Our species has long sought to make sense of the world by classifying it into neat little chunks. First-century Roman scholar and oft-mispronounced eponym Pliny the Elder included in his Natural History an exhaustive botanical survey that included the hops plant, or at least some close relative. Seventeen centuries later, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus published works that lay the foundation for modern scientific taxonomy by which we call those hops Humulus lupulus.
Beer taxonomy, in the form of Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) and Great American Beer Festival (GABF) style guides, attempts to make sense of our infinite variations on malt, hops, water, and yeast by assigning them to well-defined categories such as Pilsner and stout. It’s all too easy, however, to interpret such guides as prescriptive instead of descriptive.
Nowhere is the gulf between edict and observation as wide as in the diverse array of beers that we casually lump together as Belgian. What does it mean to call a beer Belgian? After all, Belgium is a linguistically and culturally diverse political entity that has only existed as a constitutional monarchy since 1831. So what is Belgian about Belgian beer?