Have you ever tried a new beer with some friends who offered such assessments as, “Hm. Witty. Precocious. I’m getting a hint of currant. Anyone getting currant?” You’re thinking shut the hell up, you pretentious ass. Currant. What the hell is wrong with you? Meanwhile, you offer no description yourself because you can’t think of anything besides Mm. Beer.

I love beer, but I’m not always sure why. I often taste a hint of something that I can’t quite place. A few weeks ago, I tried a beer that had a bit of cinnamon in it, and I couldn’t place it. Often, the best I can come up with is another food that has the same spice in it. Mm. This is . . . doughnutty.

Fear not. We here at (in?) the Brewniverse did some legwork for you. We plumbed the sordid depths of beer descriptions offered by the brewers themselves and those written by reviewers. From these, we culled the most frequently used words and presented them in Wordle charts (wordle.net), from which you should be able to find a few adjectives to bandy about among your more pretentious friends.

To improve your chances of coming up with an description that’s in the ball park, we looked at a few different samples of one of the most popular styles—IPAs. (I suppose this is the point of the article where I should point out that the collection and processing of these descriptions and reviews involved absolutely no scientific or statistical methods whatsoever. But since this article is essentially a tongue-in-cheek attempt to help others appear to know more about beer than they actually do, we’re all probably okay with that.)

First, here are the words the beer makers themselves used to describe their IPAs:

And here are the more popular terms used by a pretty random collection of amateur reviewers on beer-rating sites to describe the same IPAs described above:

Some of these words are pretty small, but where that is the case, the word was used only once or twice anyway. We can safely leave out yummy, for instance, even though it’s often the first word that comes to mind when I try a new beer.

There it is. You are ever-so-slightly more prepared to offer an opinion on the next new IPA. I will leave the gestures up to you, but you might want to sip, squint a bit, and look up (left, then right) like you’re searching for just the right word, nod slowly in recognition and pick a word or two.

Or just enjoy the beer.