Getting Head
Head is important. Enough to bring someone to their knees. Giving it. Getting it. Bragging about it. Advertising it. Even just the mention of it can bring excitement. So here’s a whole section devoted to it. The below graphs show how often in the 12 months April 2021 to March 2022 google searched for “beer head” and its related terms in AUNZ. It shows, for all the thought and talk about it, the MOST popular thing people wanted to know, was not giving or getting it (going by total search hits) but rather what was BEST HEAD.
So, let me reveal to you what makes great head and why tasting it elevates the whole beer experience. I’ll then talk about how personal preferences vary as to what is “best” and “good” head.
Best Head: How You Know You’ve Got It
A traditional learned foam connoisseur has said it’s a combination of:
Stability – quality of holding the foam structure of the head, how quickly it dissipates
Quantity – Goldilocksing: not too much and not too little, just right
Lacing – nothing to do with a fun corset but rather the bubble pattern left on the glass after drinking it
Whiteness – brilliant white
Creaminess – the textural feeling of it created by small uniformed bubbles (homo-dispersed) giving a very smooth mouth feel
Strength – the alcoholic strength of the beer
My craft based opinion differs. What makes great head is simply:
Stability
Bubble density within the head – bubbles don’t have to be uniform, in fact you don’t want them to be for certain pallet feels, but you want a lot of them per cm3
Quantity – standard pour should render 1-1.5” collar without gushing (over exuberate foaming, see section on beer faults) and bubble over.
Lacing doesn’t factor into it. In fact, lacing looks dirty and detracts from the beer experience, but then preference to lacing is known to be very gender based and the above learned list was written by a male. Preference to lacing is very visual. For me, that look is locked in the past of massive chain pubs owned by the majors, crowded loud bars full of smoke, patrons treated like cattle, cat calls and meat marketers, and not a handcrafted boutique beer in sight.
Colour isn’t a factor. Your colour doesn’t and shouldn’t matter – black, white, yellow, golden, brown. Makes no difference. Foam colour is merely an outcome of the beer’s ingredients. Be whatever colour you feel you are inside. I’m certainly not going to proport white is best. The only things that are functionally important in foam are, through the three qualities I’ve listed above, foam’s ability to provide:
Deliverance of aromatics – good foam lifts beer perfumes of hops, yeast, etc., out of the beer, expressing them into the air for you to smell as you drink.
Physical Sensation – as soon as the beer passes your lips you should feel the foam. It is not true that foam should be creamy. What it should be is matched to the style. A smooth malt based beer is well paired to a creamy head. A crisp summer lager is well hitched to a prickly head caused by uneven course bubbles bursting roughly around your mouth.
Filtering and capturing compounds of flavour so as to deliver these intensely to the pallet with the beer as the foam is drunk. Foam holds flavour of bitterness and spice. Bubbles are coated with both proteins and polypeptides. Polypeptides link with bitter iso-alpha acids from hops giving these flavours.
A very famous beer expert, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Charlie Bamforth, agrees that great head is in the eye of the beholder. He states “consumers discriminate between beers based on their foam characteristics. These choices have been found to diverge between genders, race or even region.” In my opinion, as long as the foam performs the above three functions then, great head is whatever gets you off. Your preferences, like most bias in life, are very likely shaped by your past experiences, subjection to advertising, and social influencers. As long as you enjoy it, it’s the best head ever. Promise.