Beer Style, a much-debated concept of critical importance to both the brewer and the consumer, but often misunderstood by those who have benefited most from its influence. Beer style is, at its base, the codification of all parameters that group particular beers together, such that they can be recognized, replicated, discussed, and understood.

Humans instinctively crave patterns and differentiations. We want to know whether a particular animal is a deer or an antelope, whether Pluto is a planet or just a big rock, whether Japanese sake is to be called a “beer” or a “wine” or perhaps sits apart from each of these.

For thousands of years, cultures all over the world have always differentiated types of beer, just as they have differentiated other types of food. The modern concept of beer style is sometimes compared with taxonomy, where all the world’s living things are grouped by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and, finally, species. This describes the natural world, and the things that it describes can be considered objectively true, even if one disagrees with the groupings.

Beer, of course, is man-made and therefore subjective. To speak of beer style, then, is more akin to speaking of a type of food—such as hollandaise sauce. As any chef or culinary student knows, hollandaise sauce is an emulsion of egg yolks and butter, usually flavored with lemon juice and some type of pepper. It is mildly tangy, has a pale yellow color, and is completely opaque, with no lumps or traces of oil. If one adds tarragon, or curry powder, or mint, or orange zest, or tomato puree to hollandaise sauce, it may be transformed into sauce béarnaise, sauce café de Paris, sauce Paloise, sauce Choron, or sauce Maltaise. One can argue, successfully, that hollandaise sauce was not always what it is today, but as a result of this “food taxonomy,” chefs, cooks, and consumers are able to use a common language to describe food.

This, then, is the true basis of beer style. A beer’s style will encompass its color, its level of carbonation, aroma, aspects of its flavor, the brewing technique used to make it, and the often-rich history from which it derives. When someone mentions “German pilsner,” then, we know that the color is clear and golden, the carbonation is moderately high, the aroma is fresh and floral with bready notes of malt and perhaps a whiff of sulfur, the bitterness is snappy, the palate is dry, and the beer had a cold fermentation by a lager yeast strain and emerged at about 5% alcohol by volume. We also know that it was essentially invented in the city of Pilsen in Czech Bohemia by a Bavarian brewmaster in 1842 and has formed the foundation for most of the beer consumed in the world today.

From one word, then—pilsner—the brewer and consumer can derive a huge amount of information. The world of wine, variously broken as it is into classifications, regions, grapes, wine types, etc, remains a mystery to many people. When a wine label says “Barolo,” what does this mean? Barolo is a type of wine, but to understand it, you need to know that it is named after the town of Barolo and that it is grown in five towns in Piemonte, Italy, from the nebbiolo grape; there is no Barolo grape. When the label says “Barbera,” on the other hand, we need to know that barbera is a grape, not a place, and Barbera can be grown anywhere. “Champagne” is a place and a technique of wine-making; all Champagnes have some things in common, and this approaches the idea of style. Sauternes are even more so, because it is grown in one place, is always sweet, is always golden, can be made from three grape varieties, is affected by botrytis, etc.

Although we tend to imagine that the modern concept of beer style is itself ancient, it is not. In fact, it is not even old, having been essentially invented out of whole cloth by the late beer writer Michael Jackson in his seminal 1977 book The World Guide to Beer. See jackson, michael. Although Jackson mined the work of earlier writers such as Jean De Clerck to form his concepts, the term “beer style” appears to be solely his invention, and other beer writers have searched in vain for earlier uses of it. See de clerck, jean. Whereas some beer styles, such as pilsner, porter, tripel, dubbel, and Weissbier clearly already existed and were well understood when Jackson arrived on the scene, others were disparate threads of a cloth that Jackson wove together. When he saw a number of similar russet-colored sour beers in West Flanders, Belgium, sharing a common set of flavors, aromas, brewing techniques, and yeast strains, he grouped them together into a style he called “Flemish Red”—something the Flemish themselves had never heard of.

Germany, especially through its intricate tax laws, had already codified many beer styles, at least in some fashion. But many other countries had no such tradition, and Jackson applied his new taxonomy widely, particularly in unruly Belgium, and created a system by which beer flavor, beer culture, and beer history could be understood by ordinary people. Building on Jackson’s work and earlier work of his own, beer writer Fred Eckhardt self-published the influential book The Essentials of Beer Style in 1989. See eckhardt, fred. Along with Jackson’s works, Eckhardt’s book had a large effect on his fellow homebrewers and on the budding American craft brewing movement that was growing out of the homebrewing culture. In 1985 the American Homebrewers Association spawned the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP), which was designed to provide trained judges to preside over homebrewing competitions. The BJCP latched onto Jackson’s and then later Eckhardt’s style designations and built from them a codified beer taxonomy that now informs the judging of commercial beers at the Great American Beer Festival (GABF), the World Beer Cup, and many other competitions around the world. As of 2010, the competition guidelines of the GABF recognized 78 individual beers styles in addition to dozens of subcategories. See beer judge certification program (bjcp), great american beer festival, and world beer cup.

Scarcely more than 3 decades later, the idea of “beer style” is well rooted in popular culture. All beer publications written in English use the term, as do most written in other languages. When non-specialized media refer to beer, and particularly to traditional European or craft beers, beer style is almost always invoked. Brewing schools, cooking schools, and sommelier programs all base many of their teachings upon the idea of beer style.

Inevitably, however, there is a backlash against the very idea of beer style. Some beer historians point out, entirely correctly, that many beer styles have changed over time, some of them so much that they would probably now be unrecognizable to their own progenitors. Modern beer styles, they say, are merely a snapshot of time within the evolution of a culture and are therefore unreliable and unworthy of codification. Some rather grumpy older traditionalists grumble that when they were young, there were not “all these styles—there was just beer.” Many younger beer enthusiasts and brewers see the concept of beer style as a straitjacket, a construct that seeks to blunt the sharp edges of creativity by taming something that ought to live freely in the world. Like many artists, they bristle at attempts to define them and their work, preferring to let the work stand on its own and speak for itself, preferably quite loudly. The blogosphere is alight with talk of “style Nazis,” scheming ultraconservatives who seek to prevent valiant brewers from making the beers they want to make.

As the debate rages on, however, perhaps it best to consider the consumer. Now faced with a vast and glorious range of beer, the modern beer consumer faces a dizzying jumble of bottles, taps, and labels, all vying for attention. Someone who is looking for a bright, bitter, hoppy pale beer might decide to look for an India pale ale (IPA). Someone looking for a softer, effervescent, fruity beer well suited to brunch dishes might reach for a Belgian Witbier. Another consumer searching for an after-dinner beer to enjoy in front of his fireplace might decide upon an imperial stout. Without beer style, there is no nomenclature, and without nomenclature the brewer has a hard time conveying to the consumer much idea of what is actually in the bottle. And when brewers misuse the names of existing beer styles, the consumer can be confused, or worse, think that beer is a drink without any history or background. As brewers create new styles, therefore, it is to be hoped that they will coin new names to accompany them. How to explain beer to the novice, when some brewers speak of Black IPA? People know what Champagne is because the word Champagne actually means something. Winemakers can make whatever wines they wish, but Champagne is never going to be a red wine. This is not a restriction upon creative winemaking—it is a simple but important matter of nomenclature. Like makers of non-Champagne sparkling wines who claim that their misuse of the word “Champagne” is a form of “shorthand,” some brewers will claim the same for their “hefeweizen” with no Bavarian weizen yeast character.

Ironically, those who rail against beer styles seem not to have noticed that creativity is based upon memory. Bloom’s Taxonomy, the influential construct used for everything from business training to education, shows a pyramid with “Knowledge and Remembering” at the bottom, with “Understanding,” Describing,” and “Explaining” above, and the ultimate goal of “Creativity” at the peak. Understanding this, it can be no wonder that the country that took up Michael Jackson’s style guidelines with such fervor is also the country that has developed what is arguably the most dynamic, creative, and increasingly influential beer culture in the world—the United States. The great musician does not resent the sheet music, the great baker does not resent the baguette, and the best wine garagistes do not resent classical Bordeaux. Beer styles are simply forms, structures, and collective memory, in other words, a place to start. Art does not spring solely from itself, devoid of a past. For the brewer, far from being a straitjacket, the concept of beer style defines the places in which modern brewers will set up their own springboards of creativity. For the consumer, beer style is an illuminating lamp upon the flavors, histories, and cultures behind all these bottles that beckon so alluringly from the shelf.