Quote Originally Posted by Vladimir View Post
Hate Sam Adams: It's good English beer; that's like Edit: Nevermind.

Anything with a fatal overdose of hops should be (relatively) good warm. The hops help preserve the beer.
Hops are great for preserving beer as long as you keep it away from light, that is. It is often a misconception that it's the beer getting warm after being poured out which ruins the taste but it's mostly light destroying the hop, making the bad taste. (the darker the bottle, the better, though the high quality hop of bigger breweries are less vurnable against light nowadays Another great evil of course is air, there's a reason you need a 'kraag' (the whitish foam) a top of your beer of a decent size (though it depends on the brand and glass and it's tradition on how high it should be, a stella for example has a 'kraag' of ideally three fingerwidths high), is air. Beer should get into contact with air at all. Temperature is not something that necessarily ruins the beer, but not all beer should be drank at the same temperature. While a pils should be at the colder end of a spectrum, one shouldn't ruin a fine Delirium Tremens by serving it at 6°C (at least 9° but better go for something a little higher) and especially not a beer a like a Chimay Blue (min. 13°C). Pils should always be served cold, preferably from a top cooled tap. And rember kids the first and very last drops when opening and closing the tap shouldn't come in the glass at all! Actually it's quite pathetic how at some fancy places people pay a lot of money (especially abroad) for a quality beer, but get them poored in completely wrong from out filthy pipes.