It’s a beer I love, and one which admittedly does have a huge savoury smoke aroma which lingers like crazy on your breath. Essentially, it tastes great but it makes you stink.

But what was interesting was that I always thought this beer tasted of Bacon, but it doesn’t. Colette is totally right (I imagine that statement will be printed out and stuck on the fridge before long) because it doesn’t taste of Bacon at all, it tastes and smells of smoked sausage.

The thing is, I remember reading about the beer on Tom’s blog, and then later about Mikkeller’s Beer Geek Bacon which also used Rauch Malt, and thinking “I wonder if it really does taste like Bacon?”. So when I first tasted the Schlenkerla I already had the notion in my head, and the savoury smokiness was enough for me to go “It does taste like Bacon!”.

My point is that my preconceptions of the beer led me off on a bit of a tangent, and sometimes it seems impossible to push past what I think something will smell or taste like, to get at what it actually is like.

Another great example of Colette’s superior nose, or perhaps why it’s good to get a non-beer-geeks opinion for perspective, was her judgement of Black Tokyo* Horizon, i.e. “It smells like Soy Sauce”. I don’t think I would have ever spotted that lingering savouriness behind all that sweet malt if she hadn’t pointed it out. But seriously, try for yourself and smell it again.

Soy Sauce.

It’s there if you look for it.

p.s. Ghostie wrote an excellent post on a similar subject recently, but he talked more about whether spending £25 on a bottle of beer tricks your brain into thinking the beer is amazing. It’s well worth a read.