Is iced beer a good idea?

Beer tastes best when served at the right temperature: properly chilled (but not too cold), poured into a glass mug so that a fluffy foam is formed on the top. The "golden drink" served in this way is a feast for the palate and the perfect way to cool down on a hot evening, while also serving yourself a bit of relaxation. Sometimes, however, our beer is not properly chilled and we want to drink it quickly. Then some people reach for ice cubes, which they plan to add to the drink.

However, is this a good idea?

Don't drink ice beer!

In short: NO! Beer with ice is absolutely not a good idea and you should beware of it. Even if my friend does, my friend does, and my friend's cousin does not see anything wrong with my uncle's brother-in-law. Okay, you will survive, the world will not collapse, the bolt from the blue will not shine, and the trumpets of Jericho will not begin to play. Well, for God's sake - you will deprive your beer of what is most valuable in it: its taste.

Ice is a bad idea to speed up the cooling of beer. If we add ice cubes to a golden drink, the bubbles will disappear faster, and with them - the aroma. Otherwise, we will sip a slightly chilled beer, a similar, expressionless liquid. But this can even be considered a waste of beer.

What influences the taste of beer

Do you add water to your beer? Not! And yet ice is water that will melt and dilute your drink additionally. And what actually influences the taste of beer? It is determined by three main ingredients. The first is hops, and more precisely the cones of the plant (perennials) with the same name. The type and species of hop cones (and even the place on the globe where the given cones have grown) determines how the beer will taste in the end. The second ingredient is malt. It is he who largely determines the aroma of the drink: whether it will be strong (e.g. Pils malt), deep (e.g. Munich malt) or maybe sweetish (caramel malt). The malt comes from the cereals: barley, wheat, spelled, rye, oats or buckwheat. And the final taste of beer itself depends not only on its type, but also on the time and temperature of drying.

And the third ingredient that influences the taste of beer is water! It constitutes as much as 97-98% of beer! And it is the type of water used in the production of beer that greatly influences the taste of the drink. Even the hardness of the water is important. The soft one is used for brewing delicate and subtle beers (pilsner, lager), in the case of beers with a more distinctive taste and bitterness, hard water with sulfur is used! What if you add water (ice cubes) to your drink yourself? Such a procedure destroys all the scrupulous work of the brewers.

You don't always know what water the ice cubes are made of, and adding it will destroy the ideal proportion of the amount of water in the beer.

Is it possible to cool a beer with ice?

Ice can be used to cool beer, provided that it is not added to the drink itself. You can use a bowl or a bucket into which we put more ice cubes and put beer bottles or cans into this bowl (a similar procedure is used in the case of wine). If you want to speed up the cooling process, prepare a larger bucket, fill it with cold water, plenty of ice and a lot of salt (up to 0.5 kg per 4 liters of water). Put the beer into this bucket - after a few minutes it should be clearly chilled and encourage consumption!

What is this trick and what is the salt for? In short, it lowers the temperature of the ice-water and causes the ice to take less heat from its surroundings when it melts. Likewise, when you sprinkle more salt on ice or snow, it will turn into a cold aqueous solution (temperature below 0 degrees Celsius)! As you can guess, such an environment causes the bottle or can of alcohol to cool down quickly by itself.

It is worth trying any other methods of quickly cooling the beer or just remember to always keep the golden drink in the refrigerator.

What if there is neither time nor possibility to cool the beer? Well, summa summarum is better to drink a wholesome but warm drink than a bit chilled, but watered down, without bubbles and aroma. It is better to cool down with ice water and wait patiently for a cold beer.

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