Broad beer categories

I think we recently created a new “Fruited Kettle Sour” style on Beer Advocate to help with this exact same dilemma to differentiate the fruit smoothies from the more traditional Gose and Berlinners. Correct me if I’m wrong.

 

What was that other reason? I forget. It must not be too important.

 

It is my opinion that OP is correct, the style guidelines blur lines. It also is my opinion this is because we have created too many categories, too many styles, and thus the unreasonable expectation that a style should be more specific than it is capable to be. We try to solve this by adding more style names, but it is like trying to use a shovel to escape a hole in which we are trapped.

My solution, repeated again now (as I have been doing here for more than a decade) is to reduce the number of styles to fourteen MUCH less specific names, and leave the more specific details and characteristics for each beer in those 14 styles to be noted on the packaging label.

 

The style name failed to deliver what you thought it would deliver because your expectations were different than others' expectations. I would suggest that a label that gives a general style name, such as Sour Beer, is much more user friendly. Also on the lablel list all the characteristics of beers in that broad category. Next to each characteristic put a sliding scale indicator of one to ten for each that shows, for example how sour, sweet, fruity, funky, thick, clear, etc., etc. it is in the brewer's opinion.

This of course will put a crimp in the number of categories brewing competitions can cram into a contest, but for the real purpose of the styles, as tools for consumers to use to know what is in the container, IMO it is much better than our present system, and especially better than adding more names. YMMV.

 

And, for the same decade I've been waving the flag of the other side: MOAR STILES!!!!

Remember when the Murkbombs started coming out? A lot of folks were against adding a style for them because, they were, after all, "just another IPA, using new hops and techniques". Well, no. The murksters were, are, and shall remain different than the "traditional" IPA styles (side note, why do we not yet have a Murky Pale Ale category? Many times now I've bought a beer labelled Pale, expecting a bright, crisp, refreshing beer, and what come out is a sludgy, turbid thing that tastes like liquid Froot Loops). A thick, fruited "sour" beer will surely disappoint someone looking for a light, clean, Cantillon-style sour.

If brewers don't want to stay inside a certain box, they don't have to, but don't call what the new creation is by an established title. Like the newish "Italian Pilsners", adding a bunch of new hops, and lots of them, to a basic brew, changes what the beer is at its core, so don't call what it's not.

Don't call Sam by Fred's name. Let Sam be Sam. Don't make him carry the expectation of being a Fred.

 

As poorly as it works, I do think that our current mish mash of style designations is the best conceivable system. Any system has to be dynamic because there will always be novel configurations that don't fit existing styles and, being a global.beverage, beer will be interpreted and categorized in myriad ways.

Looking at the slushy sour example, its.clear that these beers started as something similar to a.traditional Berliner weisse, pale wheat beer soured by the addition of lactobacillus, and then brewers just kept adding more fruit. Eventually it got.to the point where it was clearly something other than a Berliner weisse and new categories were created to communicate that. Seems like a functional system to me

 

Ya, unfortunately the marketing choices of brewers won't always align with common sense. Not much we can do about that. The system we have in place works most of the time. No system is going to work all of the time, and part of the system is us all adjusting our understanding from time to time. IPA doesn't mean what it used to and you're going to be mighty confused if you insist on sticking to the 19th century meaning

 

All the characteristics you reference could be easily determined for a beer if there were a list of sliding scale indicators on the package. That would show, for instance, that a pale ale is moderately sour, or very sour, or not sour at all. It would tell if a beer was thin for the category, regularly thick, or full on slushy thickness. Maybe10 categories for each style category. Take a brewer five minutes to click them off, then they get printed on the label with the rest of info.

My idea is simple, user friendly, and does better the only thing I think styles should do, to give consumers easy to use info about their purchase. I realize how unlikely it is to happen. Too many have too much invested in this failure of a style system, including in all fairness, this site. I have slim hopes, though, due to I am into mycology, and a complete change of the naming system into one that made sense actually happened. But I know it is beyond unlikely for beer styles.

 

Well IPA would have started as a fairly narrowly defined thing, but through living use its meaning was made much broader. Berliner weisse feels like a very narrow category because it hasn't been much used outside of historical descriptions until recently. It remains to be seen whether the term will have an expanded definition applied to it or if new category names will be created to capture the variations (Florida weisse and fruited kettle sour seem to be leading contenders there).

I definitely agree that we are living at a point when there are a number of "styles" whose name is almost useless because of the breadth of beers they can include. My personal pet peeve is "sour beer". Its gotten so wide now that it includes those slushy beers that don't even have any sour flavors

 

My pet peeve is when people just call them all “sours”.
I’m like don’t you dare put Unicorn Farts beer in the same category as Sante Adairius, Cantillon, etc.

 

The only problem with your system is that it requires all brewers to adopt a certain labeling style that might not mesh with their preferred brand aesthetic. It also presupposes some sort of objective scale for things like "sourness" and "thickness" that doesn't really exist. It also requires that an entire global (or at least national) industry abandon a couple centuries of traditional nomenclature and come to some kind of agreement around a totally.new naming convention. So, its a great theoretical system that has several massive hurdles in the way of it being at all practical.