Such are the remedies chiefly made use of for brown beers. Drinks formed from pale malts are always supposed to become spontaneously fine, and when they are so, by being bottled, they are saved from any farther hazard. As it is impossible for any fermented liquor to be absolutely at rest, the reason of beers being preserved by this method, is, thereby they are deprived of a communication with the air, and, without risk, gain all the advantages which age, by slow degrees, procures, and which art can never imitate. Were we as curious in our ales and beers as we are in the liquors we import, did we give to the produce of our own country the same care and attendance which we bestow on foreign wines, we might enjoy them in a perfection at present scarcely known, and perhaps cause foreigners to give to our beers a preference to their own growth. SECTION XX. _OF TASTE[41]._ Doctor Grew, who has treated of this matter, divides taste into simple and compound; he mentions the different species of the first, and calculates the various combinations of the latter, the number of which exceeds what at first might be expected. Without entering into this detail, I think that the different tastes residing in the barleys, or formed by their being malted, and brewed with hops, may be reduced to the following; the acid, which is a simple taste; the sweet, which is an acid smoothed with oils; the aromatic, which is the compound of a spiritous acid, and a volatile sulphur; the bitter, which, according to our author, is produced by an oil well impregnated either with an alkaline or an acid salt, shackled with earth; the austere, which is both astringent and bitter; and, lastly, the nauseous and rank, which is, at least in part, sometimes found in beers, which have either been greatly affected by fire, or, by long age, have lost their volatile sulphurs; and have nothing left but the thicker and coarser oils, resembling the empyreumatic dregs of distilled liquors not carefully drawn. The number of circumstances on which the taste of fermented liquors depends, are so various, that perhaps there never were any two brewings, or any two vintages, which produced drinks exactly similar. But as, in this case, as well as in many others, the varieties may be reduced under some general classes; the better to distinguish them, let us enquire which taste belongs to different malt liquors, according to the several circumstances in which they are brewed.