It's time to be honest about styles

Yyyyyyyyyyep. Sums up my feelings.

I say let the brewers call it what they want, if they feel that's the best way to represent it to the consumer. And consumers should, well, just consume it and enjoy it. Wax philosophical if you want, but there's more to beer than semantics.

 

Tastes bettr than a lot of IPA's and much better than any amber ales I have had

 

wow. 5 pages of what we should call beer. I know what I like and I dont care what you call it

 

Totally agree with the last part, but sometimes there is a contextual issue involved. If somebody is asking for suggestions of great Maibocks then I think it's important to point out that Dead Guy is an outlier at best. Honestly, it gets the yeast, malt and hops wrong if it were to be looked at as an exemplar. Sure, you can enjoy it for what it is, but it shouldn't be held up as representative, especially to someone just starting to explore the style.

 

Fair enough. I was thinking more of when brewers use additional descriptors like "sour petite rye farmhouse IPA"

 

@mudbug, First of all thank you for your courage to post something that is so controversial that it released a firestorm of reaction. To get a little serious, with the increasing number of breweries I prefer to see keep style indicators, but I think your point is they are not always true. I think we can solve this one by putting a bullet in the head of all black IPA's right here. I hate the style and whatever it stands for. You make a good point to the brewers, create a new style if you need to - don't pull IPA into the name.

 

That's great, thanks for the info. It really is a good beer and beats the crap out of most other regularly offered Mexican choices.

 

I cleaned this up to remove a lot of the pointless personal bickering.

There's some good information here if we can keep the discussion civil and on topic.

 

I think we shouldn't care what a beer is called style wise, and instead judge beers based on how they taste.

 

I realize I'm stirring the pot on a heated debate that settled two months ago. I'm doing it anyway.

Last night I enjoyed a glass of Smuttynose's Noonan Black IPA here in the right Portland and remembered a conversation with a buddy of mine from the left Portland a few months ago when I was enjoying many of the awesome beers available there. My west coast friend introduced me to a CDA (Cascadian Dark Ale) which I likened to the "Black IPA" with which I was familiar. With proper pride of place he informed me that the style was invented in the Pacific Northwest and that Black IPA was the wrong name to call it. I didn't debate the point, figuring that the two styles looked and tasted more or less the same, not particularly caring which came first or what it was "properly" called. I was confident that if I described a CDA to an east-coaster or a BIPA to a west-coaster I would be understood.

It's an interesting debate nevertheless, because in some contexts it does make a difference. Those of us who started homebrewing back in the late 80's and early 90's almost surely learned about the classic beer styles from Charlie Papazian's Complete Joy of Home Brewing. It was a great introduction to the process of making beer and in it Papazian laid out a classification system for the world's beers. First splitting the categories between ales (fermented with strains of S. cerevisiae) and lagers (fermented with S. uvarum). Then going on to describe the characteristics of the classic styles qualitatively and quantitatively with ranges of SRM color, IBU bitterness, original specific gravity (dissolved sugars), etc. expected for the style. "Expected" is the key word. If you, as a brewer, enter a beer that you call a "German bock" in a competition, but have fermented it with an ale yeast instead of a lager yeast, the judges will notice and ding you points for missing your target style. On the other hand, you might win the competition entering it as a "porter" instead.

Outside the context of a structured competition, free market competition, let's say, all is fair. There are style police though: your potential customers. If you create an expectation on your label that your product fails to deliver in the bottle you will piss off customers. A great example of this is Alexander Keith's IPA. This A-B InBev product looks and tastes frankly like most of their others. At 5% ABV and maybe 18 IBUs, it's tough to call this an IPA and not disappoint someone who buys it based on that name as I did in Toronto a few years ago. I seriously thought that the waitress had brought me the wrong beer, then that the bartender had hooked up the wrong keg until I finally figured out that this was a misnamed beer.

All that said, if I see a beer calling itself after a classic style I expect it to be "in the range." I might be happily surprised or disappointed to find out otherwise, but unless the brewer has made a reasonable attempt to either set or eliminate my expectations on the label I will feel annoyed that I was tricked.

 

Well I said this before and I say it again. Styles is a made up thing by good old Mr Jackson (RIP).
http://zythophile.wordpress.com/2010/10/23/michael-jackson-and-the-invention-of-beer-style/

In The World Guide to Beer, however, Michael devoted a section to what he called “The classic beer styles”, though he still differentiated between “beer styles” and “beer types”, saying:
If a brewer specifically has the intention of reproducing a classical beer, then he is working within a style. If his beer merely bears a general similarity to others, then it may be regarded as being of their type.”

(The World Guide to Beer, 1977, p14)

if you brew a beer/ale, you can call it what you want to. You know?

good read Amber, Gold and Black....

 

Ok lets think for a moment.

Before Charlie, all those folks in Europe and the Rest of the world, had no idea what beer they were making? LOL.

Funny. Every time someone "thinks" they invented a New type or style of beer, you read history and bingo, its been done. and Most likely its been done for hundreds of years......hoppy porters is all it is....which is based on what?

care to guess?

East India porter ever heard of it? yep its been done, hops from American yep been done for hundreds of years....I wonder who owned the colonies before Independence, oh yea....

really funny how since 1976 we "think" we invented "craft" or Good beer/Ale here all the sudden.....short memories is all.

 

Late to the thread.

This matters to me A LOT in one particular context - awards. Local brewery has a decent but not great IPA, labeled American IPA, etc. Then they go around boasting that they have a GABF silver or bronze medal. Wondering how this brewery could possibly get a silver with so many superior IPA's out there, I come to learn that it actually won in another category like strong pale ale (when there is an American IPA category that they could have used instead). I would speculate that the competition is thinner for strong pale ale than American IPA, especially given the frequency of top/known breweries that are always winning the American IPA category.

The medals only mean something relative to who or what the winner beat in order to get that medal.

 

Lagunitas Sucks isn't a "IPA" it's a Cereal Medley, LOL.

 

who cares? styles are for stuffy nerds to worry about. i let my pallate do the talking not labels.

 

I really dont get the trend toward antinomianism here. Categories are useful or they would not exist. Imagine a world where we didn't categorize things: "its not a beer it's just an alcoholic beverage" "it's not a pizza it's just food."