Beer style origins

Maybe this infographic will help


Your questions are too broad. Just pick a style and ask where the modern interpretation originated.

 

Generally the most popular form of beer today universally is Lager, which has origins among the techniques of German brewers, who brought the style wherever they went starting in the mid-1800s. The American lager is a particular effort to recreate Pilsner or Helles using local ingredients on-hand in North America.

Conversely, the most popular craft ale styles have origins in English brewing, namely with the Pale Ale and Porter in their most essential sense.

 

While it is true that lager brewing originated in the area(s) of what is modern day Germany/Austria/Czech Republic the popular beers of today are Pale Lagers. These sorts of beers specifically originated with the 'invention' of the first Pale Lager: Bohemian Pilsner in the town of Plzeň in 1842. The beer of Pilsner Urquell was quite notably different from the lager beers brewed in Germany (Bavaria) of that time; those beers would have been dark in color with a differing malt and hop flavor.

Cheers!

 

@Pard
In the very broadest of categories (not styles) there are ales and lagers.
Modern Ales, primarily, originated in the British Isles and Belgium; while lagers were developed in the regions north of the Alps (Bavaria->Bohemia).
Then you have crossovers like kölsch from Cologne which, to the best of my knowledge, is an ale developed to taste like a lager and porters/stouts from England and Northern Europe which could be either ales or lagers depending upon who brewed it and who you ask .

But getting into the origin of individual styles is too messy an approach do broadly. For instance, the British developed a style called an India Pale Ale; however, the IPA you order at a bar has no real resemblance to that beer. There's IPL, which has nothing to do with India or England, a growing number of “Imperial” beers, which have nothing to do with the Russian court, etc, etc.

There are people here who can give you all the information you could ever want, but you'll need to narrow your scope.

 

The other side of this question is why styles? I attempted to describe my take on the modern idea of beer styles earlier.

The origin of beer styles has always fascinated both of us (the andsuz part too) because it is where beer and culture intersect.

We should be aware that brewers did not set out to make a certain beer. A certain style. Rather they were making the best beer possible with what was at hand. This meant everything had to conform to their limited conditions. It is really only a recent invention that beer could be anything other than a local beer.

So thinking back 400 years, or even 100 years, most people never traveled much farther than a few miles from their place of birth. The same place their mother and father were born. Back into antiquity. Beer was what you had in your particular town or city. You probably knew of other beers that were darker or lighter or higher in alcohol but in general, you got the 2 or 3 beers that were available in your neighborhood (to this day Germans will disparage the beer across the river... "oh they make a fine hefe over there, but if you want a real hefe, this is where it is made". To you and me they are both excellent). The local brewer was exceptionally good at making the best beer possible with the local conditions.

Yeast. Water. Malt. Hops. That is all with some minor exceptions. This variety of hops is what you'l be using. This yeast is what will ferment in these months of the year (and yeast did not even exist. It was a magic froth, Berme. God is Good). Etc. So that is how the styles originated.

For example, it is well known that Helles was what Munich settled with. They wanted Pilsner, but because the water was not as soft they could only get to a Helles. Or the Dublin brewers that were making Stout. They were not going to make a light lager. No mountain caves to lager in, and the water was not right . And so on.

Eventually brewers discovers the thermometer. And Chemistry. And merchants shipped hops all over. And malting became more sophisticated (once thermometers and coke ovens were established). Then refrigeration arrived. And rail.
But before all that, style was not a thing. You drank the same beer they made in town for centuries. And they made it the best they could.
Cheers

 

Like x 1000 for this post. I will dig out the 45 RPM single by Clean Living on Vanguard and play it in your honor from Tennessee. A hoisting of a Virtual Pint to your honor!!!

 

This seems to be trolling based on the unusually astute multiple choice question

 

Michael Jackson regretted simplifying styles by treating Porters as Ales when of course they had a completely separate history.
By not making the mistake of classifying beers into Ales and Lagers,( he knew full well that Kolsch is top fermented lager for example) his classification makes a lot more sense.

 

I was lucky enough to try Fraoch Heather Ale and it was really wild it tasted like flower soda. It would be nice to see brewers use more non traditional ingredients and use more wild plants

 

The problem here is that some people seem to think that simply looking at today's beer market, assuming that nothing has changed, and drawing conclusions about the past is a good idea. The status quo is seen as immutable and a window through which the past is best understood. If Czech lager beers today are less bitter than German Pilsners, then that must mean that this relationship has persisted since they came into existence. If German pilsners today are drier than Czech lager beers then that too must be a relationship that has persisted throughout their existence. In extension a more bitter Czech lager beer might get called akin to a German pilsner, and a fuller bodied German pilsner might be called akin to a Czech pilsner. If those people better realized, or more readily acknowledged, how much has happened since the 1840s there would be less confusion in these matters.

 

Good point, and one which applies to so many aspects of our current society.

Take for example the word “silly.” What does it mean today, vs. over time? As per on Line Etymology Dictionary, this word moved from "happy" to "blessed" to "pious," to "innocent" (c. 1200), to "harmless," to "pitiable" (late 13c.), "weak" (c. 1300), to "feeble in mind, lacking in reason, foolish" (1570s). Further tendency toward "stunned, dazed as by a blow" (1886).

The same is certainly true of sense perception, and thus beer styles, regardless of when “styles” were first codified in and way similar to what we now recognize.

 

At worst it leads us to make stuff up in order to maintain a consistent or coherent understanding of a particular topic. Rather than us accepting complexity and idiosyncracy as inherent to the study of history.

 

This was less true in the big cities, in London for example Beers and Ales were both available from many sources, particularly from places near to navigable water. Beer was shipped abroad for centuries before refrigeration.
But having said that, there were 30000 commercial breweries in the UK serving a population of 30 million in 1870

 

But by '93's Beer Companion, Jackson had already transitioned to categorizing by: ale, lager, porter, wheat and lambic (and unfortunately included Kölsch in the "ale" category).

I personally don't subscribe to the first part of the quote above, and I'll add my thoughts on Jackson below, but beer wasn't just a local product "100 years ago or even 400 years ago." In the late middle ages, with the rise of private commercial breweries, some cities became known for beer production and exportation. Just look at Hamburg in the 1300s. As scale rose, in the 1800s, yeast, barley, and hops (and techniques too) were traveling in large amounts to brewers from various parts of the world.

I'm with you and for the life of me, I just can't understand all of the arguments about Jackson "inventing" beer styles.

I really like Martyn Cornell's work, but in his piece: "Michael Jackson and the invention of beer style," I respectfully feel like he's let the "researcher of minutiae" in him take charge at the expense of seeing the picture for what it is. He states:

Even without @jesskidden ’s evidence to the contrary illustrated here, I'm mainly left with the reaction of: "a rose by any other name." So what if they called them "varieties" before? Take the list of types in the quotes 1977 image above. It's a list of names that already existed: porter, Kolsch, lambic, etc. Names that conveyed meaning before Jackson’s work. Names that indicated “type,” “style,” or whatnot. Meanings described in his writing. The joy of his work is that he's a guide and enthusiast… not a builder. On the first page of “Amber, Gold & Black,” Cornell states that that book is devoted to the “history of the different styles of beer produced in Britain.” I don’t know how one can reconcile that statement with the concept that Jackson invented beer styles. Cornell’s idea of history obviously reaches further back than the 1970s.

I am certainly a fan of Jackson's work, but there's already so much value in it as it is that I don't need to invent more value. Some might say Jackson honed the definitions. Even if one believes this, I don't see this as inventing styles. I don’t think differentiating between “styles” and “types” justifies the claim either. I can only buy into the notion that he “formalized” them if the argument is convincingly laid out - something I have never seen. If anything, his writing is loose in my eyes. Some might say it was the act of collecting various types in one work. Is this not an element of Wahl and Henius, or Lacambre too? Some might argue that Jackson actually invented some "styles" rather than the concept of style, but these actions were due to a specific desire to expand style categories for competitions - with things like "robust porter." Look how well that's aged. If you are fabricating things like robust porter, you’re building a house with a poor foundation and the results will potentially follow. Is this notion of "inventing styles" simply a reflection of the culture of rating beers "to style" against some sort of narrow document in a competition?

At the risk of getting ridiculous, it’s believed that the Egyptians named different beer types and classified them according to things like alcohol strength, flavor, and color. We’re obviously talking about a different culture and set of beverages, but the point being that classifying beer is nothing new or revolutionary… despite the tendency for people to want to think that the defining element of this craft era is “innovation.” Classification is nothing new. Stout, Hefeweizen, India pale ale, Scotch ale, Berliner Weisse… these things meant something before and after Jackson’s writing. That meaning isn’t set in stone of course. How specific the meaning and how static the meaning varies, but this variability is intrinsic. Styles come and go. Definitions change.

Some materials worth considering below:
- 1899 advertisement from Brussels listing (and therefore distinguishing): faro, lambic, gueuze. Pic below.
- Retailer Willam Whiteley price list from 1913. Not only does this single page feature plenty of UK beer styles still on our minds today: pale ale, IPA, mild, amber, strong ale, stout (with subtypes: nourishing, oatmeal, invalid, brown, double, etc.), but it also features examples of UK brewers turning to German production methods to deliberately produce and sell Pilsener Lager and Munich Lager (“Bock” was also produced in the UK by then). Link.
- 1956 Watneys ad that claims that more people drink it “than any other brown ale” - comparing itself to other beers of it’s type and highlighting that consumers understand the categorization. Pic below.

@patto1ro - Forgive me for bugging you a bit lately, but as someone who has dedicated lots of energy investigating how brewers and authors categorized beer in the past, I’m curious what your take on all this is.

 

Then you haven't seen the updates styles page?

 

If not called beer styles as such, there was certainly classification of beer before Michael Jackson. The oldest beer competition, that held at the Brewers' Exhibition in the UK - which started in the 19th century - had classes for entries. Classes based on style and strength.

But the further you go back, the more vague it all becomes. With beers mostly named after where they were brewed and probably not styles with consistent characteristics as we would expect today.

Personally, I'd say modern beer styles started with Porter.

 

Interesting. Why? Because of its reach and reputation?

 

Because types of beer were mostly incredibly local or very vague before Porter.

 

When do you put the beginning of "Porter"?