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Beer styles differentiate and categorise by colour, flavour, strength, ingredients, production method, recipe, history, or origin.
The modern concept of beer styles is largely based on the work of writer Michael Jackson in his 1977 book The World Guide To Beer. Michael Jackson's Beer Hunter - How to save a beer style In 1989, Fred Eckhardt furthered Jackson's work publishing The Essentials of Beer Style. Although the systematic study of beer styles is a modern phenomenon, the practice of distinguishing between different varieties of beer is ancient, dating to at least 2000 BC.
What constitutes a beer style may involve provenance, local tradition, ingredients, aroma, appearance, flavour and mouthfeel. The flavour may include the degree of bitterness of a beer due to such as hops, roasted barley, or herbs; and the sweetness from the sugar present in the beer.
Some beers are spontaneously fermented from wild yeasts, for example the lambic beers of Belgium.
Additional markers are applied across styles. The terms "imperial" or "double" are used interchangeably for a higher-alcohol version of a particular style. Originally applied to , a high-alcohol style of stout brewed in England for export to Imperial Russia, the term “imperial” can now be applied to any style name to indicate a higher alcohol content. "Double", meaning the same thing, originated with the dubbel style of in the 19th century. Even higher alcohol-content beers can be labeled "triple" (from the Trappist tripel style) or even "quad". Lower-than-standard alcohol content is often indicated by the term "session". For example, while India pale ales often have alcohol content around 6–7% abv, a "session India pale ale" will often have alcohol content below 5%.
Barrel-aged beer is aged in wood barrels. Sour beer is made with additional microorganisms (alongside yeast) such as Brettanomyces or Lactobacillus.
Documents reveal comments on different local brewing methods or ingredients. Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia wrote about Celts brewing ale "in Gaul and Spain in a number of different ways, and under a number of different names; although the principle is the same." Anglo-Saxons laws reveal they identified three different ales, while the Normans mention cervisae (ale) and plena cervisia (full bodied ale) in the Domesday Book.
By the 15th century brewers in Germany and the Low Countries were using hops to flavour and preserve their ale; this new style of ale was called beer. When this trend came to Britain and brewers of beer in Southwark, London, started to take sales away from the traditional brewers of unhopped ale, there were complaints and protests. Laws were passed favouring either beer or ale for a number of years, until hopped beer became the standard style throughout Europe. At the same time, brewers in Bavaria were storing beer in cool caves during the summer months to stop it from spoiling. The type of beer they stored in this manner became known as lager from the German word lagern, meaning "to store".
Although beers using naturally dried malt would have been pale-coloured, by the 17th century most malts in Europe would have been dried over a fire, resulting in a dark-coloured beer. When coke started to be used for roasting malt in 1642, the resulting lighter coloured beers became very popular. By 1703 the term pale ale was starting to be used, though the beer it described was a lightly hopped ale, very different from more bitter modern versions.
However, despite an awareness by commentators, law-makers, and brewers that there were different styles of beer, it was not until Michael Jackson's World Guide To Beer was published in 1977 that there was an attempt to group and compare beers from around the world. Jackson's book had a particular influence in North America where the writer Fred Eckhardt was also starting to explore the nature of beer styles. The wine importing company Merchant du Vin switched to importing beers mentioned in Jackson's book. Small brewers started up, producing copies and interpretations of the beer styles Jackson described.
While North America developed beer styles into a serious study with fixed parameters of IBUs, colour, aroma, yeast, ingredients and strength, other countries continued to mainly categorise beers loosely by strength and colour, with much overlapping of naming conventions.
Many beers are transparent, but some beers, such as hefeweizen, may be cloudy due to the presence of yeast making them translucent. A third variety is the opaque or near-opaque colour that exists with , porters, (black beer) and other deeply coloured styles. Thickness and retention of the Beer head and the lace it can leave on the glass, are also factors in a beer's appearance.
This approach relies on the fact that dissolved sugars and alcohol each affect the density of beer differently. Since sugars are converted to alcohol during the process of fermentation, gravity can be used to estimate the final alcohol. In beer brewing, a distinction is made between the original gravity, the gravity of the wort before fermentation has begun, and the final gravity of the product when fermentation has completed. Since the concentration of sugars is directly proportional to the gravity, the original gravity gives a brewer an idea of the potential alcoholic strength of the final product. After fermentation, the differences between the final and original gravities indicate the amount of sugar converted into alcohol, allowing the concentration of alcoholic strength to be calculated.
The original gravity of a beer was the basis for determining taxation in both the UK and Ireland from 1880 until the late 20th century, and a legacy of that system remains in the largely arbitrary division of bitter into "bitter", "best bitter", and "special bitter" substyles. In continental Europe, the density of a beer in degrees Plato is sometimes used by a brewery to distinguish a particular beer produced in a line. For example, Rochefort Brewery produces three beers, all dissimilar in colour, flavour, and aroma; and sells them as Rochefort 6, Rochefort 8, and Rochefort 10, the numbers referring to the original gravities of the beers. Westvleteren Brewery, meanwhile, produces three beers and calls them Blonde, 8, and 12.
Before the development of modern brewing practices and the complete understanding of the biochemistry of yeast, the final abv of a beer could not be precisely controlled, making its value inconsistent and therefore unsuitable as a determinant for taxation or regulation. Contemporarily, though, abv is often used to determine the duty on beer and cider, and sales of beer and cider above a certain abv are sometimes restricted or prohibited. For example, in Texas, beers below 4% abv cannot be sold as stout regardless of other stylistic considerations. Andy Crouch's BeerScribe.com - Beer Labels and Packaging
form the basis of most beer styles now in production, with styles that use other grains as a base distinguished by those grains (for example bock, which uses Munich malt as a base). The Rauchbier and Grätzer styles are distinguished by the use of smoked malt.
Some styles use one or more other grains as a key ingredient in the style, such as wheat beer, rye beer, or oatmeal stout.
The inclusion of some grains such as maize and rice is often viewed as making less of a flavour contribution and more of an added source of fermentable sugars. Rice in particular "is considered by many craft brewers what the nasty industrial brewers use to water down their beer".
| quoted in "Craft brewers rethink rice in beer", Jenn Garbee, LA Times,
September 30, 2009 http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-beer30-2009sep30,0,2785799.story
This is due in large part to the use of rice by large scale American breweries. While it is commonly held that these breweries introduced these grains to their formulas during war shortages, author Maureen Ogle states "The mythology is that these giant beer makers began adding rice and corn to their beer after World War II to water it down, but that's simply not true. The American brewing industry was built in the late 19th century by first-generation German American immigrants such as Adolphus Busch, Adolph Coors and Frederick Miller. Although these men, craft brewers themselves, initially re-created the full-bodied beers of their homeland, many Americans had not developed a taste for the malt-heavy style. They needed a domestic ingredient that would make the beers more effervescent, bubbly and lighter. Rice and corn did that – it was a desired flavor, not inexpensive filler."
Alcoholic beverages made from the fermentation of sugars derived from non-grain sources are generally not called "beer," despite being produced by the same yeast-based biochemical reaction. Fermented honey is called mead, fermented apple juice is called cider, fermented pear juice is called perry (sometimes, pear cider), fermented plum juice is called plum jerkum, and fermented grape juice is called wine. Chinese Rice wine and Japanese sake are made using much the same process as beer with one additional step in the fermentation as well as using rice instead of primarily barley malt.
Top-fermenting yeast typically ferments at higher temperatures , producing significant amounts of and other secondary flavours and aromas, often resembling those of apple, pear, pineapple, grass, hay, banana, plum or prune.
Top-fermented beers include Brown Ale, Mild ale, Old Ale, Pale Ale, Stout and Wheat beer.
are the most commonly consumed type of beer in the world. Lagers are of origin, taking their name from the German language lagern ("to store"), and normally use a bottom-fermenting yeast which begin fermenting at (the "fermentation phase"), and then stored at (the "lagering phase"). During the secondary stage, the lager clears and mellows. The cooler conditions also inhibit the natural production of and other byproducts, resulting in a "crisper" tasting beer.
Modern methods of producing lager were pioneered by Gabriel Sedlmayr the Younger, who perfected dark brown lagers at the Spaten Brewery in Bavaria, and Anton Dreher, who began brewing a lager in Vienna, Austria, in 1840–1841. With modern improved fermentation control, most lager breweries use only short periods of cold storage, typically 1–3 weeks.
Most of today's lager is based on the original Pilsner style, pioneered in 1842 in the city of Plzeň (German: Pilsen), in an area of the Austrian Empire now located in the Czech beer. The modern pale lager that developed from Pilsner is light in colour and high in forced carbonation, with an alcohol content of 3–6% by volume. The Pilsner Urquell or Heineken brands of beer are typical examples of pale lager, with the Pilsner Urquell brand having a hop presence more associated with the pilsner style. Principal styles of lager include pale lager, Bock, Dunkel, Helles, Oktoberfestbier / Märzen, Pilsner, Schwarzbier and Vienna lager.
Beers of spontaneous fermentation use wild yeasts rather than cultivated ones. By the Middle Ages, brewers had learned to crop the yeast from one brew and use it in the next. Only in a few isolated regions were wild yeasts still used. The best-known region where spontaneous fermentation is still used is the Zenne in Belgium where lambic is produced.
Hybrid or mixed style beers use modern techniques and materials instead of, or in addition to, traditional aspects of brewing. Although there is some variation among sources, mixed beers generally fall into the following categories:
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