If Super Bowl ads, bar signs, and country songs are to be believed, Americans love their beer “ice cold.” After all, you can’t very well have a summertime backyard barbecue without an ice-filled cooler of longneck bottles and cans, can you? And beer always tastes best in a frosty mug, right?
Well, yes and no. If your predilections lean toward mass-produced lagers with the word “lite” somewhere in the name, then yes, you definitely want to keep those things as cold as the natural laws of the universe will permit. But when it comes to craft ales and lagers, including most homebrew, there really is no good one-size-fits-all temperature. And even if there were, it probably wouldn’t be ice cold.
Temperature, you see, has a profound effect on our taste buds. The chemical compounds that are responsible for the myriad aromas and flavors we love in our beer are variously activated and suppressed according to temperature. Warmth usually makes a flavor more perceptible, while cold tends to suppress it. Choosing just the right temperature ensures that these constituent chemicals remain properly in balance as you enjoy your craft beer or homebrew.