Black Ale / Porter / Stout

In reviewing this thread it occurs to me that it is possible there may be a hidden assumption floating around and that to better understand what lies down the rabbit hole, it may help if we re-examine what we think of as a category or classification. As @Ranbot points out there are all kinds of reasons for why a brewer decides to call a beer a certain thing and as @marquis ponts out history is quite relevant to understanding where we are today or what those reasons may be.

A critical thing for us to keep sight of is that most, if not all, classification schemes have fuzziness in their boundaries and are not strictly "either/or" things. Rather they are made up for our convenience at the time we need them to communicate but we like them to seem to be either/or things. For example, if you look at a topographical map of a mountain near you, you see a line such as the tree line that separates the wooded area from the area "above" it where there are no trees. But if you climb that same mountain you'll find there is no line on the ground and if you stand on where that line should be according to the map and look downslope towards the valley you'll see increasingly dense woods with a decreasingly smaller number of open spaces. If you turn and face the peak you'll see many more treeless areas but you'll also still see patches of trees. (In other words the line on the map is a lie we tell ourselves to facilitate communication a lot of the time.)

 

Every time I see a post like this I am more convinced than ever that we have too many styles. Ideally these styles all should be called porters, and the label could distinguish them further as a stout porter or a hoppy porter.

What good are style guidelines if even the geekiest of fine beer lovers (meaning us) cannot understand nor agree on what they mean?

 

I would also add to this thought that because beer styles and naming conventions have changed over the last 100+ years, then it is safe to assume they will continue to change over the next 100+ years. Which means hard style boundaries between these dark beers established today will not be valid in the future either. It's futile. So it's actually easier to let go of the rigid definitions and allow style names the flexibility to invoke the full history, present, and future of brewing.

 

So true... a couple of weeks ago I went to a small beer competition here in Portland, and gosh, they awarded like forty different medals... for some styles I never even heard of.

 

Like Guinness.

 

We should go back to the days when there were only two styles... "Domestic" and "Imported."