Beer Expert Guesses Cheap vs Expensive Beer | Price Points | Epicurious

I'm Garrett Oliver and I'm a beer expert [Music] boom zap Pilsner now this is a great place to start because actually pilzer or types of pills there are the most popular beers in the world and Pilsner is really difficult to brew because there's actually nowhere to hide there's only four things that traditionally go into a pilsner barley malt yeast hops water you don't have all kinds of other things you don't have roasted malts you don't have a really huge hop character you don't have barrel-aging you don't have many of the things that can be done with beer with Pilsner you have those few ingredients and they'd better be good alright let's see what we've got going on here alright now we're pouring from a can you know in the old days that would have been bad sign not so much these days this actually looks really nice you have a full antique gold color you have a nice fluffy head going on here this is what a pilsner should look like it should not have any brownish or reddish cast to it it's beautifully clear it has a nice kind of rocky foam to it different sizes of bubbles you know when you see all the same size of bubbles that's usually a giveaway as it is in bread that you don't really have the real thing going on so here in the aroma I have a nice floral character there is that little bit of typical sulfur this is actually smelling pretty nice alright let's check out B now we have a bottle here but that does not necessarily mean that it's a it's more expensive we don't know now right away I see that color is a little bit different slightly browner the foam has a different look to it much more fine bubbles and the aroma is for Pilsner a little bit odd I'm getting a kind of a light banana kind of character going on here slightly papery B is not unpleasant smelling beer but it doesn't really have true Pilsner characteristics all right let's taste a zap that has a real zing of bitterness to it which is what we like to see in Pilsner so if you have an all mult beer you're going to have a roundness you're going to have a sweetness a little bit of biscuity bready flavor in the background and the thing that makes bills and refreshing is that zap of bitterness it should be clean it should be quick you can taste also that this was not rushed this is actually pretty decent Pilsner this is pretty appetizing let's taste be alright this has a character of sweetness and fizziness but really very very little bitterness as it goes down it opens up on to some fruit not unpleasantly but definitely not traditionally and really almost no depth at all you start with fizz and maybe a little bit of banana and then the beer kind of vanishes from your palate I will say this for it you know that this came from a place that has a laboratory and everything else because they're working hard actually to remove the flavor from it the problem is doesn't taste that good well I'm gonna say that a is the more expensive one but let's see where we've ended up I didn't expect to see a zero at the beginning of one of these numbers so you know here you have one that's under $1 for 12 ounces and this is a more than a dollar and a half but I'm going to tell you what I mean if you think about it what can you buy for 60 cents I mean really almost nothing this is actually not a bad price for a full-flavored Pilsner where is this maybe cheaper is it really worth it to get something that's almost completely empty now we've got Belgian style wheat beer and so this is actually a type of a throwback in a way these days most people are making beer traditional beer out of barley malt but in the old days you made it out of whatever you had at hand so traditionally this style of beer would have been made from about half wheat and half barley malt for the spice saying yes they added hops but they also added Curacao orange peel and coriander all right well let's check out a here no tells in our glass we do have a pretty good look though it's a little bit dark for the style normally this style of beer is going to be very very pale this has kind of a dark gold orange kind of color to it the foam looks pretty good a little bit of open bubbles and some finer bubbles this level of haze is normal for this style of beer traditionally this would have been reefer mented in the bottle and would be served with it's yeast a little bit pasta-like not surprising with wheat a little bit of coriander but the coriander here it smells a little bit like hot dogs you know which actually is one of the flavorings and hot dogs is coriander so if you use it a little heavily you got a little bit of a hot dog character let's see what B has going on here ah there we go now that is the traditional color much much paler this has a beautiful glow to it full rocky head and that's lovely it that's that that smells great bright fresh floral that smells pretty appetizing well let's taste a Wow very sweet a little bit bland not much in the way of bitterness very broad across the tongue not really snappy doesn't have a really fine type of carbonation to it kind of a little bit sweet a little bit creamy at least it doesn't taste like hot dogs but not really the bright fresh character that I would you know hope to expect and let's see what we've got going on here in be still smells great boom bright spritz very fine bubbles across the palate bright orange peel character a nice clean focused bitterness we didn't have more beers to taste I would I would finish this class I would say that B is definitely the more expensive beer the color of beer a is attractive it started off with a pretty good foam it's almost like a cartoon of the idea of what Belgian wit beer is supposed to be while this seems more like the real thing well let's see how we did here I'd be a pretty surprised if it turned out otherwise but yeah again almost twice the price a Belgian white beer doesn't actually need to come from Belgium there are a lot of nice American versions but you need brightness you need freshness you should be seeing that pale sort of color to it and it has to be really refreshing the problem with a is that it wasn't even refreshing it just kind of laid there well B had a really beautiful pop to it and that's worth that extra dollar believe me all right IPA many people who drink i piayed might not even know that the name means India Pale Ale this was originally a style of beer that starting the late 1700s was being made in the UK sent down around the south of Africa up into the Indian Ocean and into a port in Calcutta and it was actually a provision that was sent there for British colonialists so this style of beer was made in a particular way to be able to travel well draw sharp bitter highly aromatic hops give you flavors in aroma and bitterness but also hops act as a preservative so adding lots of hops was a particular way of getting IPA to actually last in a big wooden barrel for what could be a six month sea voyage all right let's see we've got here with a would have been some years back that you would never have seen an IPA and a can but these days it's actually kind of a common thing now one thing I can tell right away is that if this is an IPA this is a very modern take on IPA I fees were traditionally clear but these days especially in the last couple of years you see a lot of them that have you know this very very hazy appearance and that has an enormous hop aroma it's just leaping out of the glass hops a varietal like wine grapes there are dozens of varieties it's one of the more expensive things that you use in beer if you're using a lot and this definitely has a lot nicely done very bright very fresh and now let's check out be alright pretty pretty dark color here a little bit darker than we generally see in in IPAs these days but that's not a bad thing so this aroma is really different it's a bit more biscuity more sort of malt focused it does have a hop aroma it has a beautiful rocky head to it a fairly nice appearance wasn't opposed to drink yet but definitely a hundred percent malt beer the thing is though it doesn't really have that massive hop aroma you know for me that's a little bit of a towel because the hops are so expensive if you have a lot of hops in the beer we have a massive hop aroma it's one of the things that's gonna cause a beer to be more expensive alright let's see what a taste like lots and lots of hot flavor the bitterness is soft but balanced and it's long it kind of keeps going and going and going it's not tremendously sharp but the hop flavor is really sitting there on your tongue almost like you had I don't know citrus powder and mango and things like that going on but it tastes a pretty good throughout now here in B you have something that almost tastes like a little bit of a throwback to the older original British style clean sharp well brewed but a little bit of metallic tang you often see that with some breweries that are using extracts and things like that you have a little bit of us almost chemical edge but from a technical point of view not a bad lead made beer at all both of these are perfectly decent beers I'd be happy to drink either one of them but when it comes to what's more expensive first I like a better and its massive use of hops it tastes like it costs two or three times as much just to make it in the first place so I'm definitely going with a here yeah that's a pretty big difference both these beers are definitely worth drinking if I'm having some really spicy food especially something with citrus going on in it I'd probably go for a in that big citrus pop but the biscuity character of B really rose in perfectly fine with a burger pizza or something like that in an IPA does a few things you're looking for generally speaking dry highly aromatic lots of hops somewhere between five and a half and seven percent alcohol by volume most of all IPAs have to be fun to drink I mean one reason why IPAs are so popular is frankly they're fun on your tongue they're explosive and a it's pretty explosive dark lager now earlier we looked at Pilsner this is our second lager style Pilsner eventually took over the world what people had before then was dark lagers well let's see what's going on here with a cold the amber looking color look at that foam that is beautiful that foam is really indicative of a really nicely brewed beer it's rocky it has texture to it it stands up it's so fine over here sort of creamy looking boy that smells good a little bit smoky toffee like just layers and layers of depth often these types of beers dark lagers are thought of as almost the beer equivalent of a freshly baked loaf of dark bread and that's kind of what this smells like beautiful caramelization that's kind of Awesome let's see what we've got going on here he's got tough competition guy much less deep color I mean not a bad color the foam is not nearly so well formed there's a lot more kind of big open bubbles it doesn't have that kind of rocky tightness that you have going on in a and does not have the full sort of a deep mahogany sort of color it's it's attractive much more simplistic aroma what I'm smelling basically is caramel mostly pale malt a golden multiple star malt mixed with some very dark other malts and giving a light caramel character now here we have the flavor and aroma I should say of Munich malt munich malt is a more difficult and expensive type of ball to make it is kind of lightly caramelized but when you make the entire mash out of munich malt that flavor is concentrated so whereas in be you have the caramel character is more of a flavoring added on top here it's used throughout let's check out a I can't wait to drink it actually boom everything in place very soft bitterness this is really a style of beer that's all about malt very slightly sweet very creamy beautiful texture it sort of makes me look forward to the holidays or something I feel like I should have a big roasted piece of meat in front of me or something like that now here in be kind of light acidic caramel character very one-dimensional not in any way unpleasant it's clean not as sweet as a but that's not technically a fault it just overall isn't as fun to drink I'm gonna say here that a is the more expensive that is like really traditional Bavarian style dark lager and I find that B is a little bit wanting but let's see what we've got alright about twice as expensive and we're that expenses really going to come in is the malt real Munich malt traditionally made that's going to deliver that depth of flavor that you're looking for you're really looking for that big bready toffee like character and if you don't smell that going on if you can't taste that going on the palate you haven't really got the real thing it's easy to get the color you can always add all kinds of caramelized sugars you're gonna head caramelized malt but that flavor that you have going on an a that's the thing that's going to cost money you have a lot of interest these days and hops but when it comes to dark lagers Munich mph is kind of where it's at now when Brewers mentioned barrel aged beers a lot of people will say to us oh you've gotten some wonderful ideas from the wine people well actually we've been putting beer in barrels for about 2,000 years now the stainless steel keg only showed up in the 50s or 60s but until then it was wood wood is porous so you always have a little bit of oxygen filtering in through the wood that is one of the things that ages wines it also ages beers and often in a pleasant way remember all the barrels are being filled and emptied by hand so that's a lot of work for somebody anytime you see a real barrel aged beer it's almost always going to have some expense to it but there are tricks and they are sometimes used you can take a barrel and chip it up into pieces if you put those barrel chips in a tank you can get some of those flavors but not all of them so let's see what we've got going on here let's open up a rather dark color we've got going on here nice foam that foam is coming up to a very sort of creamy you look here and then more of a rocky surface normally when you see a beer that has this kind of color that's going to largely be from roasted malts there is a really beautifully fruity lightly PD a sort of character I kind of suspect a scotch barrel here and it smells like real wood it's very soft and its aromatics when people are doing really fast barrel aging or they're using chips you have usually a really straightforward vanilla coconut sort of character going on where here you've got some real depth that's that's smelling awfully nice oh now it's open deep much paler color though that doesn't mean anything you can barrel aged even very pale beers and they can pick up lots of wonderful characteristics well it smells like there's definitely some wood going on there a little bit of vanilla a little bit of coconut the malts going on underneath it really kind of just smells a little bit like wood that is nice foam though a nice more or less rocky foam it's not bad looking it has a nice color to it kind of a honey like color playing overall you know smell is pretty Pleasant but not certainly not distinguished by a good amount of time in a barrel let's taste a that's pretty Wow I can barely talk now this tastes not only like dark chocolate which is more or less the underlying beer it's got that beautiful softness that really speaks to barrel-aging time so this is soft round it's got a beautiful fruitiness going on I can definitely tell that this was not done with chips or powders or anything else this spent a decent amount of barrel-aging time all sorts of characters going on there's always going to be some vanilla always gonna be a little bit of coconut but that's pretty gorgeous let's taste B B is a perfectly decent beer but frankly a little bit disappointing what I'm getting mostly here is kind of a sweetness that honey color is appropriate because it has a honey sort of flavor a little bit of vanilla going on and it's pleasantly juicy so it's actually a pretty well put together beard but if you're looking for something with like real barrel character I'm not really getting bad here this beer could taste a lot like this without the barrel I'm gonna go with a as the more expensive beer you know simply because it has a great deal of depth to it you have so much going on that coulis came from a decent amount of time in the barrel where B is tasting more straightforward it was either a very short barrel aging time or possibly some of those other methods that I mentioned so let's see what goes on here Wow okay that's a pretty big difference an even bigger difference than I expected - tell me the truth B didn't do all that badly considering that this is like four and a half times the price but the thing is I'm not that surprised in a certain way if I had to guess I would say that a had been in the barrel for over a year and if B saw an actual barrel at all I would basically put in a month or two this would actually be very nice with a pork chop I would say that basically it's worth the money but it's not worth what that is worth this is a special the beer that would be a bit more of a special occasion a much more interesting experience than be fruits hours now you may say to yourself why would I want a beer that sour well in the world of drinks generally speaking you either have citrus juice as the basis for a cocktail or you have bitters the same used to be true of beer and in the old days when it was done properly this was considered very pleasant and in barrel people would often add fruit but in the last hundred years or so we kind of sheared away the whole acidic side of beer so just even in looking at these you have two different packaging styles the more elaborate here B is the traditional style now you might look at that and say that's a champagne cork but actually champagne is in a beer bottle of the technique that's generally used for the secondary fermentation to do these kinds of beers where you add sugar extra yeast and allow the second fermentation to happen inside the bottle that actually was beer first and then later champagne but the champagne guys have better PR all right let's see what we've got going on here maybe our color is gonna tell us something and it kind of does kind of looks more like raspberry than anything else you gotta love the pink foam it's a beautiful color it's got a little bit of haze to it aromatically somewhere between raspberry cherry ish pretty straightforward nice foam it looks good nice color nice berry characteristics all right in B we have a much more elaborate style of packaging here if you want to talk about expense you're gonna start here and what do we have going on aha Wow that looks like something that Dracula might drink it's got some brownish color to it but even that tells us something it looks like it's actually taking on some age usually start to get some browning of the fruit well there's all kinds of stuff going on in there so we have a little bit of a slight vinegar character on top a little bit of acetic acid almost always an indication of wood a distinctive also fruit fruit character you also have definitely some wild east going on in here while these give you a whole other range of funky flavors reminiscent of forest floor but not in a bad way in a way that like you might feel the same way about some great cheese's so let's taste a a great color they're a little brusque a little broad I kind of expected something a little zinger it kind of lays a little bit heavy there's some residual sugar there almost tastes to me like it was added back because it doesn't have a big underlying malt character which you would kind of expect if it was what we call residual sugar meaning sugar left behind by yeast so let's see if B here is gonna do any better for us wow that's really fun it has a cherry like a characteristic to it very sour but well integrated it's not always an easy thing to match the acidity of the fruit itself together with the acidity of the underlying beer but here it's been done really nicely definitely some barrels here as well a beer that was a jinnah barrel is almost never gonna look like a it's gonna look more like be here so these guys are two really different types of fruits ours I would definitely go for B as the more expensive beer it almost certainly has a barrel going on it tastes stronger as well which means more malt which means more expense so let's see what we've got here whoa that is the biggest difference that we've we've seen so far if you're starting with something relatively simplistic that's relatively easy to get not difficult not seasonal etc it's gonna be cheaper but this barrel all that handling greater strength etc each one of these elements is going to add more and more expense to this beer but as a result here you have something that be perfectly Pleasant with a cheesecake or something like that but here you could get the best goat cheese that you could possibly imagine aged goat cheese and pair that up a is pleasant but you know B is definitely worth a lot more money the great thing about beer is that it's actually deep and wide and tall beer has all sorts of characteristics it can be like chocolate it can taste like coffee it can taste like barrels vanilla so beer can taste like almost anything so when you get out to the market and you see a few things they're usually not that expensive even if they're more expensive than the cheapest one have some fun [Music]

Channel: Epicurious

Views: 5,659,538

Rating: 4.889564 out of 5

Keywords: beer, cheap vs expensive, price points, cheap beer, expensive beer, beer expert, cheap vs expensive beer, cheap v expensive, best beer, cheap vs expensive alcohol, cheap vs expensive drinks, cheap expensive, how to make beer, how beer is made, how to brew beer, making beer, tasting beer, drinking beer, types of beer, different beer, pilsner, pilsner beer, craft beer, craft beer expert, craft ale, craft pilsner, ipa beer, epicurious beer, beer review, epicurious

Id: iDR82qG5uzs

Length: 25min 44sec (1544 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/DJKest]

Man, this was a GREAT video. Garret Oliver is a great watch. He gives tons of details that appeal to both the novice beer drinker and the crazy beer enthusiast. I love how he breaks it down.

[u/SaluteYourSports]

I want to be Garrett Oliver when I grow up.

[u/[deleted]]

Fun video, wish they revealed what the beers were. Only ones I recognized are Innis & Gunn and Negra Modelo (and I think the expensive witbier was Allagash but not certain).

[u/Monkeyfeng]

I'm going to talk about rocky foam next time I drink beer.

[u/MistrBones]

Can we talk about that tiger sweater jacket? Where can I get it?

[u/defroach84]

I was going to come in here and say WTF makes this random person some "beer expert"...but then I saw it was Garrett Oliver, and I cannot argue with the title anymore.

[u/Darcsen]

The dead giveaway for a lot of those cheaper beers was the twist top. He used a bottle opener, but you could see the grooves.

[u/thebbman]

So... does this guy have a beer show where he just educates us? He's great.

[u/[deleted]]

This man's voice sounds just like Dave Chapelle's caricature of white guys. It was a great video.