Contents
What Is A Beer Style?
Beer styles can be a contentious area among home and craft brewers. Some brewers dislike the very idea of dividing beer into styles, considering that it blunts the brewer's creativity; Peter Bouckaert has been an outspoken advocate of this point of view. Others consider beer styles useful tools in navigating a diverse world of beer.
Traditional Beer Styles
There have been beer styles as long as there has been beer, and as long as the ingredients and processes have varied from brewer to brewer. These differences often form the basis for formal, codified beer styles, but also differ in important ways.
National and Regional Beer Styles
The first "styles" of beer were probably simply descriptions of the beers that happened to be brewed by the brewers in a particular city, region, or country. This was determined by the ingredients and brewing processes that were in common use, and by the popular taste of the local people who were drinking it, in an age where most breweries relied on local custom almost exclusively.
The character of a local beer was determined by many factors, including the ingredients available for brewing. Water chemistry had a significant affect on what kind of beer could be brewed successfully, especially in cities with unusual brewing water, such as Dublin or Pilsen. American brewers, who had mostly six-row barley available to them, quickly turned to maize and corn adjuncts to create distinctly American beer styles. More recently, American brewers have exploited the unique character of American hops to create beer styles with a different, more aggressive hop character than traditional European beers.
Brewing was a skilled trade, and local habits and techniques were also passed down within a city or region from brewer to brewer; in some cases these techniques also created distinct local styles. For example, the decoction mashing characteristic of German lagers, the open fermentation of Belgian ales, or the peat-smoked malt used in some Scottish beers. India Pale Ale developed into a distinct style because of the higher hopping rates required to keep beer stable when it was shipped long distances by sea.
As time went on and beer became traded more widely, these beer styles in some cases became matters of local or national pride, and in some cases were even codified in laws such as the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot. While the rise of large regional breweries probably all but wiped out many small regional beer styles, it entrenched others, as with the Bock beers developed in Einbeck and Munich.
Color, Strength, Age, and Cost
Individual breweries also sometimes brewed more than one beer, and common language developed to describe these. The monestary brewers of Belgium used terms like Dubbel and Tripel to differentiate their beers; English brewers divided their beer into stale and mild, and later into Bitters, Porters, and Stouts. Scottish brewers divided their beers by tax rate into 60 Shilling, 70 Shilling, and 80 Shilling, as well as identifying their strongest beers as Wee Heavy.
The arrival of the clear, golden, bottom-fermented beers of Pilsen drove some of these divisions. For example, in Germany, as the craze for clear, light-colored beers hit, breweries divided their product into "helles," or light-colored, and "dunkel," or dark-colored, as well as classifying some styles as "Alt", or old-style (that is, top-fermented) brews.
The Role of Traditional Beer Styles in the Marketplace
The rise of traditional beer styles is therefore an artifact not primarily of beer brewing, but of beer exporting; as beer from more and more breweries became available, publicans developed a vocabulary to describe them to prospective clients. This is even more important in the modern marketplace; faced with a selection of hundreds of beers from around the world, a beer drinker would be lost without some guideposts along the way, however rough and approximate.
Competition Beer Styles
The BJCP and GABF Beer Style Guidelines
In the United States, there are two major bodies which promulgate beer styles for use in competitions:
- The guidelines of the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) organization are used at all BJCP and American Homebrewers Association-sanctioned events. These guidelines are designed to reflect the types of beer commonly submitted to homebrew competitions. The guidelines were last revised in 2004 and include 80 distinct styles or substyles.
- The Brewers Association (BA), the parent organization of the AHA which also serves professional brewers, uses a different set of judging guidelines for the Great American Beer Festival, a competition involving professional brewers. The most recent version available is the version used at the 2007 GABF, which includes 125 styles and substyles, including more obscure styles rarely brewed by homebrewers such as Gluten Free Beer and American-Style Ice Lager.
Both sets of guidelines include numerous categories and subcategories of beer, defined both by technical attributes such as original gravity and alcohol level and by more subjective measurements such as aroma, flavor, and mouthfeel. Both are designed to create categories broad enough to ensure multiple entries but restrictive enough to allow beers to be judged against similar beers on their own merits. Both include "specialty" categories designed as "catch-all" categories for beers which do not fit into any existing style.
Drawbacks of Competition Guidelines
These competition guidelines often reflect, or attempt to reflect, traditional beer style guidelines, but their aims, and therefore the way they draw their borders, are very different.
Traditional beer styles are developed by the marketplace, and contain just enough information to hint to a consumer as to what to expect. They are often flexible; for example, a significant number of English breweries sell the same beer as a Dark Mild in kegs and as a Brown Ale in bottles, and the distinctions between Porters and Stouts, especially near the border, are subtle to nonexistent. Similarly, especially with more modern styles, the distinctions between designations like Ordinary Bitter, Best Bitter, Premium Bitter, and Extra Special Bitter often owe more to marketing than anything else. When these categories are fixed by a body like the BJCP, beers which fall closer to the edge of the style than the center may suddenly become "poor examples" of a style no matter what their own merits may be. An extreme example is the BJCP's definition of the Extra Special Bitter category, which warns people that Fuller's ESB, which actually owns the British trademark on the term "ESB" and is therefore the only British beer produced with that name, is not a typical example of the style.
Style definitions can also fall short by paying too much example to traditional styles. For example, Kölsch is not technically a style of beer but an appelation designating a wide range of beers brewed in and around the city of Köln in Germany. As a result, a beer style based on Kölsch beers will necessarily be somewhat vague.
Finally, beers which fall entirely outside of competition guidelines, which include many popular commercial beers, end up at a disadvantage to "in style" beers as they are judged against other, often very dissimilar beers. This can discourage brewers from experimenting with recipes which represent slight variations of existing styles, which in competition would either be considered "out of style" examples or be lumped in with the extreme experiments that often populate the specialty categories.
The Role of Competition Beer Styles
Even given these drawbacks, some sort of defined beer style categories are critical to running a beer competition. It would be difficult to rank a flight of beers which included a Pilsner, a Flemish red ale, a Bamberger Rauchbier, a Cream Ale, and a Belgian Christmas beer. Ranking beers which are similar enough to be comparable ensures that subtleties in the individual beers will be more fully appreciated.
Competition beer styles can also be interesting in their own right; the creation of categories and subcategories can provide an interesting look at the trends in brewing among homebrewers and commercial brewers; for example, the recent addition of the Imperial IPA category to the BJCP style guidelines to reflect the popularity of the newly created style.
Beer Style Pages in the Home Brewing Wiki
As is appropriate for a wiki, which combines the collective knowledge of many beer brewers and beer drinkers with different outlooks, the pages listed below reflect both traditional and competition guidelines.
External Links
Pages in category "Beer Styles"
The following 4 pages are in this category, out of 4 total.
