At the Conwy Feast beer tent on Saturday afternoon, a glass of Great Orme’s delectable Welsh Black, a 4% dark ale that one immediately assumes is a mild. A chat with the brewery’s founder Jonathan Edwards turns assumptions on its head though. A mild I presume, I say in the manner of Stanley greeting Livingstone, no comes the reply, a halfway house between a mild and a dark ale. CAMRA, naturally, accord it the status of a mild when it hands out the awards. We discuss the whole vagaries of the beer style question and eventually decide that it’s a good beer whatever pigeon hole one wants to put it in. It reminds me of Green Jack’s Jack the Ripper, which won Champion Winter Beer a couple of years ago, after triumphing in the barley wine sector, even though the brewery has described it as a tripel — so is a tripel a Belgian barley wine? It wasn’t the last time I looked. I always reckon that Malheur 12 has more in common with Anglo-American barley wines. The question to be asked is — is the whole issue of beer styles just there for the consumer or does it remain a valid way of dividing up the family of beer? I must confess I don’t have the answer, but it’s one of those things that bugs away at me whenever I write about a style.
If the brewer describes as something particular then surely we should respect their opinion and categorise it as such?
ReplyDelete"A Good Beer" - a new beer style perhaps?
ReplyDeleteI think getting wrapped up in beer styles too much can be a problem, but it's useful to provide guidelines. Getting worked up about it is silly. There are far more important things to get worked up about, such as sparklers for instance.
Velky — I agree unless you get one who likes playing silly buggers and describes something that tastes like a stout and calls it a blonde porter IPA, then we are in the realms of surrealism, but on the other hand… :) Some brewers get castigated for saying that their beer should be served through sparklers, but then that is their choice.
ReplyDeleteDave — completely misread your comment, with November 5 close I thought you were on about fireworks, but see comment above about sparklers. In my opinion, some work through them, others don’t. Matter of brewers’ opinion presumably. Also I think the sparklers debate can seem a bit parochial sometimes, a bit of a CAMRA/Dave Spart version of medieval monks debating angels on a pinhead.
I like to think of beer styles as overlapping Venn diagram circles rather than rigid boxes, but I'm not at all sure about the current American trend towards producing over-hopped stouts and calling them "Black IPA".
ReplyDeleteHi Martyn
ReplyDeleteI think I know what you mean about the diagrams, and it’s a good analogy, or maybe we should be approaching beer styles in a post modernist fashion, nothing is certain, all is shifting, there are rules and after that it’s time to break them, but like you I feel that a black IPA is a sales gimmick (but if done in good faith it might be a Nietzschean/nihilistic view of style, in which case, it’s Private Frasers all round).