Bell's Third Coast - Old Ale or Barleywine?

http://www.bellsbeer.com/contact-us

 

Yes

 

It's an old ale when it's young, but a week after bottling it's no longer an old ale because now it's older, hence you can call it a barleywine. It's that simple.

 

Make it a poll!

 

The recipes for these two styles are very similar and it could be as little as an extra pound of malt and 0.1% extra ABV to go from Old Ale into the Barleywine category.

 

Last spring I was working my way through all 104 styles (stuck at 100 now) and needed to review an Old Ale. I tried Bell's Third Coast Old Ale, reviewed it, then noted it was a Barleywine. Bummer. Had to seek out a true Old Ale, strangely enough the similar sounding North Coast Old Stock Ale.

 

I imagine they added "Barleywine" to the label after catching flack over the name of the beer making it sound like it's an Old Ale style. It pissed me off at the time I fell for it. That would be like having an IPA with Stout as part of the name, and not saying IPA on the label. At least Barleywine and Old Ale are similar.

 

Bell's Third Coast Old Ale, a barley wine, isn't a contradiction of terms as they are normally used today. As a label, "old ale" practically has no meaning today. The way that the term is used, it is not a beer style. Harvey's Old Ale won "World's Best Mild" at the World Beer Awards*. For "stylists" to ascribe a consistent and sensible meaning to the term as it relates to beer styles is fruitless. Although old ale isn't alone in this, it deserves special recognition even by beer style standards. It's not like "barley wine" is an agreed upon concrete idea either - as the recent barley wine thread here illustrated. Many craft breweries use old ale and barley wine interchangeably (which is nothing new)... and if they aren't because they think that they are two clearly distinct things, then they're most likely thinking about it in fictional terms.

*there's another one for you @JackHorzempa

 

Last spring when checking off styles, I suddenly had one less. Upon checking, I found that BeerAdvocate had changed the style of Kasteel Barista Chocolate Quad from Belgian Strong Dark Ale to Belgian Quad. That does happen, particularly if two styles are similar enough to create confusion as to what style it is or should be. The person who added it to the site probably guessed wrong on the style. So - although a beer formulation could change its style, there are other explanations for the name not matching the style.

 

If the brewer states what style they are calling it, this site will go with that, I believe, rather than any independent judging of the style or recipe.

 

At risk of going slightly off topic here is an example of what I would call a misnamed beer. I was tearing through a series of Oktoberfests in August/September and this one wasn't quite right until I looked closely at the label. It has a new label quite a bit different from these pictures but it clearly said Vienna Lager in very small print.

To actually add to the discussion, some people still use barleywine as a catch all term for high alcohol beer (that isn't dark enough to be a stout, anyway). And it's easy to make different recipes start to taste the same when you crank up the malt that much. It's quite difficult to have a balanced distinct flavor at 13% abv. When an Old Ale or Scotch Ale or even some IPAs get well into the double digits the flavor can tend to merge. Nebraska Brewing Company even changed the style of Fathead at some point.

 

You bring up a good example to further the conversation, but I disagree that the person "guessed wrong." There's no right or wrong, just that the brewer calls it a quad. "Belgian strong dark ale" isn't a style in the strict sense... it's really just a method of categorization like "Polish amber lager" could be or "Canadian pale strong lager" could be (those are random words). It's a description - it only means what the words say. Many even debate if Quadrupel is really a "style" since (I believe) it started very recently as a brand name for a particular beer and has since been latched onto other beers that never identified themselves as such. Since beers will usually get the "quad" tag if they are Trappist or if they state quad on the label, many feel like quad is a more specific sub-type of "Belgian strong dark" (which feels looser)... but that thinking won't account for pale "quads." If someone claims that quads are more (insert fruity, dry, spicy, whatever) and BSDAs are more (insert fruity, dry, spicy, whatever), they are most likely buying into a selective fiction (which isn't necessarily a bad thing).

I realize that some people () want beer styles to feel like a scientific taxonomy... to start with a fresh slate and a clean logic that covers the full spectrum. Scientific taxonomy can't even achieve this with regards to the natural world though. In the case of beer, where we try to embrace multiple terms, multiple histories, multiple cultures, and those darn multiple brewers, we will not have a clean system for categorizing things that were never designed to be fully categorizable.

 

We could just use the wine system of naming by ingredients (i.e. type of grape) as the basis.

Maris Otter Caramel/Crystal Goldings ...

Rahr 2-row Caramel /Crystal Centennial Cascade ...

 

This. ^^ Beer styles cannot be too rigid or else they will fail to reflect the varied history and cultures behind them. And the more you tighten your grip the more star sys-*ahem* beer styles will slip between your fingers.

 

Whatever we are going to call it, this year's batch is really good and I'm having a hard time putting any in the cellar.

 

Pale quads? I don't think I've seen such a thing. Can you give an example? I'm not sure how they could get the 'traditional' quad flavors out of pale malt, but would definitely like to try it for myself.