Who Arranged Beer Into “Styles?”
Reader Bob Paolino noted that today is the 14th anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death. The timing of this post is entirely coincidental, but shows how his influence continues to reach into the future.
Responding to last week’s post about beer styles, a few people wondered where the concept came from. Here’s Brian Swisher in comments on the post:
“Isn't true that Michael Jackson was the first to document the idea of beer styles in writing? I think sometimes it's good to remember that we love to assign things to categories even though so many parts of our world exist along a continuum. If left to our own devices, my style categories are bound to be different from another's, especially if they haven't studied the existing styles before.”
You always know someone’s asked a good question when the answer is complicated, and Brian has framed his in an especially good way. There’s no single way to think about styles, and over the decades people have organized beer in a lot of ways. How influential was Jackson in the way we think about styles? Very—but perhaps more for a reason we often miss.
Beer Styles Are Ancient
Leaving aside nomenclature, the concept of beer styles is very old. Germans didn’t need Jackson to tell them helles lager existed or that it was different from pilsner. The moment brewers started making different flavors of beer, in fact, they needed some way to talk about them. Beer long preceded the written word, but once that latter innovation arrived, we immediately find beer styles in the record. Here’s a report about Sumerian records of economic activity (because if you don’t document transactions, how on earth do you expect to tax them?):
“[A]round the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, the administrative records on beer show a different format. Again the entries concern a number of different types of beer which by then, however, were characterized by reasonable designations such as ‘golden beer,’ ‘dark beer,’ ‘sweet dark beer,’ ‘red beer,’ and ‘strained beer.’”
—Peter Damerow, “Sumerian Beer: The Origins of Brewing Technology in Ancient Mesopotamia”
Of course, just thinking about brewing history for a moment, one realizes it’s littered with the names of famous beer styles like London porter, gueuze, weissbier, and so on. The Sumerian names illustrate that even thousands of years hasn’t changed how we think about beer all that much—they even had hazy and filtered styles back then! The habit of making new types of beer is as old as beer itself.
Jackson and His “Beer-Styles”
Michael Jackson, who died in 2007, was the most influential beer writer in the past half century. A trained journalist,
he didn’t start writing about beer seriously until his mid-30s, and he brought a reporter’s skill at explanation into his work. The first thing he had to do was look at this motley collection of names and try to figure out what they meant. Over most of his career, he wrote with the beginner in mind (from the 70s to the 90s, during his greatest output, that described most readers). He wanted to make sense of the countries making beer and how to think about the different products they made, and he came up with this framework in The World Guide to Beer (1977):
“Beers fall into three broad categories: those which are top-fermented; those which are brewed with some wheat content (they are also top-fermented); and those which are bottom-fermented. There are certain classical examples within each group, and some of them have given rise to the generally-accepted styles, whether regional or international. If a brewer specifically has the intention of reproducing a classical beer, then he is working within a style. If his beer merely bears a general similarity to others, then it may be regarded as being of their type. Such distinctions can never be definitive internationally, since the understanding of terminology various between different parts of the world.”
You can see in his own description how he was wrestling with the same issues I mentioned last week. He introduced the world to the term “style” here—or rather “beer-style”—distinguishing the category from larger, more amorphous groupings. He was clearly correct in noting that different countries conceptualized beer differently, so there could be no apples-to-apples approach to category. As Martyn Cornell documents, many earlier writers attempted similar efforts, but used different names, like “types,” “kinds,” “varieties,” or even “species.” In using “styles” Jackson was at least original. (Cornell theorizes, plausibly, that Jackson, the old reporter and editor, relied on the language of his craft, which uses “style guidelines.”)
The more interesting element of his thinking isn’t the name, though, but how he attempted to apply a more universal standard that would work as well in Germany as Belgium: “if a brewer specifically has the intention of reproducing a classical beer, then he is working within a style.” Focusing on what he thought of as archetypal beer was a big deal in Jackson’s oeuvre, and it had profound effects on the way we conceptualize beer now. To understand a style, he looked for the quintessential example. The strength and color and flavors of that beer then became the standard for the style. The beers and breweries he chose consequently became the classics.
Brasserie Dupont is a good example. When Jackson started writing about it, the brewery was barely making Saison anymore and Dupont was planning to discontinue it. They had far greater success with Moinette and Redor Pils. Yet Jackson lauded Saison Dupont and transfixed foreign readers. Saison’s fortunes changed—but only as an export product. Locally, bemused Belgians kept drinking Moinette. To millions of Americans, however, Dupont is synonymous with saison.
Many of the breweries Jackson highlighted were no-brainers: Pilsner Urquell, Rodenbach, Guinness, Paulaner. History unavoidably places these breweries in the center spotlight. But in highlighting other obscure breweries like Dupont, Schlenkerla, and Traquair, he turned them into instant classics. In choosing this approach he also sharpened the edges of styles so they seemed more scientific and less impressionistic.
No one has explored his influence on this part of the equation (as far as I know), but it shaped the way Americans in particular thought about beer. It opened up export markets for the breweries he identified, and American brewers, the vast majority of whom never traveled the beer world extensively, took those examples as canonical, almost sanctified beers. The style guidelines that followed used the science-y approach to place numbers and ranges to various dimensions of beer style. Of course, like Jackson, they also identified classic examples.
Because we see beer in terms of style now, it seems organic and intuitive. Of course, ambiguities lurked underneath the satisfyingly clinical definitions. The tension is most obvious in his more dubious categories. His division of English brown ales into northern and southern schools made little sense, for example—except to the extent that his exemplar breweries differed. The same problem cropped up when he decided two separate styles existed in Flanders, which he labeled oud Bruin and Flanders red. English brown ales have become so marginal the question hardly matters anymore, but we’re still dealing with the confusing and ahistorical residue of his Flanders choices.
Another downside came in the implication that styles were permanent, fixed things with a single referent. When Americans discovered Jackson and his styles, we embraced them for their clarity, failing to recognize they function at best as snapshots in time. Had he talked about them as more provisional, temporary categories, they might not have influence the US in the same way.
For the time he was writing, however, there’s no doubt that his taxonomies were pivotal. Brewery consolidation left drinkers with little sense of what variety actually existed. Our understanding of beer had atrophied to almost nothing. Jackson’s beer-style approach gave us a structure, a pedagogy, almost. It may have been overly simplified, but it needed to be to instruct a mass audience. So many young brewers came into the industry in the 1980s and ‘90s because of the way Jackson wrote about beer.
A lot has changed since then, and the rigidity and structure of styles is starting to buckle with the quick evolution in flavors and approaches. I have long complained about the GABF’s impossibly long and absurd list of “styles” (approaching a hundred now).
So no, Jackson didn’t invent beer styles. He introduced the name we now use, but more importantly, he provided the conceptual framework, for good and bad. A different writer would have thought about it differently—and many did. But Jackson’s approach was the one that hooked readers, and it’s the one we use to this day.