Bitter Old-School IPAs

If you'll indulge me, I'd like to harvest one more experience from the weekend's OBA judging. It was in the category "classic UK and American styles," a catch-all for styles that are so niche in the US there's no reason to devote to them an entire category: milds and bitters, browns (UK and US), US wheat and amber, English summer ales, cream ales, steam beer, etc.

One of the beers was an old-school American IPA. It was nearly brown, thick as honey and sweet with caramel, and so bitter we might as well have been taking a cheese grater to our tongues. Our mouths were still stinging the next round--and I mean this literally. Amazingly, these kinds of beers did once exist. Brewers sometimes added aroma hops, but the attention was squarely focused on causing as much violence to the drinker as possible. Even more amazing: we liked them. Well, some of us at least.

At our judging table, this beer sparked a philosophical reverie: was this actually a classic style? Or was it, rather, an awkward phase along the way to becoming an actual style--the pimply 15-year-old version of a grown-up, fully-developed American IPA? Was it, in other words, an old style fallen from favor, or embarrassing juvenilia?

Much evidence supports the latter, very little the former. Aesthetically, old-school IPAs are a train wreck. It's hard to know what every made us think this was a good idea: "I know, I'll make a tincture of hop so deadly the human mouth won't be able to absorb it, but I'll balance it by using 50% caramel malt so that it's as heavy as glue and sweet enough to rot teeth. That beer will totally rule." It's a strange scenario, I'll grant, but humans have lost their minds in the past and thought leisure suits, tuna casseroles, and brutalist architecture were cool, too.

Certain styles of beer look pretty weird on the merits of aesthetics, though. So perhaps someone could defend these IPAs through some kind of offbeat rationale. But then there's the matter of their disappearance: if they were loved by someone, shouldn't they have hung on, at least to the extent, say, amber ales have? I've never loved ambers, but they possess a certain logic. You can see how someone might like them--and indeed when I mentioned a brewery recently that was making an amber, many people on social media gave it the thumbs up. But truly violent 1997 IPAs--those things are the dinosaurs of craft beer. We know them only through the archaeological record.

Some styles manage to emerge and live a fitful but ultimately fleeting existence, passing without much fanfare. I love reading about them when Ron presents an obscure old text with mention of the extinct relics. But if we mourn them with the tinge of nostalgia, we don't go far as to actually want to drink them. An IPA with a decent punch in the nose--yes, we still like those. But not actual vintage IPAs; they just seem primitive to modern palates. No one today would make these beers without tweaking them (more hop flavor and aroma, less bitterness, way less caramel malt). An evocation of the past, maybe. Beyond that, let that adolescent, with his zits and braces and Twisted Sister posters, remain entirely in the past..

Visualizing Beer Styles

How to see the relationships between beer styles. This is a puzzle I've toyed with since 2011, when I was working on the Beer Bible. There's a feature in the book in which, near the end of each style chapter, a sidebar offers other close styles for people to try ("If you like pale ale, try..."). What I discovered was that the flavors of beer styles don't necessarily match the national tradition or broad category (ales and lagers, say). Maibocks and French bière de gardes are very similar, for example.

Over the weekend, I tried yet another version of this (you have been spared earlier versions). It is not a beautiful infographic, because I'm a writer, not a visual design guy. And there's no way to pull this off in two dimensions without overly simplifying it. As a consequence, it will never be a fully immersive and complete way to think about beer styles. People will recognize that "neutral" and "expressive" yeasts correspond to ales and lagers, but the latter terms don't tell you what their flavor differences are. So it seemed to make sense to describe them on the flavor continuum on which they actually run. Have a look (and click to enlarge):

Irish stout, for example, doesn't work so well because it has nearly equal intensities of hop and malt.  You can't very well average the two, since both flavors are pronounced (compared to, say, helles), so I was forced to choose. Most styles do fairly well on the chart, though, I think. This seems better than some of the beeriodic tables and various other visualizers I've seen.

Thoughts?

On the Nature of Fresh Hop Beers

 Mt Tabor Brewing held a media event unveiling their new, inner-Southeast location, and as things began dissipating, a dispute broke out about fresh hop beers. I thought I'd settled all this already, but I see there's still work to do. As such, I'm reposting comments from September 24, 2014--"You Know a Fresh Hop Beer By Its Taste."

Let us consider the fresh hop beer. A seemingly simple beast, it is made from the addition of undried hops rushed sun-warm from field to kettle (or tank). In recent years this simplicity has been obscured by off-topic etymological and existential discussions about what "fresh" really means. It has come to mirror--or rhyme with--the debates about gluten and organics, as if the best way to ascertain the true nature of a fresh-hop beer is to check your conscience. Can it be a fresh hop beer if some dried hops are used?  Can it be a fresh hop beer if none are used? These inquiries lead in the wrong direction, to ethics, and away from the thing that is so blindingly obvious. The "fresh" in the fresh hop comes from the living plant and anyone who has tasted that life in a beer appreciates it through the proper instrument, her senses.

This is not rocket science.  What we should be looking for in a fresh hop beer are those very obvious flavors and aromas that ooze out of the [pick one: fresh, wet, unkilned, undried] hop. We know a fresh hop beer not by querying the brewer about his methods, but by tasting it. I recognize that a lot of people in the world haven't had the chance to try these beers, so Pacific Northwesterners must act as envoys to tell of these wondrous creatures from afar. The first lesson is: they're about as easy to distinguish from normal beers as a porter is from a pale. If you're sniffing and swishing and cocking your head trying to figure out if the beer was made with fresh hops, it's not a good example no matter how it was made. If you're getting lively, feral, sometimes unsettling flavors, that's a fresh hop beer.

I am all for truth in labeling, and I endorse Bill Night's long crusade to expose breweries who call their beer "fresh hop" when they're nothing of the kind. But it obscures the far more relevant and important inquiry into the joys and wonders (and mishaps and disasters) that are to be found in those that are manifestly fresh hop beers. They are their own thing, and their thing is obvious by the way they taste. We should go forth and discover.

Yup, It's an IPA

The beer is 5% ABV and it has 15 IBUs. Existential question: is it an IPA?

The answer doesn't really matter (and wouldn't be definitive in any case). But whatever you think of this trend in nomenclature, it's pretty good evidence that "IPA's" new meaning is settling into place. It's been just a couple of years since I first made the case that, at least to customers, "IPA" doesn't have anything at all to do with beers shipped from Burton to India.

To the average drinker, slapping the word "India" on a label communicates a very specific, easily-understandable meaning.  It's shorthand for "saturated in the flavors and aromas of American hops."  Gigantic IPL, for all the ways it wasn't an IPA, instantly met the expectations I'd had--it was decadently perfumed and soaked in Simcoe and Citra hops.

The beer in question is brewed by pFriem, and I've written about it before. Over the weekend, I stopped into the brewery on a trip out the Gorge and was delighted to find it on tap again. It definitely fits the bill of "saturated in the flavors and aromas of American hops." In this case, if I had any problem with the name, it's the "sour." It's lightly acidified via kettle souring, and this gives it a tartness akin to citrus fruit. Add the fruity hops on top, and it really has the effect of making it more fruit-like. Many fruits have an element of acidity, but we don't think of them as "sour" because they're balanced by sweetness. In this case, it's the hops that sell the fruitiness, adding their flavors and aromas to that snappy tartness. It's like a scoop of mandarin-melon sorbet.

The IPA part--that's wholly defensible. The one thing I didn't mention so much back in 2014 was how IPAs have been decoupled from bitterness. IPAs have become so flavor-and-aroma-centered that people have become habituated to relatively low-IBU IPAs that nevertheless have deeply saturated hop flavors. pFriem's IPA has all that flavor, and it's actually accentuated by the acidity. The "sour" part of the title may scare some people away, but I doubt few people complain that it fails to meet their expectations for an IPA.

When I wrote that post back in 2014, the comments were not entirely supportive of the thesis. I become ever more convinced that it's happening in front of us, and this is a good case in point.

A Different View From London

A couple of days ago, I posted a piece on All About Beer wherein I mentioned with some alarm the ubiquity of American-style beers in London.  I specifically name-checked The Kernel, and yesterday one of the brewers, Toby Munn, left a really thoughtful comment on the blog.  With his permission, I'm reprinting it in full.

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I commented on your All About Beer page, but I like repeating myself. This is just regarding point 1. These are all valid points, and your concern over the health of British cask beer is not insignificant. But, I would like to point out that, although there are a few breweries and a few beers that are attracting headlines, there are still a huge amount of beers produced that are quintessentially British.

This is just my tiny little opinion, but I happen to think that the influx of outside influence is good for traditional beers and breweries. I think that the younger/newer drinkers are bringing with them a different, critical look to beers. On the one hand, traditional brewers are concerned that newer drinkers are just after a 'grapefruit hit' in their beers, and concerned with only IBUs and intensity of flavours. In the short term, this may be true, sadly. Long term, I think that these newer drinkers will understand more about the technicalities about what makes beer great, and the subtleties that makes beer great. To reference a post that I think is perhaps relevant, and almost certainly true.  [Note: Toby added that link, not me.]

I think that the introduction of these different styles and new flavours is only a good thing. These modern drinkers will have a fuller and more rounded view and opinion of beers, and are more critical in general. If we are to follow trends of the US, we will see that producers of truly great beer are in demand. This, I think, will happen here in the UK, and elsewhere. Actually, it is evident already.

The problem with many indigenous beers, whether in Britain, Germany, or, especially, Belgium, is that, after years and years of little progression, the only point of difference has been price point, and the only change has been a deterioration in standard. There are many traditional beers and breweries that are truly awful. And there are many that have stuck to their principals and are outstanding. I think with the newer drinkers, armed with more discerning taste buds, will raise the expectation of what good beer should be, irrespective of style, and make our tiny little world of beer a better place. Other opinions are, of course, available.

When you came to Britain in 2011, I am sure that you found many beers that were dreadful. Just because it is served from a cask does not make it good. Similarly, just because a beer is doused in Mosaic is no guarantee that it is any good.

Your concern for traditional styles is valid. It is not insignificant. But I believe that your concern will be proved to be moot.

Respectfully
Toby

A Brief Primer on Czech Lagers

Sometimes I skip posting information that I know exists elsewhere on the internet, as if the mere existence of information somewhere means people everywhere are consuming it.  You can find descriptions of Czech lagers from people far more versed on the subject than I--Evan Rail and Max Bahnson (the Pivní Filosof) are your English-language starting points.  (Unfortunately, Evan's old blog, a mighty archive of great data, is now offline.)  Nevertheless, it is sometimes useful for a person to gather together and repeat some information for those who are coming later to the party.  In that spirit, here's a brief primer on Czech lagers.

Only One Pilsner
You do not order a "pilsner" in Prague (or anywhere else in Czech).  You could order a Pilsner, though.  In the Czech Republic, the word pilsner is a proper name reserved for Pilsner Urquell.  All other pale lagers are referred to by either their proper name or by category (see below).  I have gotten several different answers for why this is the case, but my sense is that it has mainly to do with tradition.  Josef Groll invented pilsner at the old burghers' brewery in 1842, and other breweries show great deference to this brewery (now called Plzensky Prazdroj, or Pilsner Urquell).  That beer is the ur-Pilsner, the one that begat the rest.  It is also the beer from Pilsen--not the only one, but obviously the big one--and so for these reasons it is the only one people call pilsner.

The Categories of Beer

The Czech system for grouping beer runs along two axes--strength and color.  If you imagine a table in your mind, on the one side you would have beers of different strength categories based on the Plato scale, and on the other a continuum of color running from pale to black.  So you might have a 10° pale beer or a 12° amber or a 14° dark.  But you might also have a 12° dark. (On our tour, Evan Rail mentioned that while there are no hard and fast rules, if you see a brewery list that includes a 10, 12, 14, and 18, the average Czech would assume the two smaller beers are light, the two bigger ones dark.)   

Let's start with the legal designations, which refer to Plato categories.  These changed a bit in 2011, so if you find lehké on an old list, note the change.  Also, those are my best-guess pronunciations you find.  Fluent Czech speakers may offer corrections or denunciations in comments.

Update: Indeed, the wisdom of hive mind is speaking loudly in comments, with corrections, questions, and clarifications.  Definitely have a look.

• Stolní pivo, table beer up to 6° P.  (I've never seen one of these in the wild.)  The pronunciation is roughly stole nyee Pee voh. 
• Výčepní pivo, from 7° to 10°.  Strangely, výčepní comes from the word for taproom and the term literally means “draft beer.”  It is applied to all beer in this range, irrespective of package.  Pronounced vee chep nyee Pee voh.
• Ležák, from 11° to 12°.  Again, to add to the confusion, ležák literally means lager—and again, it applies to all beer in this range whether lager or ale.  Pronounced leh zhak.
• Speciál, strong beers above 13°.  Pronounced spet zee-al.  

The colors are more straightforward--pale, amber, and dark, though for etymological reasons, I'm going to list them out of order (you'll see why):

• Světlé, or pale-colored.  Pronounced svet lee.
• Tmavé, or dark.  Pronounced t’ma veh.
• Polotmavé, which literally means semi-dark or half-dark, referring to a color in the amber band.  Pronounced polo t’ma veh.
• Černé, or black.  Pronounced cher neh.

When you're ordering these, you would mix and match.  That 12° amber would be a polotmavý ležák.  A 10° pale would be světlý výčepní.  Of course, you could also just order the beer based on its gravity, which is the easiest for Americans in whose mouths these words gurgle like giant balls of peanut butter.

Bright, Unfiltered, or Yeasted?
So far, so good, yes?  Now comes the more tricky part of the whole thing.  Not only do you have this taxonomical tangle, but you have an additional stratum of information regarding how the beer was prepared.  In addition to just regular old beer like you might find in a bottle, the beer might be unfiltered or served kräusened.

• Kvasnicové, literally yeast beer.  It is a specific preparation that involves adding yeast or fermenting wort to fully-lagered beer right before kegging.  It brings a liveliness to the beer that has Czech beer geeks in a swoon.  Pronounced kvass nitso veh Pee voh.  
• Nefiltrované or unfiltered beer.  Slightly confusing because both kvasnicové and nefiltrované will appear less than perfectly clear in the glass, and both may enjoy the benefits of richer, brighter flavors.  Unfiltered beer is not kräusened.  Pronounced ne filtro vanay Pee vo.   
• Tanková, or tank beer.  Just means it's served from a large, 5- or 10-hectoliter tank underneath the bar.  What's significant is that this beer is unpasteurized, which means the flavors are sharper and more vivid.  Pronounced tank o va.

All right, are you ready to head out to the pubs?

How the Word "India" Came to Mean "American"

Last week, I ordered a pint of Gigantic's new beer, IPL, sight unseen.  I was at a pub that listed nothing but the name.  A few minutes later, the waiter dropped a glass of something pilsner-pale and conditioned-clear in front of me.  I had assumed--correctly, it emerged--that the name of the beer stood for "India Pale Lager."  The beer in front of me had almost nothing to do with IPA, though.  Indeed, I later discovered that Ben and Van (brewmaster and master brewer) also call it a "Northwest pilsner," and it's a lot closer to a pils than anything to do with English or American ales.  It's 5.6%, has a pilsner malt bill, and is, not unimportantly, a lager.

During that same session--possibly just after the arrival of the Gigantic--one of my friends complained that IPA no longer had any meaning at all.  He ticked off the various offenses against a once-knowable style: black IPAs, white IPAs, lagered IPAs, session IPAs, fruit IPAs.  (He actually ordered a rye and double IPA that night.)  It had nothing to do with the original IPAs and has devolved into little more than a marketing gimmick, he argued reasonably.

As someone who has complained about this very phenomenon, I should have been sympathetic, but here's the thing: to the average drinker, slapping the word "India" on a label communicates a very specific, easily-understandable meaning.  It's shorthand for "saturated in the flavors and aromas of American hops."  Gigantic IPL, for all the ways it wasn't an IPA, instantly met the expectations I'd had--it was decadently perfumed and soaked in Simcoe and Citra hops.

Beer taxonomists and history prescriptivists miss this truth that is so obvious to the casual drinker.  The qualities that separate the 19th century English originals--or the middle 20th century English or even late 20th century American versions--from these myriad permutations (Belgian, black, imperial, etc.) are vast.  But that's because there's now a contemporary definition and it does a pretty good job of characterizing things.

Until something like thirty years ago, the hoppy beers typical in American brewpubs today did not exist.  There were hoppy beers, but they didn't have the kind of hopping Americans now use--which is partly a function of the method but mostly a function of the hops themselves.  And those qualities, begotten by vigorous kettle hopping and profligate late and dry-hopping of American hops, is what "India" (or "IPA" or "IP-whatever") now refers to.  It's sort of like the catch-all term "Belgian," which means anything with vivid yeast character but can be applied to any imaginable style (except, I suppose, lagers).  One of the great revelations of my foreign travel was to see that this shorthand was well-understood by breweries in the UK, Italy, and the Czech Republic.  "American IPA" or "American-style" always meant super-hopped with American hops, whatever the beer style.

I've stopped overthinking this.  Breweries want customers to know what the beer is going to taste like.  If they attach the word "India" to it--whether it is just a hoppy pilsner or witbier or stout--customers know what they mean.  It's pedantic to insist that there's something wrong with how this artifact of language has evolved.

On Kolsch

It has been a couple years since I passed through Cologne--and probably that long since I blogged about the city's signature style. Yesterday, I encountered something that made me think it was time to revisit these light, crisp pale quintessentially summery beers. As easy as they seem to understand, it turns out there's still confusion about kolsches:

Did you spot the problem?  Germany and Bavaria are not synonymous (this confuses the history of Bavaria's ancient Reinheitsgetbot, too); Cologne is nowhere near Bavaria. 

But there is another issue, more subtle, more confusing. Is it an ale or lager? When I tweeted out that menu picture last night, a number of people said it was not just a mistake to call kolsches Bavarian, but to describe them as ales, too. They're sort of right--but that doesn't make them lagers, either. As with so many things German, the categories have been sliced more precisely:  

This middle-space, Obergäriges Lagerbier, indicates a top-fermented beer that has been lagered--a lagered ale. This distinction is useful to the extent that it illustrates the dual nature of the word "lager," which designates not only a yeast type (a noun), but also the practice of cold conditioning beer (a verb).  It harkens back to the era when yeasts were only dimly understood, but practices very well known. 

But as much as I respect Ron Pattinson and his knowledge about German beer, this is a needlessly pedantic distinction--and one I had a hard time finding Germans observe. When I was in Cologne, I asked about Obergäriges Lagerbier, and got curious looks for my trouble.  When I was touring the Kolsch brewery Reissdorf, I had an exchange with a brewer where I tried making Ron's point--and it was his point; I'd boned up on his vast treasury of blogging before my trip--but the brewer dismissed the distinction. "No," he told me, "it's an ale."  I think the world has shrunk enough now that the notion of ale as Americans understand it is typical, even in Germany. 

So you may call a Kolsch an ale without worry, or if you want to impress your friends, you can call it Obergäriges Lagerbier.  You might even argue that since it's a lagered ale, the word lager can be used in describing kolsches (though not by itself). 

 Just don't call it a Bavarian ale. 

The Versatility of Corn

You may recall that a year ago I went on a bit of a corn jag.  I was rounding the final turn on the Beer Bible and it led me into the fields of the new world's native grain.  I considered how the neighborhoods inhabited by corn beer went from respectable to distressed; I discovered American weissbier; I sampled authentic chicha illegally smuggled in from Peru.  Typically, my momentary enthusiams fail to spark much interest and they slip into the ghostlands of the decaying internet archives.  Corn, however, was intriguing enough to capture the attention of an Ohio homebrewer, who tucked into the subject with more sustained attention than I can usually manage.

He sent along the results of many trials and I've been working my way through them.  Along with obscure annotated bottles, he included a concordance to help decipher the bottles, but I confess I couldn't really line everything up.  (Further descriptions at his blog here, here, here, here, and here.)  And, since you will never have a chance to try the beers, it doesn't matter overmuch whether I knew exactly what I was drinking.  More interesting is what I learned from the sampling.

Most of the beers were modeled roughly on the old Wahl and Henius American weissbier description, and used 30% flaked corn, 20% wheat, and 50% old-timey six-row barley.  He used different yeasts and fiddled with some sour mash and wild inoculation (to sometimes mixed effect*).  But what comes through as you try one after the next is how versatile the grain is.  In one beer, I picked up the classic beer corniness--ala Miller--but this was the exception.  One of the beers was made with the 3711 French farmhouse strain, and it was spectacular.  Belgians use corn a lot anyway, and it thinned out the body in a Belgiany fashion.  It also added a particular kind of rusticity to the palate--almost like cornbread.  It didn't have that processed corn flavor of Miller; it was fuller, more wholesome and natural.  Another of the beers had what tasted like an abbey strain, and it exhibited classic abbey character (it might have been the Duvel strain).  It was clarion, roiling, aromatic, dry, and champagne-like.

They didn't all work.  One of the beers was cloudy and produced large, soapy bubbles.  When Wahl and Henius wrote about American weissbier, they observed that "grits will under no circumstances yield those albuminoids that give Weiss beer its character, as wheat malt does."  By albuminoids, they mean the chunky and chewy stuff that characterize a good weizen, and they could have been writing about this one.  It was watery, thin, and characterless.  In other words, like any ingredient, corn will not redound uniformly to a beer's success.

While I was on my corn theme, I sent out a plaintive call for more brewers to experiment with this lovely grain.  It still retains a whisp of the old taint of cheapness--though the Brewers Association has finally officially ended its jihad against America's grain--and I think this is why you still find it less often included in a recipe than, say, cucumber.  Nevertheless, I renew my call.  Corn is a great grain and can add not only flavor and character to certain styles (Belgians more than German weizens), but has the undeniable virtue of being a local grain.  There is nothing so authentic and traditional as local, so why don't more American craft breweries use it?

_____________________
*On Friday, I had some friends over and we started sampling.  The very first beer we pulled out had been made via sour mash, and it was easily one of the most offensive substances I have ever encountered.  It was putrid, but while the brewer described the aromatics as "garbage and sweaty feet," I got an undiluted smack of baby diaper.  So far as I can tell, that comes from wayward pediococcus, but I'm not an expert on infections.  I admire the brewer for sending this along all the way from Ohio for purely forensic purposes, but a warning label might have been in order: it took five minutes for the air to clear, even after we'd dumped it down the drain and flushed with water.  Ah, homebrew.

Evolving GABF Style Guidelines

The Brewers Association has new style guidelines out, and in a couple weeks, I will return to them for some more meaty analysis.  For the moment, have a look for yourself (.pdf).  There are some significant changes to the methodology to go along with the usual adjustments and additions. 

• There are now more "American-style" beers listed than beers from any other national origin.
• There are 35 subtypes listed under the catch-all "hybrid" category, more than lager subtypes (30)
• Bamberg gets a lot of love: four subtypes reference the city.  (No other city, including Munich, is listed more than twice)
• Countries now referenced as origin points for styles: England, Scotland, Ireland, US, Germany, France, Belgium, Poland, Netherlands, Australia, Czech Republic, Austria (sort of--Vienna lager), and Japan--plus "Baltic-style," "Australasian," "Latin American," and "indigenous."

Australasian for bee-ahr.

The last thing I'll leave you with is this statement in the preamble to the rules.  It is, more than anything else, a distillation of the American view of brewing.  I have no problem with that as far as it goes--each country has very different brewing philosophies--but because the GABF and World Beer Cup are so influential, I do despair that this view should infect the thinking beyond our shores.

Each style description is purposefully written independently of any reference to another beer style. Furthermore, as much as it is possible, beer character is not described in terms of ingredients or process. These guidelines attempt to emphasize final evaluation of the product and try not to judge or regulate the formulation or manner in which it was brewed, except in special circumstances that clearly define a style.

Go have a look and share your thoughts.

Zen and the Art of Appreciating Simple Beers

There's a famous Zen verse that goes: "First mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.  Then mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers.  Finally, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers."  The insight has to do with the Buddhist concept of the two truths, but it can also be understood more simply.  At first, we accept the nature of rivers and mountains because we haven't thought deeply about them.  Once we do, we see that they are not as we thought.  However, once we see their true nature, then we understand their essence and "rivers are rivers"  once again.  It's a circle, but we arrive back at our starting point with a transformed view.

I would like to posit a similar lesson with beer appreciation.  A while back, Stan quoted from a post by blogger Eric Sturniolo, who described the process of developing a palate as evolutionary, with a beginning point of mass market lager and an end point of Westvleteren.  This prescription is as old as craft brewing, though the "evolved" state--Eric called it an apex, as if reaching the mountaintop--is particular to the times. 

It's a paradigm that assumes beer styles exist in relative quality.  Style x is superior to style y, so as one becomes more sophisticated in the way of the beer world, she will naturally grow to enjoy x.  In this prescription, "x" is almost always the more intense beer.  Belgian abbey ales are more intense than light lagers and therefore naturally and innately superior.  When you look at how beer geeks rate beers (compare beer x to beer y), this is borne out by mass acclaim.

But, going back to the koan, I'd describe this as the "rivers are not rivers" phase of beer appreciation.  In the pursuit of intensity, the beer drinker begins to narrow down the range of beers that can be considered sublime.  Whereas a novice might go to Munich and fall in love with hellesbier, to the beer geek, such products are trifles unsuitable for the serious palate.  For the geek, "hellesbier is not beer."

The true apex of appreciation is the ability to locate the sublime in any style (not, of course, any beer).  This means being able to pick up a glass of helles--or English mild or Belgian bière de table or even a characterful mass market lager (of which, admittedly, there are not a great number)--and find the flavors as pleasant and satisfying as when you heft a barrel-aged imperial stout.  It is possible, but not if the only flavors you can appreciate are intense.  You have to fine-tune your palate to appreciate the difference between a helles that has dull, simple malt flavors and one that has rich, fresh, and complex malt flavors.  The presence of subtle esters, the gentle scent of a particular hop, the weft and harmony of all these flavors working together.  It's not the kind of gesture judges make in a competition to reward one beer in a reviled or discounted class--the best of a lesser bunch--but the actual deep pleasure in the beer itself.  

It has helped that I traveled the world and tasted beers in several different countries.   In places like England, Scotland, France, and Germany I found serious beer people committed to styles Americans have long ago "transcended."  Travel challenges certain prejudices one wasn't aware he possessed.  But those are intellectual discoveries.  At the end of the day, to really grow to love a hellesbier is a private journey of experience.  You can't know it intellectually.  It dawns on you in the moment, as when I drank an Augustiner Hell in Munich and something changed in my experience of pale lagers.  

Beer appreciation is not linear; it's circular.  First you love beer naively, out of a simple joy.  Then your head gets filled with a bunch of crap about what's "good" and you begin disliking beer out of a blind prejudice.  Finally, you come back to appreciating beer for its own nature.  (And conversely, that appreciation makes you aware of how many intense beers are badly made and lack the harmony and integration that are the hallmarks of a good beer in any style.)  It may be facile to put it his way, but what is blogging but not facile?  Until you can appreciate all beer styles, your journey of appreciation is not yet complete.

Style Ontology and the Everyman Rule

One of the constant, unanswerable questions in the universe of beer concerns style.  A gueuze and a pilsner are obviously different beasts, and noting the history, national tradition, and methods of each helps us understand them.  But what about the difference between a German pilsner and helles?  Or, since it has been a topic on the blog this week, Irish and English stout.  One of the blog's best commenters, Daniel Warner, characterizes the thorny issue beautifully in this paragraph:

It's not really a historical question, but one of ontology. Does changing brown for patent malt change the essential nature of a porter? Which is to say, a dark beer of the style made in the UK, made like most UK beers of a combination of UK-style pale malt and cereal adjunct, with UK style top fermenting yeast and UK-style hops. All beers made in the region are made using similar styles and methods, so the "Irish" type is at best a subtype, and one I'm not convinced exists, given that brown malt was phased out almost entirely over the next few decades. [My bold.  Incidentally, "ontology" is concerned with the nature of being.]

There's actually a lot more, including a nice contribution from the Beer Nut.  I won't re-litigate the arguments here--you can go have a look and see where you fall on the (unresolvable) debate.

Source: Beer Growler/Juliano

It reminds me of a dimension to this discussion I've often wanted to include.  The question of style shifts before our eyes depending on what criteria we happen to be using at the time: history? brewing methods? ingredients?  They're all relevant, and depending on what style you're arguing for, you can make a case that a style exists based on a particular criterion.   To help cut through some of the over-considered haze, I'd like people to consider the everyman rule:  If you sat a random person in front of two beers, could she tell the difference?  This is not meant to trump any of the other ways of thinking about beer, just to clarify them.  A random person isn't going to be able to distinguish between a German pilsner and a helles.  Or Dortmund export.  On the other hand the everyman rule would, I think, support a difference between Irish and other kinds of stouts (even if we had to run it as a thought experiment in mid-19th century Dublin).

It's relevant partly as a check against hyper-geekiness.  When you spend a lot of time studying, brewing, and drinking beer, you tend to see subtle differences as gaping chasms.  But I spend a lot of time drinking beer with non-beer geeks, and I sometimes have the emperor's-new-clothes experience when I'm attempting to justify how one beer is meaningfully different from another.  To beer geeks, yes, the distinction between San Diego IPA and Portland IPA has meaning.  To everyone else, this is pointless hair-splitting.  Unless we want beer to become a tangled world of byzantine complexity, it's wise not to ignore that view.  The everyman rule is a good check on over-thinking style.

The Third Dimension: Wild

A little while back, we had a lively discussion about whether Americans should call their wild ales "Lambics."  The question was taken up on Twitter and Reddit as well, and one of the most pervasive critiques was summed up by commenter Jordan like this: "At least supply a catchy name for the new style if you're going to insist on the semantic distinction."  Fair enough.

Each lambic brewery has unique markings so blenders
can distinguish them.  This is Boon's.

Let's begin by agreeing that aside from these wildlings, beers can be divided pretty cleanly into the categories of ale and lager.  (There are outlying opinions, but let's dance past them for brevity.)  This taxonomical division rests on the behavior of the yeasts, so why not follow the logic and add a third category of wild ales*.  These are the beers acted upon by any rough interloper (brettanomcyes, lactobacillus, pediococcus, etc.) in any method of brewing.  The category would then include anything from Berliner weisse to lambic, Flanders tart ales to whatever it is Chad Yakobson is making. 

The thing is, there are a lot of ways to get to funky, and the extremely baroque procedures of lambic-makers are only one.  A possibly inexhaustive list includes:

• Spontaneous fermentation.  Leaving aside things like turbid mashes and extra-long boils, what makes this the most extreme and rare form of wild ale is the method of fermentation: naked wort exposed to the elements.  The resulting bacteriological bacchanalia is wholly uncontrollable and few brewers actually rely on pure natural fermentation.  Allagash did the world an enormous favor by inventing a word for this process, and we should stick with it.  All lambics are spontaneous wild ales, but not all spontaneous wild ales are lambics. 
• Spontaneous via media.  Cideries and wineries use this method all the time.  Yeast collects on the surface of fruit, and is adequate to ferment wine and cider all by itself.  I know of only one brewery that does it--Italy's LoverBeer, where brewer Valter Loverier uses local Barbera grapes to inoculate his wort.  It makes such spectacular beer, I wouldn't be surprised to see others follow along.
• Solera.  In the production of balsamic vinegar and certain liquors like sherry, a solera consists of a series of wooden casks.   In beer production, each cask is its own solera.  New Belgium is the most famous solera brewery.  When it comes time to produce a beer like La Folie, the master blender will begin tasting lots from different vats and making a mother blend.  Afterward, the brewery tops each vat off with fresh beer and the process repeats.  Over time, each vat becomes a distinct ecosystem for populations of different microorganisms, and the beer each one produces is different from the next. 
• Barrel inoculation.  Another way of working with native populations of yeast and bacteria is to nurture them in barrels and inoculate fresh wort by putting it in inside these funky casks.  Some breweries regard this as spontaneous, but it's a form of indirect pitching--especially in cases in which the brewery has seeded the barrel with a batch of brettanomyces-pitched beer.  
• Pitched wild yeasts.  The easiest and most common way to introduce wild yeast and bacteria to fresh wort is in the form of laboratory-produced pure culture. At some point, people are going to debate whether these constitute "wild" strains, but so far, we haven't had to contend with that argument.  (Knock on wood.)

As you see, only one of these techniques uses spontaneous fermentation.  In no case should the word "lambic" be used to describe a beer made by any other technique--whether or not you think the place of origin matters.  It becomes very complex when you consider that there is a version of Berliner weisse that also uses purely spontaneous fermentation, but which begins with a lactic fermentation sparked by wild wheat-born lactobacillus. (Pedio, not lacto, is the main source of lactic acid in lambics.)  The process and final beer is quite a bit different from lambic--and there is only a couple fully wild Berliner weisses I know (Bear Republic Tartare and De Garde's Bu Weisse).  And anyway, Berliner weisse is a nice style we all understand.

So that's my modest proposal.  Place them all in the category of wild ales, as distinguished from ales and lagers, and pay special attention to those beers that use fully spontaneous methods of fermentation.  

Errata.
It's really easy to get in the weeds here.  Rodenbach, for example, calls its method "mixed fermentation," and uses a version of barrel inoculation of fresh beer.  Ah, but those barrels were originally inoculated by beer fermented spontaneously, a practice Rodenbach only discontinued in the 1970s.  So it's in a sub-category of probably one brewery.  But whatever else Rodenbach is, it's definitely wild.

___________________
*Pedants may point out that "ale" indicates saccharomyces, and the beers of Crooked Stave are made exclusively with brettanomyces, so therefore Chad is not making wild ales.  I say those pedants take it to BeerAdvocate, where such hair-splitting is encouraged.

Beer/No Beer: A Curmudgeon at the Oregon Brewers Festival

The hop-garlanded OBF cask with beer this year from
BridgePort.  (Blueberry, natch.)

There are some absolutely spectacular beers at the Oregon Brewers Festival this year.  I started out with a pour of Kaiser Pilsener, the special beer Jürgen Knöller brewed up to celebrate Bayern's 25th anniversary last year.  An intense blast of noble hops with a polished malt base--and we're off.  Upright's impressive Kolsch followed and then the smoked helles from Widmer and the Collaborator project, another really impressive effort (and the prettiest beer at the fest).  A little later the twin Dortmund exports from trailer 5, Occidental and Breakside.  The former was more a helles, emphasizing grainy malts, while Breakside's was a good example of what I imagine enthralled Germans half a century ago.  It was a truly spectacular beer and my fave of the beers I tried.

You can see the theme there: I was going for the low- and mid-alcohol, low-impact German beers to get started.  I was there with a clutch of friends, and we had staked out a prime table in the shade of a large tree by the river.  For the most part, my friends had taken a different approach and were going for the exotica.  I was cradling my precious Breakside when one of the friends handed me a pour of Peaches and Cream by Fearless.  The aroma: pure peach.  The flavor?  Even peachier.  I detected nothing in the liquid that betrayed the art of zymurgy.  Sort of off-handedly, I declared it "not beer."

This is an old dispute.  The nature of beer is change.  One generation's abomination is another generation's cherished tradition.  Indeed, in some countries, the cherished traditional beer from the neighboring country is an abomination.  It's almost impossible to defend the idea of a fixed identity for "beer" when you have styles as divergent as pilsners, porters, and lambics.  We're well into the realm of subjectivity here, right?--so I should get with the program and just enjoy the damn beer. 

A circus of the bizarre continued parading across my tongue: spicy gazpachos like Elysian's and Dunedin's; Gigantic's literal juicy IPA (Old Town's Bolt Minister: "It takes like a Christmas Tree, with juice"); Laht Neppur's peach entry; (weirdly) innumerable blueberry beers (though props to Boulder for a very nice, beery take); Oakshire's crazy 26-ingredient beer that included Oregon grape*; Widmer's Thai-spiced lager.  They were so weird that we continued my game.  With each new specimen, we sniffed and sipped and rendered a judgment: beer/no beer. 

I am no longer going to stand on my porch and shake my fist at you damn kids to get off the lawn.  Put whole pies in the beer, whip up meat stouts, shave the dog and harvest the yeast from his fur: it's all good.  When you read medieval accounts of beer, you realize this is a time-honored practice.  The ancients liked to brew with beans and bark, eggs, hallucinogens, and the residue of coal seam fires. I am in no position to call BS. 

And yet, and yet.

There is something illuminating about tasting a beer like Breakside's or Bayern's and comparing it to one of the cold soups on offer.  I like beer.  The flavors that come from the fermentation of malt and hops are pleasant to me.  It's hard to make them harmonize perfectly and when a brewery manages the trick, it's like watching a crisply-executed give-and-go.  A fundamental play in basketball, but not so easy to pull off and very satisfying when done properly.  When you start dumping random flavors into beer (and I use the word "random" advisedly), you start to obscure the beer. Maybe a fermented peach drink is heavenly, but it doesn't taste anything like beer. You may call it pleasant, but I call it "no beer."  Hand me the export, please.

______________
*Not a grape.

What the Brewers Association Did With Adambier and Grodziskie

Update.  When I wrote this post yesterday, Ron Pattinson hadn't commented on the Brewer's Association guidelines.  But he has now, so you should go to the source.

Source: Homebrew Chef

The Brewers Association has decided to include Grätzer/Grodziskie* and adambier as new styles for the purposes of judging in the GABF and other festivals.  This is a curious endeavor.  It's one thing to use guidelines for styles that have a historical through-line; current incarnations represent the best example of what we understand the style to be.  Porter, for instance, refers to a moderately alcoholic black beer with a roasty flavor, not a highly alcoholic, barrel-aged beer characterized by the vinous note of brettanomyces, as would have been the case 200 years ago.  But pick up a style that ceased to exist--especially one like adambier, which went extinct decades ago--and you are confronted with the question of which incarnation to pick.  So what did the Brewers Association do?

Grodziskie
Grodziskie, a fairly well-documented style, was a lot of different beers over the years. This is how BA describes it:

Grätzer is a Polish-Germanic pre-Reinheitsgebot style of golden to copper colored ale. The distinctive character comes from at least 50% oak wood smoked wheat malt with a percentage of barley malt optional. The overall balance is a balanced and sessionably low to medium assertively oak-smoky malt emphasized beer. It has a low to medium low hop bitterness; none or very low European noble hop flavor and aroma. A Kölsch-like ale fermentation and aging process lends a low degree of crisp and ester fruitiness Low to medium low body. Neither diacetyl nor sweet corn-like DMS (dimethylsulfide) should be perceived.

Leaving aside the editing that paragraph requires (did a blogger write it?), I see a few issues.  The Reinheitsgebot comment is sort of salient in that the law wasn't adopted outside of Bavaria until the 20th century, but of course the style lived past 1906, confusing matters.  The kölsch comment is odd--what's the link there besides the fact that we're talking German obergärige (top-fermenting) beer.  But more to the point, where does the overall characterization of the beer--light smoke and hop flavors--come from?   It doesn't conform to any of the descriptions Ron Pattinson--in his usual painstaking way--has discovered.  For example:

Grätzer Bier, a rough, bitter beer, [is] brewed from 100% wheat malt with an intense smoke and hop flavour. The green malt undergoes smoking during virtually the whole drying process, is highly dried and has a strong aroma in addition to the smoked flavour.  (1914)

The starting gravity for that beer was just 1.028.  It's a post-Reinheitsgebot version, however, so maybe BA was thinking an earlier grodziskie.  Let's jump back a half century:

This bright, light, highly effervescent fine wheat beer is shipped far. It owes its peculiarities of the use of willow bark. It has a slight taste of smoke from the drying of the malt with smoke. Mashing is done by infusion, but willow bark is scattered on the cooler, and on the next day it is put into the fermentation vat.  In this way you create fermentation material from one brew to the next. The beer is well mixed and immediately filled into barrels that have a wide bung hole, which is bunged with straw. The beer is delivered to the customer in this state. (1867)

The source mentions isinglass for fining as well, and observes that "the willow bark contains tannin and a well known bitter substance."  Not very Reinheitsgebot!  One thing I'll note is that the older versions Ron found reference to were all hoppy as hell.  Ron also located a reference to modern Polish grodziskies just before they went extinct.  There were three varieties, a small beer, a 12 P beer of 3.5% alcohol (very low attenuation) and a 14 P strength version that was 3-5%, which indicates incredibly poor to just poor attenuation. 

All of which is to say that in over a hundred years of written descriptions of the style, Ron found none that looked like the Brewers Association.  The descriptions he found mentioned lots of smoke, lots of hop, low attenuation, high effervescence, willow bark, bottle-fermentation--none of which are mentioned in the BA's description.   So where'd they get theirs?

Adambier
This style seems to have made it to the 20th century, but barely, and it seems to go way back.  Here's what the Brewers Association has to say about it (again, with the atrocious editing):

Adambier is light brown to very dark in color. It may or may not use wheat in its formulation. Original styles of this beer may have a low or medium low degree of smokiness. Smoke character may be absent in contemporary versions of this beer. Astringency of highly roasted malt should be absent. Toast and caramel-like malt characters may be evident. Low to medium hop bitterness are perceived. Low hop flavor and aroma are perceived. It is originally a style from Dortmund. Adambier is a strong, dark, hoppy, sour ale extensively aged in wood barrels. Extensive aging and the acidification of this beer can mask malt and hop character to varying degrees. Traditional and non-hybrid varieties of European hops were traditionally used. A Kölsch-like ale fermentation is typical Aging in barrels may contribute some level of Brettanomyces and lactic character. The end result is a medium to full bodied complex beer in hop, malt, Brett and acidic balance.

Again with the kölsch!  (That style is essentially a modern one, and while it's fine if the BA wants to think of all North German styles as kölsch-like, fine, but nothing before 1900 bore much resemblance to modern kölsches.  Lagers didn't challenge them until Dortmund started cranking out the exports well into the 19th century, and so there was no reason that they would "kölsch-like," by which we mean low-ester, lager-like ales.)  But this wheeze aside, I think they got a lot closer to the mark on adambier.  Here's Ron:

Dortmunder Adambier was a strong, sourish top-fermenting beer. Wahl & Henius ("American Handy Book of the Brewing, Malting and Auxiliary Trades", 1902) has an analysis of the beer performed in 1889. It was around 18º Balling, 7.38% alc. by weight (9.4% ABV) and a lactic acid content about half that of a contemporary lambiek. In contrast to sour beers such as Gose and Berliner Weisse, Adambier, also called Dortmunder Altbier, was heavily hopped. It acquired its sourness much like Porter - through a long secondary fermentation. Bacteria in the lagering vessels slowly changed the beer's character. It needed to be stored for at least a year for this process to take place.

The weird thing about this is that while Weyermann's new smoked wheat malt has recently unleashed a torrent of grodziskies (ten or twelve, easy), who in god's name is making adambier?  Is this really a style we needed to be statted out?  What's next, joppenbier (also Germano-Polish!)?  Cottbuser?

I await your thoughts on this matter eagerly.
_______________
*Even the name is dangerously political.  Grätz is, of course, the German name of the town from which the style came, and Grodzisk the Polish.  Right off the bat you may sense the awkward politics.  Prussia, Jews, and the World Wars played a role in the history of the town (I've no doubt language and religion did, too), and I don't even want to think about which name is less loaded.  I'm going with the Polish, because the small town is now located in the Republic of Poland.

Czech Lagers in Hood River

Update.  Scroll down to look at the comments where Full Sail's brewmaster, Jamie Emmerson, comments on his background and technique.


The world of Czech lagers is mostly hidden to Americans.  We know of "Bohemian pilsners" and assume that's all there is to the country that invented the world's most famous style.  But the Czech Republic has a brewing tradition as rich as Germany's and if you have the good fortune to visit, you will find more than golden lagers there.  The thing we know as pilsner is called "light lager" in the Czech Republic--světly ležák ("pilsner" is reserved for the beer made at Urquell).  But you'll also find things called tmavé,  černé, and polotmavé in hues ranging from light amber to black.

The Czech system for producing beer runs along two axes--strength and color.  On the one side you have beers of different strength categories based on original gravity (they've changed, so old hands need to update their vocabulary): stolní (table beer up to 6° P), výčepní (7° to 10°), ležák (11° to 12°), and speciál (13° +).  On the other, the definitions run from pale to black: světlé (pale), polotmavé (half dark), tmavé (dark), and černé (black).  Anything on one side may be matched to anything on the other, so you could have strong pales or table darks--or anything in-between.

This all seems academic to the average American, though, right?  When was the last time you saw a tmavé in the grocery store? It might have been more recently than you know.

Several years ago, Full Sail's James Emmerson tried a Czech tmavé and had an epiphany: it would be the perfect style to compliment Session Lager.  "When I had the tmavé, to me that was the yin to Session’s yang, just a perfect beer to pair with the all-malt helles, which is what Session is."  And thus was born Session Black, a stealth tmavé.  I was working on a chapter about dark lager and I called Jamie up to talk about Black, which I knew was inspired by the Czech dark.  I was surprised to learn that Session Fest and the current LTD seasonal--LTD 06--are also Czech-inspired, and that Full Sail has quietly been brewing up a portfolio of Czech beers.

When Session Black was released, I described it as a schwarzbier--and was later corrected.  Last week I called and asked Jamie what he saw as the difference was between German dark and black beers and the Czech versions:

The difference between a dunkel, schwarzbier, and tmavé style is the Munich dark being really malt forward in that Munich malt character. The schwarzbier being drier with that roast character. And then the tmavé was an interesting balance, with that roast being subdued and that malt-forward character wasn’t so surrounded by the Munich malt character. Maybe it’s a different brewing philosophy. The Czech beers in general have a really nice creaminess that [is] different than say the kind of malt character that came from a Munich beer. 

For my money, that last point is really the key.  Czech beers are made with very different malts than German beers.  Czechs use floor-malted grain that is less modified than German malts.  Most larger German breweries have abandoned decoction (though it's more common in Franconia and Bavaria), but it's typical in Czech breweries.  The combination of the less-modified malts and decoction create that creaminess--a quality that runs through all the Czech lagers I tried.  He agreed:

Certainly when you’re using the kind of malt they’re using, it lends itself more to decoction than the kind of malt we’re using. The degree of modification here does a lot of the work for you, but it takes away some of the opportunities as well. The challenge for us it to use American malts and specialty malts to try to recreate those flavors. Is it the same? Probably not—but it’s pretty close. 

Full Sail first released Session Fest last year, and it is probably the country's only regular-rotation polotmavé.  Emmerson: "No roast in it all all—it’s all caramel malts, Munich, and pale malts. It’s got that same kind of creamy mid-palate again. After bringing the Session Black, then, the idea of a polotmavé for Session Fest was a natural."

Okay, we have the half-dark and dark, what about black?  That would be the LTD 06:   "The černé is one I’ve always wanted to do, and the LTD 6 allowed that, because it’s a much larger beer. It’s very dopplebock-y, but that whole dark-roasted thing at the top created an interesting character to that beer."  If you haven't tried it yet, go buy a sixer.  It's pretty spectacular beer.  The balance between the burnished smoothness of the malt with that twist of roast is fantastic, and it's a perfect winter beer.

Emmerson has also made a strong Czech beer, inspired in part by Budvar's Speciální pivo called Bud (not sold, as you may have guessed by the name, in the US).  Emmerson wanted to create "an homage to the Czech thing of super-simple," and LTD 04 was just pilsner malt and Willamette hops.

Of course LTD 03 was the one beer people might have recognized as a Czech beer--it was a pilsner.  Or, as Jamie probably wished to call it, a světly ležák.

So that's pretty much the full range of Czech beers, and you can find them right here in Oregon.  I still think it's worth that trip to Prague you were always planning on taking, but maybe these beers will tide you over in the meantime.

IPAs Have Conquered America, But Why?

In response to yesterday's IPAs in America post, one beeronomist (there are others) noted:

I dunno, seems like false advertising - have you answered your question, 'how'?  I get it that they have [conquered America] but I was expecting your usual bloviating - er - erudite analysis of why IPA is especially right for American palates. What is it about the IPA and the American Experience that makes them so simpatico?  (My bold)

The purpose of this image will become evident in due course.

Well, I'm glad you asked, Patrick, if only because it allows me to stretch the discussion out--bloviate--over two posts.  In fact, I do have a theory, and it's built, like all great blogging theories, on a single anecdote that I garnish with actual data and a bit of fairly accurate history to create my wholesome meal of an answer.

The Anecdote

Way back in the waning days of the last century, I worked on a fantastic research project at Portland State University.   We were attempting a massive effort to interview parents and children and their social workers in the state child welfare system.  We worked like fiends and grew quite close.  At a certain point, our very cool boss started arranging post-work happy hour get-togethers where we could chat about work and blow off steam.  I had just begun writing about beer on the side, and so was regarded as the local expert.  The waitress came, ran through the tap list, and the Very Cool Boss asked which beer to order.  I asked what kind of beer she liked.  She said: "I don't like bitter beer.  I like IPAs." 

The Data

We are all well aware that industrial lager producers have been trying to make their beers as inoffensive as possible for the better part of a century.  Products made for mass audiences must have no sharp edges or challenging dimensions.  Humans crave sweetness and so food companies sweeten foods like pasta sauce that have no business being sweetened.  Over the years, the beer companies have done the same thing by steadily removing hops.  They now fall below the human threshold for flavor.

The History

Craft brewing arose as a reaction to the homogenization and boring-ification of mass market lagers.  It was sparked by people who existed way out in the tail on the beer-styles bell curve, people who loved intense, rich flavors.  For a long time, craft brewers thought they had to create bridges between their beer and Hamm's, so they dabbled in Vienna lagers, wheat beers, and fruit ales.  This buoyed craft brewing through the 80s, but by the 90s, people were losing interest in tame craft beers (and also bad beers, of which there were a growing number).  The market stumbled and took several years to recover.  When it did, it was on the strength of beers like IPAs that were sharply different from mass market lagers.

So here's my theory.  In the age before craft (BC), we had a lot of ideas about beer.  We believed "less filling" was a higher state of beer.  We feared "bitter beer face."  We had never heard of ales, never mind "styles," and considered Heineken impossibly strong and exotic.  Also, beer tasted bad.  There was a hollow tinniness to it, and the aftertaste was slightly unpleasant.  (I have no data to back this claim, but make it I shall: I suspect beer in the 70s was pretty bad, never mind how many hops it had, and that the technical quality and consistency of macro lager is very high today by comparison.)  You muscled your way through a beer to get to the next one and, if you persevered, the fourth one down the line.

We were ignorant.  On the one hand, we were told bitter was bad--seemed logical enough--but on the other, beer companies had essentially made it impossible for us to know what hops tasted like.  We never associated the two.  Now we enter the period after craft (AC) and for the first time taste hoppy flavors like grapefruit, lavender, and marmalade in our beers. They're not bad!  In some very abstract way, we can see how they might be called bitter, but it's not nasty bitter, tin bitter; it's single-estate-Ethiopian-dark-roast-with-notes-of-blueberry-and-black-pepper bitter.

Those who came to craft beer were a self-selected sample of people who didn't like mass market lagers.  Axiomatically, they were looking for something different, and along each dimension, IPAs offered a contrast: they were strong, they were fruity and ale-y, and of course, they were intensely-flavored.  There was a reason even very hoppy pilsners didn't take off--they were too familiar.  It had to be more than just hoppy.  The fullness and fruitiness of ales were a revelation.  But hops were key, and American hops, absolutely unfamiliar and even a little bit bizarre, were a big part of things.  Bolted to the chassis of a nice, full ale, they created flavors that seemed unrelated to beer from the land of sky-blue waters.  We were thrilled.

The rise of IPAs is similar both in pattern and kind to what was happening in artisanal food and beverage segments elsewhere.  When pursuing coffee, cheese, whisk(e)y, and wine, people went for the intense; they offered the best contrast to the bland, mass-market products they had grown up with.  In cuisine, "ethnic" foods (which are of course "foods" to people in different countries) have led a renaissance since the 70s and 80s, and we're forever looking for the next great flavor around the corner.

Looking back, it seems inevitable that a strongly-flavored beer was going to become king.  That it was IPA and not, say, tripels, is a little dicier to explain.  We are left to speculate.  American hops, once derided in other countries, have won the test of time.  Everyone now agrees: they're awesome.  So saturated IPAs are objectively tasty.  I also wouldn't underestimate the value of their being local.  I haven't figured out why this matters, but country after country, region after region, it seems to.  And finally, trends build on themselves.  IPAs may have won out partly because they started to get popular before people were exposed to Belgian styles and sour ales.

And that brings us to the end of my tale of Why IPAs Conquered America.  Surely you have your own theories and refutations, and as always, I welcome them in comments--

Style, Method, or Tradition?

There is nothing so necessary and inadequate in the conceptual terrain of beer as "style."  Or contentious.  Something is necessary because beer is so diverse--we can't have any meaningful sense of "beer" if we don't distinguish among the various products produced across Europe and, lately, parts of the new world.  (It's not an especially old concept and for a history of the issue, I will refer you to instructive posts here  and here.)  But style stymies: the structure is neither as precise as its defenders wish but also far too detailed. 

I'm supposed to chat with some homebrewers tonight, and I've been thinking of why "style" fails, and I think it's because it captures only one dimension in what should be a more complex taxonomy.  Forthwith, I'd like to offer a new structure, with examples.  When thinking about what makes a category of beer worth carving out from the herd, it's useful to consider not only style, but brewing method and regional tradition.  Take saison and biere de garde, often lumped together as "farmhouse ales."  Speaking as a matter of regional tradition, this makes all kinds of sense--they come from a single source.  But in terms of style, it's absurd; biere de gardes have evolved into something closer to lagers, while saisons have clung to their rusticity.

• Method.  Some categories of beer are distinctive because of the way they're brewed.  British and American ales are often constructed identically in the brewhouse, but when the former are pulled from fermenters a shade before terminal gravity and packaged in casks, they become quite different from the latter, force-carbonated in kegs.  Similarly, Belgians make tons of beers designed to go through a secondary fermentation in the bottle.  
• Tradition.  The best example here is the (tiny) group of beers people have called oud bruins, Flanders brown, Flemish red, or (the worst) Flemish red/brown ales. The beers don't really share a style, and they certainly don't share a method, but the reason people try to group them is because they do share a tradition.  Until the past few decades, brown ales were the standard in Flanders, though every brewery had a different method of producing them.  As they have slowly died out, we're left with a disparate collection that don't look or taste a hell of a lot like each other.  Yet it still makes sense to group them together because of their shared regional tradition.
• Style.  For the most part, styles are an effective framework.  When we say kolsch or cream ale, we know what we're getting. Styles have been built on the chassis of method and tradition, and are usually decent enough proxies. 

Where styles fall down is when they're stripped from tradition and method.  If American breweries have erred in picking up the beers of other countries, it's that they think only of the finished product.  Styles encourage this kind of thinking.  Like varieties in an ice cream shop, the only thing that distinguishes a lambic and a stout are flavors.  It leads breweries to do things like dump lactic acid in Berliner Weisses.  The product may have the superficial appearance of the style, but lacks the character and complexity you'd find in a beer made by a brewery using methods specific to the style.  That beer may fool a punter or even a judge, but it's not actually the same beer as a Berliner Weisse made with souring microorganisms.  If you only care about the way a beer tastes, fine.  If you care about what the beer is, you have to think a little more deeply.

"India Red Lager"

Style traditionalists, sharpen your knives:

Rather than go on a Cornell-style rant, I will instead nod appreciatively at what is clearly a postmodern joke.

Toward Better Beer Taxonomy, or, a Fool's Errand

Alan McLeod has a post on that perennial question: are styles just more hassle than they're worth? (His actual words: " at what point do beer styles become so diversified as to be useless?") While recognizing right out of the gate that it's a question with no definitive answer (or twenty, take your pick), I'd like to piggyback on the question with a few thoughts.

I'm supposed to be writing a book, the structure of which is based on style. Actually, it didn't have to be, but the virtue of styles are evident the second you consider writing a book about beer based on something other than them. One could re-invent the wheel--group them by broad type or region--but then all the people who already use style would wonder what the hell you were talking about. And of course, breweries in most countries use style to sell their beers. For better or worse, we have to play the cards we're dealt.

I'd also put in a word in praise, too. Beer styles been around as long as beer has been around. Both the Sumerians and Egyptians had different types of beer, and I suspect that per-civilized proto-Sumerians probably distinguished between types of gruel-beer, too. Having something to name beers is really helpful. The difference between lambic and Flanders-style wood-aged beers is not incidental, even if they're both tart beers. Alan suggests that gradations can become too fine (agreed!), but they could obviously get too coarse, as well.

The difficulty is that styles shift and change over time, and sometimes, they're not well defined in the first place. I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what to do with saisons and biere de gardes. The fashionable trend is to group them in the genus Farmhouse ales. It's not a terrible decision--they were once a single style that branched, and the regions they're brewed border one another. Yet for the person arriving fresh and new to good beer, they don't appear to have anything in common. Biere de gardes are a lot more like Scottish ales or bocks than saisons. There are a bunch of other rustic-style ales that aren't saisons per se, either, but which have more apparent connection to them in terms of yeast character, rusticity, and so on. (I grouped saisons with other rustic beers and gave French beer its own chapter.)

Or take Irish ale, that poor, neglected style. It dates back 1,500 years--"red ales" were mentioned in the sixth century, no doubt quite a bit different, but part of a single lineage. Yet thanks to the success of stout, there are almost no commercial examples left. Among those that are, tell me exactly how they are distinguishable from other British session ales? Heritage isn't enough to sustain a style if it appears to have vanished in the wild.

I hate to say it, but Rodenbach-style red ales and oud bruins are also on serious life support, too. They've more or less been collapsed into a single style, and there are only a few breweries that still produce the style in the authentic barrel-aged fashion. If Rodenbach went out of business, could we say the style really still existed commerically?

The converse problem involves the proliferation of Frankenstein beers that glue borrowings of various styles together to make beers conforming to no style. Your IPAs made with saison yeast and peaches--that sort of thing. We shouldn't declare a new style every time the idea for a new beer crosses a brewer's mind. On the other hand, if everyone makes a black IPA, at a certain point we're just going to have to accept the damn thing.

Styles are provisional, like grammar. We have to try to keep a semblance of order and be a bit schoolmarmish about enforcement, beating back the worst offenses. But at a certain point, the barbarians will overrun the gates, and then we have to let it go. Businesspeak and imperializing we can resist, sentences beginning "hopefully" and black IPAs, probably not. So it goes.

I am willing to entertain your own style pet peeves, however, particularly if they're entertaining.