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In May the Brewers Association updated its official Beer Style Guidelines. Designed to help the brewers and beer competition organizers keep up with craft beer’s fluid style landscape the BA revises this list annually…but that doesn’t mean they got everything right.
Included In the 2019 Style Guidelines…
- Juicy or Hazy Strong Pale Ale
- Contemporary Belgian-Style Gueuze Lambic
- Franconian-Style Rotbier
- American-Style India Pale Lager
And even though we don’t have a clue what a Franconian-Style Rotbier is, it’s now an official style. And we’ll just have to google it so we can act like we know what’s going on.
The Brewers Association also made the IPL (India Pale Lager) a legitimate style category. We’d assumed they’d added that one years ago –we were wrong – and now they’ve righted that wrong.
But still we can’t help but think that they overlooked some beer categories that need to be addressed…
The Overly Ambitious Beer Category
With brewers seemingly in a race to craft beers with a menu increasingly complex and/or unusual ingredients we need a style category which announces that “enough is NEVER enough” and that this madness has entered a concerning new stage of escalation
We expect that the Overly Ambitious Beer category would be hugely popular and extremely competitive.
The “Shit Beer” Category
We’ve long been espousing this sorely overlooked beer category and once again the Brewers Association has chosen to look the other way.
It’s time to address the 800-pound gorilla in the room and formalize this distasteful, yet undeniable style. After all, who among us has never had a “shit beer?”
The “No Style” Style
Some brewers seem to take a particular pleasure in creating beer hybrids that seemed to have been deliberately brewed to defy easy categorization…And the Brewers Association will eventually have to deal with these ‘unknowns”
We think there’s a need for a beer style designation that recognizes the art of obscuring mistakes, and supports brewers trying to cover their ass when their Brown Ale veers dangerously close to a Prussian Barleywine.
