Page 16 - Beverage MasterAprMay 2021

Craft Brewery
Craft Brewery
Ale and a Robust Porter.

The vast majority of the craft breweries in this
country were built by homebrewers which ampli-
fies these definitions on a commercial level and
gives them an outsized importance, particularly to
the people within the industry itself.

According to the Trade and Tax Bureau (TTB),
there are 5 classifications allowed on a label: beer,
ale, lager, porter, and stout. Well-style-versed
brewers scoff at this list for the same reason that
they roll their eyes at Cold IPA. Porter and stout are
both ales, and both ales and lagers are beers. It’s
not so much a list of styles as it is a Venn diagram.

By contrast, the 2020 GABF Style Guidelines list-
ed 91 different styles, with 127 subcategories. The
style guideline document itself I s 61 pages
long and is updated every year. Somehow, though,
brewers still think that when they put the words
“Czech Pilsener” on the can, that their custom-
ers can accurately determine that, of course this
isn’t a “German Pilsener” and obviously it’s not an
“American Pilsener” or an “International Pilsener.”

Styles are great tools. They’re good communica-
tors. In a short description, they can communicate
to the drinker exactly what they should be able to
expect inside the package, assuming, that is, that
they know what the words in that description are
referring to.

Unfortunately, craft beer consumers don’t have
this level of education. Their knowledge of beer
styles has been imparted to them through one real-
ity television show hosted by the irreverent Scottish
founders of Brew Dog and another focused on the
weird antics of the country’s “extreme” brewery,
Dogfish Head. They’ve learned styles from airport
menus and that one brewery tour they went on
a few years back when they got a Groupon, and
they’re pretty sure they learned something at that
beer festival that they went to on their birthday
when they tried to have one of every single beer
there and passed out in the parking lot.

The fact is that styles are industry jargon. They
are not marketing materials, or a meaningful form
of communication to customers. They don’t real-
ly describe what’s inside a glass, so much as they
describe what’s inside a recipe. Every brewer in the
country has a story about a customer walking into
their bar, looking blankly at the list of beers and
asking, “Do you have any ales or lagers?” That’s

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