Beer Styles Have Finally Been Updated!

As Clark would tell you, since you know he was one of the originators of the style, it is indeed a North East Iowa-style IPA!

 

That's really interesting that the canned pumpkin products are actually a different sort of squash (and i love me some butternut squash so no wonder I love "pumpkin" pie). But the article is making a strangely straw man argument about how bad jack-o-lantern pumpkins are to cook with. I'm prettty sure nobody tries to make anything out of those unwieldy things. If you want to try it from scratch you use the much smaller, denser, and sweeter sugar pumpkins.

That said, we tried that once and I still agree that the canned stuff was better!

 

Yeah, recent batches of King Sue have been fairly hazy, but I don't remember it always being like that.

 

I think the fruited IPAs should be put in the fruit beers or their own style. For example, why put the fruited hefeweizens in the fruit beers, yet the fruited IPAs are in one of the many IPA styles? Just doesn't seem very consistent.

Maybe an adjunct IPA style? To include the fruited IPAs as well as the milkshake/lactose IPAs. I think this would serve a better purpose then the NE IPA style that was added.

 

This is going to get real complicated real fast. What about sour IPAs? There are also plenty of fruited IPAs (some hazy, some not) that aren't milkshake IPAs. IF we had a category for IPAs with adjuncts, shouldn't we have categories for stouts with adjuncts?

 

Like I said, a category for adjunct IPAs, doesn't matter if it's fruit, lactose, etc.

Again, why are the hefe's with fruit in the fruit beer style category?

Sure, adjunct and BA stouts could be a different style as there seems to be a lot of those as well.

 

On the basis of flavor, I think Weizenbock should be moved from the Bock group to the Wheat Beers group, together with Dunkelweizen. Consider the description: "The German-style Weizenbock is a wheat version of a German-Style Bock, or a bigger and beefier Dunkelweizen."

 

I read through this thread and I am surprised that nobody has bought this up.

Methode Traditionelle should be a listable beer style on this site. There are a fair number of beers brewed by Jester King (Spon series), Funk Factory (pretty much all of their spontaneously fermented beers), amongst others. See the official website with descriptions of their standards: https://methodetraditionnelle.org/standards/

When I am adding new beers under the Funk Factory listing, I am always struck by the dichotomy of "American Wild Ale" (which encompasses a very broad spectrum of wild beers in the USA) and "Belgian Lambic/Geuze". Funk Factory's Glory in the Morning is a blend of spontaneous coolship fermented beer, but it certainly isn't a "Belgian lambic" despite it being brewed in the same tradition with different terroir; but "American Wild Ale" fails to capture the effort and time it takes to brew, ferment and age such a beer when you have beers like "7 Day Golden Sour" from Trinity which is a kettle soured beer (yet is currently listed as "Belgian Lambic" on this site right now). So as a default, I choose to label such offerings from Funk Factory as "American Wild Ale" to err on the side of caution. There should be a way to distinguish such beers from all the other "sour" or "wild" beers on the site.

Just my 2 cents.

 

Not to mention, Belgian Saison is under Pale Ales... (?)

I too am always conflicted about how to add an American Gueuze or Saison...

 

At least for me, 99% of the time I see "American Wild Ale", I assume it's been at least spontaneously fermented and likely aged in oak and all that. If we start creating styles for every combination of hops, how long it took to brew, how long it aged, and all that we would have the same number of styles as beers and styles wouldn't mean anything. So many beers cross over between styles these days. I think even adding NE IPA as a different style than American IPA or American Imperial IPA opened up a huge can of worms. At this rate we're going to have styles for "Citra-hopped IPA", "Mosaic-hopped IPA", "Mosaic & Citra hopped IPA", "Double Dry-Hopped kinda hazy but not quite New England IPA that might be kinda tart IPA".

 

Huh? I mean, I don't have the numbers, but I'd hazard a guess that 75-90% of the "American Wild Ale" beers here on BA are not spontaneously fermented at all. And a slim minority even aged in oak.

American Wild Ale may possibly be the worst catch all on the site actually. I'm surprised it's taken this long to suss it out.

 

I mean I haven't researched every single one to make sure. But my point is: for many of these styles there are so many variations of the style, the catch all just makes more sense. What styles could you see American Wild Ale being divided up into and what would differentiate them? Aren't the majority of kettle sours either a Berliner Weiss or a Gose? I'm sure you'd find some on BA under American Wild Ale, but plenty of beers on here are listed under the wrong style, so that wouldn't exactly be surprising.

 

I quite agree but rather than listing new styles I think it would be more accurate to call things simply what they are. Beers labeled as Methode Traditionelle could be included under "Wild Ales" without creating any confusion.

 

I mean, that's fine and all. And I think they do fall under that broad category of American Wild Ale and I'm OK with that, I was just thinking that more specificity (not just for Methode Traditionelle which is in a way, a marketing term) could be more instructive to those with more discerning sour/wild palates and a sense of history.

Either way, I really believe that we cannot call "7 Day Sour" from Trinity a Belgian lambic. At minimum, that falls under American Wild Ale, and would definitely fall under a "kettle soured" subcategory. I think it's misleading to label that kind of beer as a "Belgian Lambic" because that is lightyears away from being the same thing.

Maybe there are too many categories, and I get that. A hoppy IPA is a hoppy IPA, but there is a not insubstantial difference between goses, berliner weisses, sour beer with the yeast pitched in by the brewer, spontaneously fermented wild beer, brett beers, etc.