Spice Up Your Next Beer Tasting Party with These 4 Can’t-Miss Ideas

For serious beer lovers, few events are more fun than a beer tasting party. With so many different beer styles and families on the market today – and so many breweries around the world producing extremely high-quality interpretations of those different styles – it won’t take much effort at all to come up with a great selection of beers that most of your attendees will probably never have experienced before. Put some good friends and great beers together for an evening, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that your event will be a hit.

As with any event, though, a beer tasting party presents plenty of opportunities for you to go the extra mile and make the evening truly special. You’ve put lots of thought into your beer selections, and you’ve chosen some bottles from around that world that you’re certain your guests are going to remember for a long time. If you truly want to host a next-level beer tasting event, though, you’ll need to spend at least a little time thinking about things other than beer. Here are some can’t-miss ideas for spicing up your next beer tasting party.

Cool Your Glassware Before the Tasting Party

As a serious beer fan, you’re no doubt already well aware of the role that beer serving temperatures play in ensuring that each style of beer served at a tasting event tastes as good as it possibly can. Hopefully, you’ve also selected plenty of appropriate glasses that have sufficient room for a decent volume of beer plus the foam from pouring. You’ve probably also planned what you’re going to do to ensure that you have sufficient room in your refrigerator for cooling the beers in advance and serving them at the ideal temperatures.

One thing that you might not have considered, though, is the fact that some time is going to elapse between pouring and tasting. Surely, you’re expecting your guests to mingle and have fun between beers rather than spending the entire evening guzzling away – and in that case, you’ll need a way to keep the beers cool for a while after they’ve been poured. The easiest way to do that is by storing the serving glasses in your refrigerator.

Choose Snacks Carefully When Planning a Beer Tasting Party

When you’re planning a beer tasting party, you’ll want to think carefully about the foods that you offer to your guests. People will almost certainly get hungry during the event – especially if you’re planning something big that’s likely to last several hours. At the same time, though, the beers that you’ve purchased for your event might represent a pretty hefty investment. You wouldn’t want to serve foods that could interfere with the flavors of the beers you’re serving or that might make the beers taste flat and lifeless. Foods like peanuts and pretzels, for instance, are very popular to serve with beer but may not be ideal for a tasting event because salt and yeast can both change your perception of how a beer tastes.

Unsalted crackers are actually the ideal snacks to serve during a beer tasting event because they’ll keep attendees from getting overly hungry without interfering with the beers you serve. Unsalted crackers aren’t exactly the most exciting snacks in the world, though, so you’ll have to make a choice. Would you rather have an event in which the snacks are a bit more fun than plain crackers, or would you prefer for the beer to remain the star of the show? If you’re not sure, you can compromise by offering plain snacks to go with the beers that you serve and pausing halfway through the event for a more elaborate lunch or dinner.

Distribute Disposable Vapes to the Smokers in Your Group

If you’re planning to have a fairly large number of people at your beer tasting party, there’s a pretty good chance that at least a few of them will be smokers. That presents you with a potential conundrum. For one thing, it’s likely that the majority of the people in your group don’t smoke. Those people won’t want to spend their evening immersed in a smoky haze and might make excuses to leave early the smokers in your group are puffing away in your house all night. On the other hand, you may not want to force the smokers to go outside for their cigarettes because that’ll just end up splitting the attendees into two groups that will barely mingle at all.

It’s also worth mentioning that cigarette smoke greatly interferes with your ability to taste anything – including beer. As much as the smokers in your group might not want to admit it, they’re going to have trouble tasting the expensive beers you’ve selected if they spend the entire evening sucking down smoke. What’s the alternative? Distribute disposable vapes to the smokers in your group. You’ll want to select some devices that won’t run out of e-liquid or battery power during the event, and this list of the longest-lasting disposable vapes can help with that. Encouraging your guests to vape instead of smoking will ensure that the non-smokers in your group enjoy the event, and who knows – it may even encourage some of the smokers in your group to switch to a smoke-free alternative and add a few years to their lives.

Find a Good Party Game to Play During the Tasting Event

You’re not going to want to host a beer tasting event in which all of your guests simply stand around and drink beer all day, and that means you’ll want to plan at least one activity that keeps your attendees occupied – and not too tipsy – between servings. You can always plan your party around a football game, of course, but maybe you’d like to have a different type of activity that doesn’t involve all of your guests staring at a TV instead of interacting with each other. Consider an escape room or murder mystery in a box. Those types of games are designed to be solved through communication and collaboration, and they’re completely playable even for those who aren’t normally fans of board games.