer, but at the end of the day the sense of Smell is most important.

 

For me it's 100% smell. Smell contributes so much to the overall flavour of the beer. If a beer has great aroma, that beer tends to taste better as well.

 

Feel for sure. So many beers have gotten the shaft in my book because of mouthfeel. I'm a huge stickler for it. A great beer will go from a 4.8 to a 4 because of mouth feel.

 

Smell. The nose knows.

 

You could include taste as an option and smell would still be my choice. I could practically huff a good IPA until I fainted

 

Smell for me but look does help. For me, if the nose is absent but the beer is visually appealing, I can at least go into it with a positive attitude.

 

Aside from the fact that smell influences taste greatly, I generally get more from a beer's aroma than any other attribute.

 

For me, smell and look are equally as important. Feel usually follows these.

 

There's a reason why smell counts for 20% of a beer's aggregate score on this site, compared to 10% for mouthfeel and 5% for appearance.

 

Aside from taste, in my book it's:

1. Smell
2. Feel
3. Look

Smell is #1 for the reasons already mentioned.

Feel has a big impact, actually for me personally it's just about on par with the aroma. If a beer has a mouthfeel that's too thin or too syrupy etc. it tends to ruin the experience for me and removes or at least significantly reduces any chance I'll revisit it.

I enjoy looking at beer and love to see how the head develops and dies, how it's lacing, carbonation, clarity etc., however I don't always pour my beers into a glass so it isn't a factor 100% of the time.

 

Sound. It's all about the sound.

 

Smell and feel are hard to choose between... though an absence of much smell, or especially a bad smell, can really hurt things. Mouthfeel being overly harsh or too watery doesn't help either, though. And while I wouldn't want to drink something that looked absolutely disgusting (same applies to food: if it looks gross I'm less likely to try it... though if food smells really bad it is not coming anywhere near my mouth!), looks are probably the least important thing overall.

I'd probably have to go with smell, though, since if something just smells bad that causes more problems than anything else (except if it tastes bad, of course, but the two tend to go together. Not as closely in beer as in food in my experience--there have been beers where the smell was a little funky to me, but the taste was good--but there's still a link.)

 

opinions vary but anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of what's perceived as taste is actually smell. Gotta go with smell.

 

I would have used to said smell but the more beer I drink and more diverse I can appreciate the mouthfeel as a major characteristic. I love a clean finishing beer like nothing else. I used to not have a clue what the hell mouthfeel had to do with anything and just kind of discounted it as a thing you had to put a number on to rate a beer, but its become a very important part of how I rate a beer now. I love a good aroma but that does not always translate into a good tasting beer. But when you get a good clean finishing beer that also tastes good, you have a true well crafted beer in your hands! In particular Saison's, IPA's and sours.

 

Mouthfeel can definitely enhance a beer's appeal, but it's not as make-or-break as it's usually made out to be; it's very situational and not as simplistic as thick=good. Some of the best beers around are pretty lean and silky- so by 'enhance a beer's appeal' I mean it adds an unexpected quality, depending on the style. Lately around here, though, I get the sense that if the mouthfeel is perfectly appropriate for the style there will be complaints- too much focus on the least important aspect of a beer.

 

Smell.. taste... is smell in many ways. But they are all important to me... I want em all to be great!

 

Smell for sure...mouthfeel is the wildcard that will make the beer world class, however

 

As important as smell is, and as much as I savor the smell of a good beer, I went with feel, because ultimately, even if a beer smells like heaven, if the mouthfeel is bad, it's still not going to be very drinkable. Drinkability is everything.