All five British beer styles

I must be prescient. How else can I account for my last post, mocking the Brewers Association 140+ "beer styles"? I wrote it a week ago. Because of a weekend break in England, I had five posts stacked up and scheduled to be published in my absence.

What did I notice on my return? That others had been writing about the insane proliferations of made-up beer styles. Good to know I'm not the only one wondering where it will all stop. Alan at A Good Beer Blog got me pointed in the right direction with his "Being a Hound Without any Sense of Style" post.

Jack Curtin touched upon the topic in a chat with Fritz Maytag.

Over at Yours for Good Fermentables Tom Cizauskas wrote a paragraph with which I wholeheartedly concur:

"Styles, now, at least in the US, seem to be determined by formalistic minutiae, and, once in place, fiercely defended by the killer phrase "not to style"."

A post called "What is the purpose of beer styles?" on Beervana answered the question in its title thus:

"The purpose of having them at all is to bring coherence to a vast diversity of beers--not to merely create a name for every single variation."

I spend a lot of time looking brewing logs, old adverts and the like. The information I collect from them is packed into spreadsheets. It's given me a lot of material to analyse. The more I look, the fewer styles I find. I'm left with just a handful.

Removing variations based on differing strengths or the addition of a special ingredient, this is all that remains:

Pale Ale
Brown Ale
Mild Ale
Porter
Strong Ale

You could add Lager to that, but I was talking in terms of indigenous styles.

Or maybe I should stop swimming against the tide and start campaigning for the recognition of some new styles of my own. Where to start? AK, perhaps. Followed by AKA, XK, XLK, Luncheon Ale, Family Ale, Intermediate Ale. Why on earth hasn't the Brewers Association picked up on these yet?

Imperialising

It isn't true, as some have claimed, that "Imperial" was only used to describe Stout. As with much Victorian beer terminology, it was erratically and inconsistently applied.

I stumbled across this wonderful example today in an 1868 price list: Imperial Table Beer. Let's see, Imperial means really strong and Table Beer means something safe to give to the kiddies. So how on earth can a Table Beer be Imperial? The price, 2s 6d for a dozen pint bottles, implies a gravity of 1060-1065º.

Funnily enough, Imperial Table Beer isn't one of the more than 140 styles officially approved by the Brewers Association. Though "Session Beer" is. Soon there will be more styles than exhibitors at the GABF. Or mybe that's the point: having enough medals so that everyone can win one.

If you're in need of amusement, take a look at the style definitions. They gave me a few good laughs. The Porter and Stout definitions are particularly hilarious. The german ones, too. Where do they get this shit from?

Respect

Many things annoy me. I'm a pretty angry sort of bloke. I regularly scream at my television. And my computer.

Along with drivers that don't stop at pedestrian crossings, people who smoke cigars in pubs, unleashed dogs, politicians who sow fear and hate, greedy agents, queue jumpers, mobile phones and mosquitoes, the external imposition of a style structure really pisses me off. It shows a lack of respect for the beer culture of others.

Want examples? Belgian Quadrupel and Bohemian Pilsener. Neither terms are used by brewers or drinkers in their supposed country of origin. In coining and using these names, what's being said is "We know your beer culture better than you do yourselves". What could be more disrespectful?

But I hate being left out. So I've thought up a few style designations of my own that I'm going to start using.

Mild Brown Ale (MBA) - pale brown in colour, OG 1.045 - 1.060, ABV 4.5 - 6%, relatively lightly hopped.
Black Porter - a Porter that is neither brown nor robust.
Roast Overload Stout (ROS) - a Stout brewed from both black malt and roast barley.
Single Pale Ale (SPA) - any Pale Ale under 5% ABV.
Imperial Brown Beer (IBB) - like a Porter, but over 14% ABV.
Half Barley Wine (HBW) - like a Barley Wine, but under 7% ABV and fewer than 120 IBU's.
Double Dunkles (DD) - dark lager of 6.5% ABV.

Any guesses as to which country these beers come from?