The current issue of Vue Weekly is their annual Adventure Issue. As it was a beer column week, I was asked to think about some kind of beer-related adventure, especially indoors (so winter backyard homebrewing was out). I opted for the adventure of organized beer tastings. I essentially offer a primer about how to organize your own coherent tasting to amaze and impress your friends. While a basic theme-based or region-based tasting is fun and a perfectly acceptable option, I spent most of my time in the piece examining a more formal approach – the world of vertical and horizontal tastings (you can read the column here).

Just like in the wine world horizontal and vertical tastings are a way to explore a particular segment of beer in a methodical fashion. Horizontal tastings are the easier of the two to organize. Start by picking a style of beer you want to explore. IPAs, bocks, lambics, barrel-aged beer – whatever catches your fancy and your curiousity. Pick up anywhere from 4 to 12 different examples of the style. Try to get a range of breweries, regions, and interpretations. For example if doing IPAs you must pick up some British-style, some West Coast-style and some East Coast-style to show the range of flavours. The principle is to select beer that have common origins so that you can isolate the subtle differences between them.

The key in any tasting is conscious sampling. Move slowly, doing one beer at a time. Have the guests take a few notes. Leave time after for discussion of what they found, consider the range of tastes and explore why guests preferred one over another.

Vertical tastings take more advance planning. Instead of different examples of the same style, a vertical tasting offers different vintages of the very same beer. Obviously, in the beer world, vertical tastings are only appropriate for a sub-set of styles, those with aging capacity meaning barley wines, Belgian strong ales, imperial stouts, lambics, some barrel-aged ales, and so on. These stronger beer evolve in a manner similar to wine and so tasting versions from different years can be quite enlightening and enjoyable. Of course, strong beer styles are also well-suited for horizontal tastings, so don’t feel you have to exclude them from that quicker model.

What makes verticals harder is the need for advance planning. Occasionally you will find multiple years of a strong beer in the store, but it is a rare find. More likely you need to plan ahead. Buy a couple more bottles of that barley wine/imperial stout/etc. that you like and store it in your cellar-like space (cool, dark and fairly stable). Many strong beer tend to be annual releases and those that are year-round offerings can still be dated and stored quite easily.

If you do that for a few years you will find you have a nice supply for a vertical tasting. There is nothing like sampling the same beer side-by-side to see how it evolves with age. Again, similar methods apply; take your time, take notes, carefully consider what you are tasting. Leave time for discussion.

Of course, if you are really ambitious (I don’t mention this in the Vue column) you could organize what I called a 3-D tasting, where you have multiple vintages of multiple beer of the same style. Take two or three breweries’ versions of, say, barley wine, and compare them not just horizontally but also assess how each ages differently. Aside from the risk of palate fatigue and the likely need for taxis home, that could be an epic adventure of beer experience. You will learn much from an evening like that.

Organized beer tastings are not difficult to put together and can be highly rewarding experiences. A beer adventure, you might say.