How to taste at a beer festival without losing your palate

Plan before you arrive

Most festivals publish a list of breweries or a beer list in advance. Look through it and mark the beers you most want to try. Ten is a good target for an afternoon. Twenty is ambitious. More than that and you will remember none of them.

Pick a theme if it helps. You might try every hazy IPA on the list, or every lager from a different state, or only the breweries you have never visited. A theme gives your notes a point and makes comparisons easier.

Pour small and taste in order

Ask for taster pours where they are offered. A small pour lets you try more beers without drinking too much. If a beer is not for you, it is perfectly polite to pour it out. Festival staff expect it. There are usually dump buckets on the counter.

Order matters. Start with lighter, lower alcohol beers like lagers, wheat beers and pale ales. Move to hoppy IPAs and amber beers after that. Leave stouts, barleywines, smoked beers and sours until later. A big bitter or sour beer early on makes every delicate beer afterwards taste flat. Our guide to beer flights explains the same logic on a smaller scale.

Water, food and breaks

Drink a glass of water between beers. It rinses the palate, keeps you hydrated and slows the pace. In an outdoor festival in Bengaluru or Pune in the afternoon sun, water matters even more.

Eat a proper meal before you start and keep eating through the day. Plain bread, pretzels or idli are good palate cleansers. Spicy, salty or heavily flavoured food tastes great but muddles what you are tasting for a while afterwards, so save the chilli fry for a break between rounds.

Step away every hour or so. Ten minutes in fresh air away from the noise and the smell of spilt beer resets your nose more than you would expect.

Look before you sip

Festival glasses are often small plastic tasters, which makes appearance harder to judge. Hold the glass up against a light-coloured wall or the sky. Is the beer clear or hazy? Is the haze meant to be there? Does it have a head? Does the head last?

Then smell before you taste. A quick sniff, a pause and a second sniff tells you more than one long inhale. Festival halls are full of competing smells from food stalls and spilt beer, so cup your hand over the glass for a moment to trap the aroma before you sniff again.

Rinse the glass with water between pours if a rinser or jug is available. A trace of the previous stout will muddle the pilsner you pour next.

Keep notes you can use later

By the afternoon you will not remember which beer had the lovely mango aroma. Write it down. Brewery, beer name, style, ABV and three or four words is enough: "hazy, mango and pine, soft bitterness, would buy". A phone note or a photo of the tap list with a quick score works too.

Use a simple scale, perhaps one to five. Stick to it all day. Our guide to reading a taproom menu helps decode the styles and numbers you will see on festival boards.

Talk to the brewers

Festivals are one of the few places where you can ask the person who made the beer how they made it. Ask which hops they used, why a lager is cloudy or what the beer is meant to taste like. Most brewers enjoy the question, especially early in the day before the queues build.

If something tastes wrong, you can mention it politely. Brewers would rather hear about a buttery note or a sour edge from you than from a review. Describe what you notice rather than declaring it bad: "I'm getting a bit of butter on this one" starts a better conversation.

Know when you are done

Your palate tells you when to stop before your head does. When every beer starts to taste the same, or you cannot pick out hop aroma you would normally find easily, your tasting is over for the day. Switch to water or a soft drink and enjoy the music and company.

Pace yourself, decide in advance how many pours you will have and make sure you have a safe way home. Festivals are best enjoyed with friends who look out for each other. Nobody should drive afterwards.

If you enjoyed picking out flavours and want to do it with more confidence, structured sensory training is the next step. It turns "I liked that one" into a description a brewer would recognise.

Common questions

How many beers can I taste at a festival?

Ten or so small pours over an afternoon, with water and food in between, is a good target. Beyond that, most people stop tasting differences clearly.

Is it rude to pour out a beer at a festival?

No. Festivals usually provide dump buckets for exactly this. Pouring out a sample you do not want is normal and sensible.

What order should I taste beers in?

Start light and low in alcohol, move to hoppy and amber beers, then finish with strong, dark, smoked or sour beers.