Letter from North America

A Word About Beer Styles

Sometime in mid-1989, I conjured up an ingenious if, at the time, somewhat unlikely means of earning a living: I was going to write about beer! It was, I figured, a reasonable enough idea, since others, well, one other, the late and inestimable Michael Jackson, was already so doing, and what we then called microbreweries seemed to be popping up all over Canada at the time.

Two years and many, many tasting notes later, I wrote the first instalment of what went on to become a three year, bi-weekly column in Canada’s largest circulation newspaper, The Toronto Star. In prepping for my literary debut, I studied beer like a doctoral candidate readying for their dissertation, reading books, sampling beers critically rather than for enjoyment, and crucially, learning everything I could about beer styles.

Beer styles were important because they were quite literally the only way to get early 1990s readers to understand what I was writing about. People then knew what ‘beer’ meant, which was primarily mainstream brands that had spent the last couple of decades devolving towards a less flavourful and more marketing driven norm, and might, just might get that such beers were of a class called ‘lager.’ Try explaining anything else without first establishing a style and what it meant and you were charging headlong into confusion — and, importantly for this young writer, the almost certain cancellation of one’s column!

Beer styles were, as Tim Webb and I put in bold type many years later in the third and latest edition of our World Atlas of Beer, “an informal agreement between a brewer and a consumer, expressed through a term on a label, by which the former tells the latter roughly what sort of beer they have tried to make.” Except, back then, it was a bit more formal than informal.

I’ve no idea how I might approach the same issue were I just starting to write about beer today. If that agreement was semi-formal in the 1990s and informal in the 2010s, it’s nigh on casual these days. I mean, bathing suit and flip-flops casual. So casual as to be almost entirely useless, in fact.

Take the craft beer world’s number one style, for example. In the 1980s and ‘90s, long before it became the go-to for a generation of brewers, an IPA was fairly easy to define, regardless of whether it was crafted in its traditional English form or more modern and then still developing American iteration: Somewhat to significantly stronger and hoppier than its pale ale kin, and often lighter in colour.

Put in terms the average imbiber could then understand, if you liked pale ale or best bitter but craved more of what made those beers distinctive, IPA was for you!

Today, we see IPA assume all sorts of diverse and frequently discordant guises. There is the Session IPA, of course, which swaps out strength but maintains an often abrasive bitterness, the hoppy porter-IPA hybrid known as Black IPA, and the Fruit IPA, which softens the bitterness with sweet fruitiness or agitates it with citrusy acidity. Then there is the New England IPA, or as I like to term it, the Neepa, with dense, sometimes turbid cloudiness, big olfactory impact from the hops, and quite often little to negligible bitterness.

And don’t get me started on Sour or Milkshake IPAs, respectively adding sourness or sweetness to a style that is supposed to be defined by its bitterness.

IPA is the worst offender in style dilution, but by no means is it alone. Over the months and years recently passed, I have sampled Berliner Weisses so infused with fruit that they reminded me of the descriptively named childhood candy, Sweet Tarts, confectionary Stouts that resembled more a syrup-filled Starbucks creation than anything beer-like, and Pilsners barely a hop cone removed from Budweiser or Carling.

None of this is to decry creativity in brewing, which is, after all, the whole reason microbrewing/craft brewing took off in the first place. But while some might suggest that ‘style creep’ such as that noted above is essential to the further growth of the craft beer market, I believe it is equally valid to propose that when a consumer repeatedly buys beer expecting one thing and receives another, they might the next time be more inclined to opt for a tried-and-true international brand than anything from a craft brewery.

‘Once bitten, twice shy’ is how the saying goes, and when, say, an IPA of indeterminant character is doing the biting, that resulting shyness could ultimately prove detrimental to not only the future of the brewery that made the beer, but also to that of the craft segment as a whole.

Stephen Beaumont