I had a beer last night from a small local-ish brewery that I was curious to know how it would be technically classified. Suppose they wanted to enter it into a brewing competition (which they don't). I just wasn't sure because it's a beer that's pretty much exactly a Schwarzbier only the brewery doesn't lager any of their beers. In other words, it's a dark beer brewed with German hops and malts. I believe it would be an ale yeast, though, and there's no maturation. Could it still be called a Schwazbier, since the term only really means "black beer?" Would it be an American Black Ale, even though it's an alias for a hoppier hybrid style? What say you?
All classifications involve a great deal of opinion. It's a shame that the beer world wants to pigeon-hole all beers into neat boxes when what really matters is what the beer is actually like.The result is deeply flawed style guidelines. The source of the malt and hops doesn't matter (Beck's and many US breweries use English malt and many UK beers use US hops).Both the names you suggest are technically perfectly all right.
Style categorization is a huge can of worms, but if they wanted to enter it into competition, popular wisdom says to enter it into the category it most resembles to the naked eye, nose, & tongue vs. what it is "on paper". If it looks/smell/tastes like a Schwarzbier, it should be entered as a Schwarzbier regardless of its process. If it had a clean, low temp fermentation, it would probably present with lager-like characteristics anyway, even it used a top-fermenting yeast. There are also a ton of esoteric German niche ales that don't really fit into the established style canon - I predict that BJCP guidelines will include a "German specialty ale" category before long, the way it does with Belgians.
here's one.... pliney the elder is a proper dbl ipa. It is a hop forward beer with a malty backbone. this is a true ipa/dbl ipa. vs. heady topper (my favorite beer) would be a hop bomb. all hops. kind of like shoving a pine cone or grapefruit in your mouth. there should be a difference in style classes.imo.
It just sounds like a stout/porter with German hops to me. Look around and I think you’ll find plenty of such beers that are not categorized as a schwarzbier. Honestly, I'm almost at the point where I start referring to these sorts of things simply as "black beer." It sounds like something a craft novice would say rather than someone who's been drinking craft for six years, but the needlessly large and arbitrary categorization of dark beers and the weirdly passionate arguments they inspire is tiring. Particularly in a hyper-connected globalized world like today's, the concept of beers having a specific recipe genome tied to a specific time and place is as out of place as the idea of music "scenes" tied to specific locales. There’s, what, 13 styles that people have defined around the idea of them being black and/or roasted? Yeah, eleven top-fermented, one bottom-fermented, one either or. Yikes. I think half of those overlap so much that there is no difference amongst them in the larger picture. Maybe we should start a campaign to the BJCP to whittle them down a bit. Styles are primarily a linguistic trope to make it easier for us to talk about beer but they've lost their usefulness in that regard.
“It just sounds like a stout/porter with German hops to me.” I am a homebrewer and one of the beers I have been mulling over to make is a German Schwartzbier. I have some rough notes for the recipe of this beer. One aspect that I am clear on this beer is which dark malts to use: Carafa Special II malt. The Carafa Special II malt is dark in color 430°L but more importantly it is dehusked so it contributes very little astringency to the beer. The dark malts that are typically used in stouts and porters are roasted barley, black patent malt, chocolate malt, etc. These dark malts add flavors and astringency while Carafa Special II principally adds color to the beer. Presuming the brewery made their beer using German Carafa Special dark malt and utilized a neutral ale yeast strain (to mimic a lager) then this beer should be very close in flavor to a German Schwartzbier. If that brewery wanted to enter that particular beer into a beer competition then entering it as a Schwartzbier seems appropriate. At the end of the day it is how the beer tastes which should most influence which beer category to enter a beer in. Cheers! P.S. Schwartzbiers obtain their malt flavors principally from their base malts which should be a combination of Pilsner malt and Munich malt.
I'm all for that. There are only really four British styles: Porter/Stout, Pale Ale, Mild Ale, Old/Stock Ale. And Lager, nowadays. But that's foreign.
I didn't get all of the technical details on it, but the brewer did say it was the same in every way with the exception that it wasn't lagered. It tasted very much like many Schwarzbiers I've had.
