Beer Styles

When I first started getting interested in craft beers and micro-brews a few years ago, I focused a lot on the differences and similarities among the different beer styles. I did research on the internet and at the library, collecting various charts and beer "family trees", trying to make sense out of the traits that defined each style. And since we don't have a reinheitsgebot here in the U.S. (or anywhere other than Germany for that matter) brewers can pretty much call a beer whatever they damn well please! While it appears to me that in the early days of American craft brewing, brew masters attempting to brew "true to style", whether that meant a traditional or regional style, or a resurrected  type of beer that had long disappeared. As more an more micro-brews sprung up, engendering more and more competition (as well as other market forces) naturally we saw more innovation with a bewildering array of beers flooding the market. the counterpoint to the huge number of beers and breweries we saw that certain beer styles had a coolness factor that couldn't be ignored. One of these was the IPA. IPA stands for India Pale Ale, a designation given during Britain's colonial days to beers that had to stand up to the long trip by ship to India, necessitating a lot of hops and a lot of alcohol, both which served to act as preservatives. (Some research indicates that this may be a myth, however)

Within the modern brewing community, "IPA" became synonymous with "really hoppy" and many breweries designated their hoppiest beer as an IPA. This resulted in a wide variance in IBU's (International Bittering Unit - a measurement of hop derived bitterness) from brewer to brewer and region to region, with the Pacific Northwest gaining a reputation for being a center for hoppy beers.

With the popularity of IPA's has come the phenomena of branding anything that is even slightly hoppy as an IPA. You have your Black IPA's, Red IPA's, Belgian or White IPA's, Rye IPA's ad infinitum. There is some disagreement among the craft beer community about whether or not this is a good thing. If you are one who believes that craft brewing is a sacred calling that should be outside the realm of crass commercialism, then sure, it's bad. But if you recognizer that it's a business like any other, you see that "IPA" has become shorthand for "hoppy" and leave it at that.

Another appellation that has achieved critical mass is the term "Imperial". Originally used only as part of the style Imperial Russian Stout, a specific style of stout that received its name due to it being brewed in  England for the Russian Czars,"'Imperial" has come to mean "a really large amount of alcohol" when appended to an existing beer style, like "Imperial Porter", or "Imperial Amber".

The bottom line is that what a brewery calls its beer may or not be a helpful description of what is actually in the bottle. Read beer reviews, sample when possible and do your research. there's a lot great beer out there!