Should barrel-aged Quads be recategorized?

I know you didnt lol. Just adding an aditionl point. Cheers!

 

I'm now drinking a St Bernardus Abt 12. This is a completely different beer from La Trappe Quadrupel. Apart from their strength what do they have in common? The La Trappe is a fine strong pale ale, this is a nice dark ale. What have Rochefort and the others in common with the La Trappe beer? And as I've said many times before, the problem is that it suffers when American beer weirdos compare it to the other so-called 'Quadrupels' from Belgium and find it wanting...Anyway, pending evidence against it (there won't be any), we should assume that the first use of 'Quadrupel' was by the brewery in naming this beer in 1991 (many, many years before it became fashionable in the USA). Other strong pale ales are closer to this than any strong dark beers. Being English, of course, I wouldn't mind calling it a barleywine. A 10% beer? Definitely a barleywine...Did you know (I could be wrong about everything), that in the 1950s England was producing (possibly) the strongest beer in the world?

 

To give people some updates:

Beer Advocate added Quadrupel as a style category in early 2004. In 2001 they teamed up with the Brewers Association to categorize their beers, at which time they had a Belgian Strong Dark Ale category and an "Other" Belgian Ale category (which mostly contained Christmas beers and other oddities). This "Other" category was renamed "Belgian Specialty Ale" in 2002. In Feb-March 2003 they seemed to have dropped their association with BA as they cut their number of categories by a third, and all of the Belgian Strong Darks ended up in "Artisanal Strong Dark Ale." A couple months later they redid everything again, at which time they created a Belgian Strong Dark Ale category, and a Belgian Grand Cru category (the only differentiation between the two that I can tell is whether or not the beer had "grand cru" in its name). When BA redid their styles again in early 2004, they dropped the Grand Cru category and put all of those in the BSDA category, but pulled every beer with the word Quad in the name (La Trappe plus a handful of American beers) and put them in a new category called Quadrupel. They also took a few classic strong dark examples, including Westvleteren and Rochefort, and put them in this new, small category as well.

The earliest use that I can find of the term Quad on a label other than La Trappe is perhaps Weyerbacher QUAD. They started brewing Belgian style beers in 1998, and it may have been one of them (Merry Monks definitely was). Avery first brewed The Reverend some time around then as well (it was produced "shortly" after Hop Heaven, which was introduced in 1998). Urthel, which was founded in 2000, first brewed Urthel Samaranth in 2002, but originally was designated as a barleywine on the label. At some point it was given the term Quadrium, perhaps when it went from being brewed at Van Steenberge to Koningshoeven (which would make sense). The influence is clear, as the brewer of Urthel had previously worked for La Trappe. The first true Belgian Quad that I am aware of is Straffe Hendrik Quadrupel, which was released in 2010, but which falls in line stylistically with BSDAs.

It cannot be said definitively that the style came long after the beer La Trappe Quadrupel was first released, but the fact that this site did not create the style listing until more than a decade later, and that when they were using the Brewers Association definititions before that there was no mention of it as a style, pretty well lays it to rest.

I wanted it to be more contentious than this so that I could take an in-depth look at it, but I dont think it is worth it.

 

Does this mean I can stay?

 

This article from 2010 is also an interesting read:

https://www.beeradvocate.com/ratebeer/?path=/Beer-News/Article-758.htm

 

Great find. Thanks for posting.

 

Yep "Quad"as a "style" is an American marketing term. But then again, IPA is now just the same thing. A flavor descriptor that can be attached to nearly anything to denote "hoppy". This is why I am against any new "styles" being created.

 

Single, dubbel, triple were all styles noting the belgian beers. Same thing with marking bottles with XXX's noting how strong the spirit or beer is. You could call it marketing or informing the public of the strength of the drink