We’ll take murky beer but not muddy.
Murk is usually superficial, but sometimes softening, sometimes silky. It leaves room for other flavours. Light likes it.
Mud is taste and texture. It is dirt, the riverbed stirred up — chewable, unclean, silt between the teeth.
Mud is why you leave carp to swim in a clean bath before eating it — one degree away from… Well, you know.
Beers that look murky are more likely to taste muddy, but don’t have to. Clear beers can be muddy, we think, but it’s a clever trick.
Murky wasn’t meant as an insult. Muddy always is.
7 replies on “100 Words: Beer Strictly for the Geophages”
“Haze” may be superficial; “murk” certainly isn’t.
with you 100%. Always disappointing to find a potentially exciting beer buried beneath particulates and the flavours that go with them. Not to mention a texture more like double cream than beer.
Sadly I may have mentioned this a few times before
But a good porter can be silty. The texture tricking you into thinking it was made in a coffee press. Particularly enhanced with taken from pewter.
Agree with Curmudgeon – for me the distinction is between hazy and murky. Hazy you can still see through. Murk is soup – too much.
Bright > ‘Off-bright’ (made that up) > Hazy > Cloudy > Murky > Muddy.
Guess everyone draws the line in a different place.
People talk about ‘off-bright’ beer having ‘a cast’ (more usually ‘a bit of a cast’). ‘Casty’ doesn’t really work, though.
Beyond Murky is soupy.
Muddy is different – its about the taste, not the appearance. Greene King beers literally taste of mud. Therefore they are muddy, even though they are mostly clear in appearance.