A First Look at Beer Styles

Beer styles are, on close inspection, a relatively recent invention pretending to be an ancient one. People have been brewing for millennia, but the tidy taxonomy of "American IPA" versus "Munich Helles" versus "Berliner Weisse" is largely the work of late twentieth-century writers, judges, and brewers trying to make sense of what was already in the glass. The categories are useful. They are also, in places, a little arbitrary, and worth understanding as such.

What a "style" actually is

A beer style is a description, not a recipe. It is a cluster of expectations — color, strength, bitterness, aroma, mouthfeel, the particular yeast or grain or hopping tradition behind it — that drinkers and judges have come to associate with a name. The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP), which publishes the most widely used style framework in competition, treats each style as a written profile: vital statistics, sensory description, ingredients, comparisons to neighboring styles. The Brewers Association maintains a separate but parallel set of style descriptions used at the Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup. The two overlap considerably and disagree at the edges, which is itself a useful thing to know. There is no single official list.

It is worth pausing on what styles are not. They are not legal categories. The federal definition of beer in the United States, set out in 27 CFR Part 25 and 27 USC § 211, concerns itself with whether a liquid is beer at all — fermented from malt or substitutes thereof, with hops or hop products — and with how it is taxed and labeled. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), which administers labeling under 27 CFR Part 7, cares whether a label says "ale" or "lager" or "malt liquor" in ways that might mislead a consumer, but it does not certify that a beer is, say, a properly attenuated West Coast IPA. Style is a cultural and commercial vocabulary layered on top of a regulatory one.

The first and oldest split: ale or lager

Almost every introductory account of beer begins with the same division, and for good reason: it is the one cleavage in the family tree that traces directly to biology rather than to fashion. Ales are fermented with strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, generally at warmer temperatures, producing a wider band of fruity and spicy aromatic compounds called esters and phenols. Lagers are fermented with Saccharomyces pastorianus — a hybrid yeast — at cooler temperatures, then conditioned cold for weeks, which suppresses those same aromatics and tends to leave a cleaner, crisper drink behind. Peer-reviewed reviews indexed in NCBI PubMed Central describe the flavor chemistry in detail; the practical consequence for a drinker is that ale yeasts tend to contribute flavor and lager yeasts tend to step out of the way.

This division does real work. A Bavarian Hefeweizen, with its banana and clove notes, is recognizably an ale even before the label is read. A Czech-style pilsner, all bread crust and noble hop, is recognizably a lager. The ale-or-lager distinction is also the only point at which most national beer cultures agree on anything.

There are, of course, edge cases. Kölsch, brewed in Cologne, is fermented warm with an ale yeast and then lagered cold, which makes it technically an ale that drinks like a lager and is sometimes called, awkwardly, a "hybrid." California Common, the survivor of nineteenth-century San Francisco brewing, runs lager yeast at ale temperatures. Spontaneously fermented lambics, made in a small region of Belgium under the watch of HORAL, the High Council for Artisanal Lambic Beers, do not use a pitched yeast at all and instead rely on whatever wild Brettanomyces, Saccharomyces, and bacteria happen to drift in. The neat binary develops fuzzy edges almost immediately, which is a recurring theme.

Color, strength, bitterness: the vital statistics

Once past ale-or-lager, style descriptions tend to reach for three numbers. They are imprecise enough to argue about and precise enough to be useful.

Color is generally given in SRM (Standard Reference Method) in the United States or EBC in Europe, both measured by light absorbance through the finished beer. A pale straw lager might run 2-4 SRM, an amber ale 10-14, a dry stout north of 35. The number is determined chiefly by how darkly the malt was kilned or roasted, which is the subject of recent malt-science reviews available through PMC.

Strength is reported as alcohol by volume (ABV). Mainstream lagers cluster around 4-5%; British session bitters can run lower; American double IPAs and Belgian quadrupels can climb past 10%. Federal excise tax under 26 USC § 5051 is structured per barrel rather than per percent, so ABV is a stylistic choice rather than a tax bracket within beer.

Bitterness is given in IBUs, International Bitterness Units, which measure isomerized alpha acids derived from hops. A peer-reviewed review of hop bitter acids in PMC walks through the chemistry. The number is famously imperfect — an 80-IBU imperial stout and an 80-IBU West Coast IPA do not taste equally bitter, because malt sweetness and residual sugar mask perceived bitterness — but as a rough coordinate it works.

A reader who knows roughly where a style sits on those three axes, plus its ale-or-lager status, can get oriented in most beer lists without resorting to flowery descriptors.

Families worth knowing

The full BJCP guidelines run to dozens of categories and many more sub-styles. A first look needs only a handful of families, each with a recognizable center.

Pale lagers. The descendants of the original 1842 Pilsner from Plzeň, still brewed by Pilsner Urquell, expanded across the world via German, Dutch, and American adaptations. German pilsner is drier and more bitter; Czech pilsner softer and more bready; American light lager pared back further still. The German Brewers Association (Deutscher Brauer-Bund) and the BMEL maintain records of the Reinheitsgebot tradition that shaped much of the European lager lineage.

Dark lagers. Munich Dunkel, Schwarzbier, Czech tmavý ležák. Color from kilned malts rather than roast, often with surprising drinkability for how dark they look.

Wheat beers. Bavarian Hefeweizen, Belgian witbier, Berliner Weisse, American wheat. United mostly by the inclusion of a substantial proportion of wheat in the grist, then divided sharply by yeast and by acidity.

Pale ales and IPAs. The most commercially important family in American craft brewing. English pale ales and bitters at the gentler end; American pale ale, West Coast IPA, hazy or New England IPA, and double IPA at the more assertive end. The Brewers Association's national beer statistics document the segment's outsize role in craft volume.

Amber and brown ales. A loose grouping — Irish red, English brown, American amber, altbier — held together by mid-range color and a balance tilted toward malt rather than hops.

Stouts and porters. Defined by roasted barley or roasted malt. Dry Irish stout, sweet milk stout, oatmeal stout, Baltic porter (which, by an act of taxonomic mischief, is actually a lager), imperial stout. Porter and stout were once distinct beers and are now a continuum no two writers draw the same way.

Belgian and farmhouse styles. Belgian dubbel, tripel, quadrupel, witbier, saison, plus the Trappist beers protected under the International Trappist Association's Authentic Trappist Product designation, and the lambic and gueuze tradition overseen by HORAL. Yeast does most of the talking.

Sours and wild ales. Berliner Weisse, gose, Flanders red and brown, lambic, American wild ale. Acidity from Lactobacillus, Pediococcus, or Brettanomyces, intentionally cultivated rather than treated as a flaw.

Specialty and historical. Smoked beers (Rauchbier), fruited beers, barrel-aged beers, gluten-reduced beers, no- and low-alcohol beers, and the various revivals of historical recipes. The category absorbs whatever the previous categories cannot.

Why the categories keep moving

Style guidelines are revised. The BJCP guidelines have been substantially rewritten more than once, most prominently in 2008 and 2015, and the Brewers Association updates its competition descriptions annually. New styles get added when enough commercial examples exist to describe a coherent center; older styles get split, merged, or quietly retired. New England IPA, virtually unknown in published guidelines a decade ago, is now a distinct sub-style. Grodziskie, a smoked Polish wheat beer that nearly went extinct, has reappeared in the guidelines because brewers started making it again.

This is not a flaw. Beer styles are a description of what brewers and drinkers are actually doing, and what they are doing changes. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in the United Kingdom and the Brewers of Europe document parallel evolutions on the cask and continental sides. Treat a style guide as a snapshot, not a constitution.

How to use styles without being ruled by them

A style name on a tap list or a bottle is a useful prediction. It says: this beer will probably look like that, taste roughly like those, and reward being served at that temperature in that glass. The Brewers Association's Draught Beer Quality Manual covers the serving side in some detail. Style is also how beer competitions work — a beer is judged against the description of the category it was entered in, which is why the same liquid can win gold as an "American Strong Ale" and place nowhere as an "English Barleywine."

Where style language stops being useful is when it becomes prescriptive about pleasure. A beer that drinks well outside its category is not a failed beer; it is, more often, a beer the category has not caught up with. Several of the most loved commercial beers in the world sit somewhere between two official styles, or have a category named after them retroactively. The Cicerone Certification Program® trains candidates to taste against style standards while also recognizing successful beers that fall outside them, and the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) takes a similar position in its judge training. Style literacy is a tool, not a verdict.

A first look at beer styles, then, is mostly an exercise in learning the rough coordinates — ale or lager, light or dark, gentle or strong, bitter or not, clean or funky — and then learning which traditions cluster where. The names and the boundaries will keep shifting. The coordinates do not.

Further reading

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