Misleading Beer Style Names

Just quit drinking those styles that annoy you then. I personally enjoy jumbo shrimp too.

 

Oxymoron's still confuse me..

 

Check this out

http://www.bjcp.org/2008styles/style23.php

Black IPA is in class 23 specialty beer

 

Perfect timing

 

Almost every American "Hefeweizen" ends up being a Pale Wheat Ale...that is annoying.

 

Or a Berliner weisse that uses sour fruit juice in a clean beer. Or they add lactic acid to the beer. Or many American saisons with an American ale yeast strain and they just add spices to try to get the flavor. Again, all go into that Specialty Beer class.

Which witch by the way......

 

Everyone knows that IPAs were first brewed by Christopher Columbus to survive the trip across the ocean to be served at the first thanksgiving.

Getting all bijiggity about the use of the word India in IPA seems a bit silly unless you are equally as irritated with Kolsch, Russian Imperial Stouts, Berlinerweisse, Flanders Red, Baltic Porters......

 

Zombie Killer.

Nice tasting mead, but it's 6%. What? Hipster Killer maybe.

 

I just had the 21st Amendment Back In Black. It's a "Black IPA." I think it's a British Stout. It has IBUs in the IPA range, but the color is obviously not in compliance with the requirements of an IPA. So they just name it whatever the heck they want to comply with certain parameters and snitch on themselves for violating others.

 

No, I mean Imperial Pale Ale. Such as in Hoppin Frog Fresh Frog Raw Hop Imperial Pale Ale, which is also known as an APA (American Pale Ale).

 

Here's the thing with styles. They have three different origins, and I think you may be conflating them. The first, obviously, is historical. We are not going to be dropping the I from IPA anytime soon, no matter how irrelevant that whole "beer for the British army in India" thing might be today. The second origin is essentially sensory, which is where you get your 9 (Id argue a few more, but your point is made). You are saying you can lump beers with similar characteristics together in a fairly small number of buckets and it would tell the consuming public largely what it needs to know. That may be true, although you are going to get a lot of pushback in this forum (as you can see) being that this group knows a bit more than your average beer drinker about beer.

The third origin is where all of the subcategory hairsplitting comes from. It is competition. The BJCP uses 23 styles but splits those into substyles to get it to 88 (I think). World beer Cup goes with 95 styles. The GABF outdoes them all, with 84 style and fiurther subsyles, for a total of 134 different ways to enter a beer. (Disclaimer in case I added wrong: Close enough. You get the point.)

The thing is, you can complain about it all you want, but in commercial competitions this is just going to happen, and its going to keep happening. I can give three reasons for this. The first is that the bounds continue to be pushed on what can be done with Barley, Hops, Water and Yeast (along with god knows what else). That innovation is a good thing. It's why we are here and why this site exists. Imperial IPA is a good and well known example. It's too big to be in competition with American IPAs - more importantly, they are designed and built with different goals in mind. It's not a Barleywine for other stylistic reasons. For a little while, it's okay to put it into "experimental/specialty" but sooner or later, as it explodes all over the craft beer scene, you need to define a category so they can be judged on their own merits.

The second is a little different from the first, but distinct. I can think of many examples of beers that didn't fit a style that became commercial hits on such a scale that either the style had to either bend to meet them or a new style had to be created to accommodate them. I always thought Bells Oberon was a good example of this - due to its success it is listed as a classic example of American Wheat/Rye, but it is darker than the style calls for and I think it is on the malty and fuller end of the scale (although I do think it makes it into the range). Certainly lots of styles whose name starts with "American Style..." are good examples of this as well.

The third is mercenary, but an absolute factor. Breweries pay hundreds of dollars per entry and stake their reputations on these competitions. They will fight tooth and nail to get "American Style Oktoberfest" separated from "German Style Oktoberfest" (to pull a favorite example from GABF), so they can medal with their slightly non-traditional (albeit tasty and well made) flagship beer. (Disclaimer #2: I know Oktoberfest is no one's flagship. Use your imagination. I'm not putting any more time into it.)

I sympathize with your point. I just don't know that history is going away, and I know that competition, market forces, and marketing spin are not going away.

 

lmgtfy.com/?q=IMHO

Sure, OK, it makes no sense, but it's not misleading as you originally posited, and it's the best name we've got so I'm going to keep using it.

 

The name began as the drinkers' term for what the brewers called Pale Ale, and it was massively hopped and bitter. But I've had a few which are so bitter that the inside of my mouth has shrivelled up and much more bitter than some immensely hoppy IPAs. Hoppiness and bitterness aren't the same thing.