Beer "Service" if You Will

Alas, sometimes it is too much to ask...

Freshness is a crap shoot when dealing with beers that have no bottling or best-by dates anywhere on the bottle, carrier, or case. The beer may have been just delivered to a bar/ restaurant/ store that day, but sitting in various warehouses for months before hand. If you encounter a beer that you are certain is stale, alert your server promptly, but be sure you know all about the particular style of beer you are drinking because it is bad form to try to return something because "it tastes funny" when you had no prior idea what a particular beer tastes like - that's what asking your server is about. "What does this taste like?" I have once witnessed a fool loudly request "a dark manly beer, not all this girly stuff" only to be served something that he wasn't man enough to even get half way through, while the rest of the bar and staff laughed at his ever-reddening face.

Proper temperature varies depending on the style of beer. If you are the owner of an establishment with limited space, you don't always have the space or money for multiple coolers set at multiple temperatures, and if you have beer on tap, where all the kegs sit in one cooler, can you really have a different cooler set to different temps for each keg? And what about when one keg runs out, and you have to replace it with a different style of beer? Do you also have separate storage areas for keg stock at different temps? As you see, this is getting more complicated and unrealistic by the sentence, so kegs all get stored in one room at one temperature. Some bars do have two separate coolers for different draught lines, but usually just two - one for cask beer, one for all the rest. My local bar added three new tap lines, and had to have a new, separate cooler installed for them right under the tap handles, instead of downstairs, behind the wall etc. with the other, already full cooler. I like to order a beer before I'm ready, and let it sit for a bit.

Chilled glasses in the beer geek world are a no-no. Most beer in America is served too cold rather than too warm, and chilling a glass merely prolongs the time it takes for a beer to warm up to it's proper temperature. If the glass is frosted - not just chilled - the thin layer of frozen condensation of water will melt into your beer, diluting it slightly. Remember - too cold, and you lose a lot of flavor.

As for glass replacement, where you been drinking? I've never had a bartender take my used glass and refill it unless they were out of clean glasses. Maybe in a restaurant they leave your glass when you are ordering another of the same, but if you are ordering a different beer, it is never difficult to just say, "excuse me, but may I have a new glass with that?"

Hope this helps. Also, sign on to popular beer web sights like BeerAdvocate and RateBeer. They are the Chowhound of the beer world, and have many reviews of beers, breweries, brewpubs, bars, and restaurants by city and state. There are better beer bars out there that will go the extra mile for proper beer service, so happy hunting!

beanbagchickenwing in Beer