Did the Pursuit of Beer "Styles" Lead Us Down a Blind Alley?
Created by Midjourney (prompt: “cubist glass of IPA”)
I have been working on an article for Craft Beer & Brewing about witbier, and it got me thinking. Actually, it got me rethinking an idea that has been rolling around my brainpan for years: is “style” really the best way to think about beer? Witbier’s a great example. The modern version, developed by Pierre Celis beginning in 1966, has almost nothing in common with the beer made in Hoegaarden up until 1957. So when we say witbier is a style, what exactly is this meant to communicate? (This is easier and harder to answer than it seems.)
Take any population, and you can group and cluster individuals that seem alike. We group creatures with fur together, but separate them from creatures with gills. The act seems like one of intuition, and can help us understand the population. But it can just as easily fool us for any number of reasons: we think those associations are real rather than conceptual; sometimes the associations we find are wrong, or; the groups we create reflect our own biases or misunderstanding. My master’s thesis was an examination of the ways 18th- and 19th-c British and German scholars massively misunderstood Indian religion when they discovered it, blinded by their own unexamined Christian biases and racial bigotry. They taxonomized the hell out of what they saw, but got most of it wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with thinking about beer style per se, but it has become so codified and calcified that it’s as much a straightjacket as it is a tool for understanding. We won’t and shouldn’t abandon beer styles entirely, but I think we need to develop a new relationship to them.
Prescriptive and Descriptive
Long before Michael Jackson used the language of “styles,” people distinguished among beers. Hundreds of years ago, towns or regions would often make distinctive beers. In Germany, it was common to name a beer after the town itself. The Brits love converting adjectives into nouns when they talk about beers: mild, bitter, stale, stout, brown, pale. If you go all the way back to the Sumerians, you find mention of different types. Beers come in all different colors and flavors, and we need a way to refer to them. These terms originally came as ways to describe beers: that one is made with wheat and is whitish; this one came from Cologne; that one is pale-colored. That’s obviously fine: we need a language to talk about beer.
But that’s not what styles have become. Americans are responsible for taking this pretty simple taxonomy and screwing it up, mistaking these titles as prescriptive. In the 1980s, having just poked our heads up and looked around for the first time, Americans realized there were all these different beers out there. They wanted to embrace them and make them, and so they looked at the world they found and said: ah, I see, if you want to make a British pale ale, you must use so and so ingredients, and it should be this strong and have this much bitterness and be this color. They began prescribing how to make these styles, wrote up guidelines and judged each other on how well they made them like the European examples, finally settling on the idea that styles existed as solid, extant creatures, rather than just loose descriptions people used to distinguish them from other beers out there.
As craft brewing became a worldwide phenomenon, we exported this sense of beer style as well. We exported the guidelines and the judging criteria, and people starting new breweries looked at the world they’d discovered and said, Oh, I see, these are beer styles, and I can make them all here in my own brewery if I just look at the guidelines.
The problem with prescriptive beer styles is that they are wholly inflexible. If an IPA is supposed to have 80 IBUs, be pale and clear and 7% ABV, what happens if it is a bit cloudy, red, 35 IBUs and 5% ABV? Well, it can’t be an IPA, so we have to invent a new category. This gets back to the witbier, which was invented out of whole cloth by a single person who wasn’t in the least constrained by the idea of style. (Belgians rarely are.) If a modern-day brewer did the exact same thing and completely changed the formulation but still called it a witbier, we’d call them a heretic and condemn the product as not-witbier—or more likely call it Southwest-style Belgian wheat ale. Scratch the surface and almost every style has wandered over time, some of them unrecognizably. This didn’t used to be a problem, but now style creep leads to endless new style creation for no real purpose. It gets ever more baroque and obtuse, but the new styles don’t add anything to our understanding or experience of the beer. And they confuse the hell out of the casual drinker.
Another Way
We got here organically. The migration of beer styles from a language to a conceptual model of understanding happened naturally, with a little help from brewers, writers, competitions, and consumers. We won’t undo it with a single blog post. This article is mainly aimed at those breweries and competitions and avid fans who slowly shape culture.
My argument is this: back away from the idea of style as the sole or even most important way to understand beer. So many things are more important, like the history of a type of beer, the way it’s made, and the tradition it comes from. When we take styles in isolation, we shear these elements from a type of beer. To go back to an earlier example, that 5% hazy fruit punch bears almost no similarity to a biscuity British cask ale, no matter that breweries may both call them pale ales. A kölsch has far more in common with a helles than it does a pale ale from Belgium.
I’m not arguing that people regularly conflate pale ales from Brussels and Cologne (although London and Boston?—maybe), but we understand their differences far more powerfully if we see them as expressions of a place, its history, culture, and ingredients.
The reverse is also true, and especially relevant in 2023. I recently had a glass of Pono’s pineapple “kölsch.” I don’t have a problem with Pono using that style in their name, but people writing about it and judging it shouldn’t attach it to the beers made in Cologne. Put smoothie sours labeled gose or Berliner weisse or any other hybrids in the same pot. They don’t have anything to do with the traditions or beers those labels reference.
I would love it if beer competitions backed off the style ledge as well. The GABF currently lists 98 categories, and because they use the style paradigm, they list 212 styles or subcategories within them. In one way, this is a recognition of the world’s many and varied expressions of brewing and is an admirable step up from older versions that were built partly on ignorance and misunderstanding. (My favorite is that for years they rebuffed German-trained brewers on the adamant conviction thst Brettanomyces should never be present in Berliner weisse.) But it’s actually a perfect example of the problem with the style-based approach, its inflexibility, and the inevitable splintering it fosters. These guidelines make the implicit argument that the way to know and therefore evaluate beer is through extremely narrow, prescriptive, and inflexible categories. I would direct anyone to the Oregon Beer Awards and the way they think about it as one kind of alternative (and, oh joy!, Texas has followed their lead).
The resistance to change comes, I believe, from a fear of what we’ll lose rather than what we’ll gain if we move away from styles. The fault here is the assumption that customers understand style in the first place. The only reason to slap “gose” on a smoothie sour is because a brewery thinks it will convey useful information to the customer. But aside from a very few descriptive terms—IPA, lager, pilsner, pale ale, stout—styles are meaningless to them. Conversely, Belgians are famously resistant to using style designations, even if their beers fall squarely in the center of a well-known tradition. And you know what? Customers still buy their beer.
I’ve gone on and on, so I’ll summarize and end this. Styles are not something actual, they’re a linguistic convenience. Beers are constantly changing, so any term will be a snapshot in time, and the more specific that term is (robust porter versus brown porter), the quicker it will stop describing what we find in the marketplace. And finally, there are far, far better ways to understand beers than as a catalogue of names with their associated stats.
Again, I don’t expect to see massive change anytime soon, but for the couple thousand people who read this, if you could at least hold styles more loosely, that would be a start. A couple thousand here and a couple thousand there and pretty soon you may be talking real movement.