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Most of the flavor of beer you detect by the nose, not by the palate and so if you drink
the beer straight out of the bottle, your nose doesn’t dangle in the beer. But if
you got a glass you get these cathedral windows of foam lacing the side of the beer glass.
It’s just so hedonically just fantastic and this vision of beauty is created before
your very eyes. That’s why I get so annoyed when people drink beer straight out of the
bottle or the can, you know? That’s just not civilized. It’s got to go into a glass.
My name is Charlie Bamforth. I’m the professor of malting and brewing science here at UC
Davis, the Pope of Foam, yeah, that’s what they call me in Berlin. I think it’s probably
because we’ve done all this work on the composition of beer in relation to foam. We
used to do trials and look at different beers, two different beers, see which one people
liked the taste of better. The one with the better foam than the other that was always
the one that was chosen as tasting better. The foam is a critical aspect of beer quality.
So how do you ensure that happens and there’s a lot of science involved, all the chemistry
and microbiology, the engineering, the biochemistry and so on. And how it’s applied to achieve
tremendous consistency. From the psychophysics and people’s impressions of beer with and
without foam, right away through to the complex chemistry, we continue to discover enzymes
that nobody’s ever reported before in grain for example. It’s the social dimension and
the whole ethos of drinking responsibly. It’s not just mixing a few things in a bucket and
drinking this delicious liquid at the end of the day. It all comes together in brewing
and so if they really want to understand how science has been applied to produce a very
interesting product and a very enjoyable product when treated in moderation then brewing is
a great vehicle. Opener, pour it with vigor, delicious, look at that. You can see the proteins
and the bitter acids sticking together. Beautiful, artistic, symphony, ah. Is there a proper
time to take your first sip? Well this is Hefferveisen so the answer would be breakfast
time.