By Paul r. Glenister and Edward Segell
J. E. Siebel Sons' Co., Inc., Chicago
Published in October 1965

In order to make this article easier for you to read and save, we have made it a downloadble (PDF) document you will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to access. Left click here to read it online or right click here to save it on your computer.

Synopsis:

Much of thevisual attractiveness of a freshly poured glass of beer is due to the creamy-white head of foam which rides atop the surface of the beer. This appeal is not lost as the foam collapses or as the glass is emptied, because a good head of foam will deposit a generous, lacy "cling" on the glass, and a good "cling" has unique visual charm for the person who knows and appreciates good beer.

The laboratory evaluation of beer foam quality is therefore a matter of no small importance ; it is, unfortunately, also a matter of no small difficulty. It is all too easy for a person working in a laboratory to be led astray by his methods of analysis and to measure foam attributes which have little, if anything, to do with foam appearance and behavior under practical conditions. Published procedures for the evaluation of beer foam have generally been based on measurements of the liquid beer contained in or drained from the foam under standardized conditions of foam generation and decay.

Such procedures are generally attractive to laboratory personnel because they yield numerical values which permit statistical treatment of the data, promote neat record-keeping, and are (somehow) intellectually satisfying to those trained in scientific or business pursuits. It is not at all certain, however, that such test values correlate closely with the behavior or the general attractiveness of beer foam in the drinking glass.

More pertinent to the present paper is the fact that beer foam quality, is the resultant of a combination of a number of different foam attributes, in which foam drainage plays only a subsidiary role.