Page 15 - Beverage MasterAprMay 2021

Craft Brewery

fermentation, it’ll certainly pick up some haze.
Does that make it New England Style? We may
never know.

It’s not an unfamiliar debate. A decade or more
ago, beer industry veterans will remember a similar
debate around Black IPA. How could you possi-
bly call it an IPA? After all the P stands for “Pale.”
We’ve had Brown IPAs, Red IPAs, Belgian IPAs, Brut
IPAs, Session IPAs, Hazy IPAs, Juicy IPAs, and even
IPLs. “India” is one of the most over-used meaning-
less words found in beer styles, yet the industry is
happy to pedantically argue about every word that
happens to land anywhere near it.

The industry is both obsessed with style classi-
fications and their definitions and crippled by its
hyper-focus on them. At the largest beer compe-
titions in the world – The Great American Beer
Festival and the World Beer Cup – beers are judged
as “best” by how closely they adhere to style
guidelines written and maintained by the all-holy
gatekeepers of beer, the Brewers Association. The
US-based organization essentially functions as the
worldwide arbiter of what makes a beer “authen-
tic”.

Here’s the problem. Brewing “to style” is not a
measure of quality, and customers would rarely
recognize it if it were.

The arcane and specific definition of beer styles
emerged at around the same time as the coun-
try’s first craft breweries with the 1985 found-
ing of the Beer Judge Certification Program
(BJCP) by Pat Baker of the Home and Beer Trade
Association along with support from the author of
The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, and veritable
Godfather of Craft Beer, Charlie Papazian. From its
originators, it seems quite clear that the purpose
of defining beer styles was to further interest in
homebrewing.

Using styles as an educational tool created a com-
mon language for homebrewers to learn how beer
differed around the world. It created a framework
for writing about historic origins and context. It
gave homebrewers a language for their dreams
of recreating that beer they had when they were
traveling right in their own kitchen. It gave them
the ability to share recipes with other homebrew-
ing enthusiasts in a shorthand that they could all
recognize, to save the countless hours that would
otherwise be needed to explain over and again the
nuanced differences between an American Brown

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