How Cold Should Beer Be?

Saw this interesting article / post / tidbit on how cold beer should be served. While it’s spot on in many ways and very detailed, I thought it wasn’t as compelling or descriptive as it could be. I mean, we all are commonly inserting thermometers into our beers to make sure they’re coming to us at specific temperatures, but what about those times when you’ve left your temp measuring instruments at home? Here’s how I would lay it out:

Lagers:
As cold as possible. Imagine those hot summer days when the sunlight bounces off the pavement or even the grass. It hurts to breath deeply. You’ve got a fence to paint (yes, you’re Huck Finn) and at the end of painting, there’s a case of beer waiting for you. Do you want it “fridge cold”? No, you want it in a cooler, packed with ice and no matter how fast you put them down, there’s always another one getting even colder.

There is no limit to how cold you want your lagers. Ok, that’s absolutely not true. One time, during the summer before my senior year of college, for no particular reason, I decided to get a keg of the cheapest beer I could (it was college, damnit!) and host a “it’s too damn hot too care” party. My friend, who worked in the physics lab mentioned in passing that he could get us some dry ice to make the keg extra cold. Needless to say, we packed that keg with more dry ice than a college kid should be able to get his hands on and ended up freezing that keg. I’m still too embarrassed to reveal the things we did trying to unfreeze that keg while a party full of sweaty college kids banged their red dixie cups on the walls. So any level slightly about dry ice would be the right amount of cold for lagers.

Ales:
In the summer, I love iced coffee. I’m one of those people who will finish one and immediately start planning the next one, “Why don’t we walk over to Grumpy’s and then head over to Root Hill? That’s a Saturday, right?” One of my pet peeves is when you order an iced coffee and they pour hot coffee into a cup and then shove in a few ice cubes to pathetically melt away before you can even get your money out. Instead of having a strong, cold coffee that could pull a polar bear back out to the melting pavement, you’ve got a slightly cold and watery coffee that couldn’t tow a tricycle. However, that’s the level of cold Ales should be. Half a foot in the world of a cold refrigerator and the other in the world of room temperature. Another way to judge this is to let a less intense beer drinker try your beer. If they say, “this isn’t cold AT ALL!” then it’s probably about right.

Strong, Dark Beers:
Growing up in Vermont, we often used the outside as our freezer during the winter. At any given time you could find turkey’s remaining in their frozen state, dough waiting to be thawed and frozen pizzas just hanging out on our porch. This was a perfect system (all be it, trashy) until the time my mother decided to let some brownies cool out on the porch’s picnic table. After she put them out, my dog started scratching at the back door, wanting us to let her out into her fenced off back area. We let her out and within about 30 seconds she had chewed through the fence, broken free and was racing around to the front of the house to consume the brownies. At least, that’s how we solved the “who chewed through the fence, ate an entire tray of brownies and then diarrheaed all over my father’s computer wires” mystery. Why tell this story? Because I like turning diarrhea into a verb. Also because strong, dark beers should be slightly below room temperature (cellar temperature) or the equivalent of leaving those beers somewhere cold long enough for my dog to eat an entire tray of brownies (roughly 1 – 2 minutes, probably less). The taste shouldn’t be gummy or give you the sensation of hot (what an actual room temperature beer will taste like). It should feel like it was pulled from somewhere dark, dank and potentially not somewhere you’d want to spend the night (cellars, caves, etc.)

These are guidelines, not rules (for proof, see Guinness’s giant arctic chilling machines to serve their beers EXTRA COLD!!!). Feel free to experiment with different beers in similar styles and varying temperatures to find the right combination for you.