New style list poll - a bunch of possible new styles put in one big list

Inspired by the discussion about a new style list https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HqTu-FkP1rbdONm_cOT1lpJhXOUYNPcbV8IF2QcrST4/edit input is needed on topics.

A bunch of new styles have been proposed. Do you think they should be added? Where valid I have put some reasoning why it might be useful (though I might not agree with it). Feel free to not vote on ones you don’t care about.

Hopfenweisse

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

Strong Czech lagers - tmavy and svetly

  • Yes but combined
  • Yes but separate
  • No

0 voters

Sticke Alt - we have English Strong Ale and Belgian Strong Ale, why not the German equivalent (correct me if this reasoning is wrong)

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

Roggenbier

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

White Stout - A silly style BUT over 200 of them tagged (which implies loads more) and they’re split between stout styles and spice herb vegetable neither of which seem particularly fitting

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

Beer Blends - Both a sour / wild and a regular category have been suggested

  • Yes to both
  • Yes to sour, no to regular
  • Yes to regular, no to sour
  • No

0 voters

Rauchbier

  • Yes
  • Yes and split out substyles
  • No

0 voters

Adambier

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

Gruit - several hundred on the site split between styles, quite a unique production method that’s easily identified

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

Kveik - seems to be a growing trend in beer circles

  • Yes
  • Yes but as part of an expanded style gotlandsdricke / koduolu / kveik / sahti (and maybe rename to something less unwieldy)
  • No

0 voters

If yes, then maybe separate it as “raw ale” or “no boil” as separate style. IMO IPA-s brewed with kveik yeast should not go under this style, even if they are called kveik (and techincally brewed with kveik yeast).

2 Likes

I agree. Kveik should not be used for the yeast but the traditional style.

1 Like

Then you’ll end up with a handful of beers within the style, and a truckload of beers that have the name kveik but can’t be assigned to the style.
Not looking good.
On top of that, you still need to fit the majority of beers called or using kveik into another style.

The correct way to deal with that is to categorize kveik beers as Saison/Farmhouse, and tag the few real ones with something called “kveik traditional”, I think we did the same for a few styles already.

1 Like

That’s the thinking behind putting them in with Gotlandsdricke etc. which are all other forms of traditional farmhouse ales from Northern Europe. Traditional kveik is still a very broad thing. As long as they’re aiming at something farmhouse ale like then it can go in the kveik style. Kveik IPAs and Farmhouse IPAs etc should be in IPA.

So basically for everything except rauchbier the majority of the voters is AGAINST a new style addition. Thank god for common sense.

3 Likes

Don’t forget Gruit :smiley:

3 Likes

I hope at least if none of those small styles are considered that we could at least find one place to add them instead of putting them everywhere based on personal opinion of the matter. Maybe at least specify them in the Style descriptions, which non-listed styles should be added in that style.

For example, Hopfenweisse are mostly split between Wheat Ale and Hefeweizen…
White Stout are split between stout, Spicy/herb/vegetable and others…
Adambier are split between smoked, english strong ale, sour/wild, american strong ale, traditional ale…

Hopfenweisse are split for a reason, which is that it just means hoppy wheat beers and so whether the underlying wheat beer is a hefeweizen or a weizenbock is irrelevant to its labelling. They shouldn’t be added in one place because they’re not one thing.

Agreeing where to put white stouts would be useful, and I don’t really have much idea which is the right place, hence my support of adding it.

Adambier is not really a style. The fact that out of the 56 tagged on this site almost 25% of them are Hair of the Dog Adam variants is a problem. There’s no real agreement on what the style is, most references you’ll find say it should be sour, though the Hair of the Dog ones aren’t. There are 56 different interpretations of a vague historical style. I think they fit fine in Traditional Ale and any that aren’t there currently should be moved.

Well, the same goes for Smoked…Imperial Smoked Stout/Porters really shouldn’t go be classed with Rauchbiers…

Maybe a good thing would be to to rename it Kveik - Traditional or Kveik - Undefined Style so people will put Kveik IPA in IPA (we get the same existing problem with Sour IPA for exemple, half the people will put them in Sour and the other half in IPA…)

I don’t really have a problem with that. If I try a so called “sour IPA” I would -before tasting it- say it would go to style IPA. Otherwise, in my opinion, it should have been called “hoppy sour”. If I try it and indeed it tastes dominantly sour with a touch of hoppiness, it is a hoppy sour and not a sour IPA. So then I’d put it in “sour/wild ale”.

So the question here is: should the beer be put in the category where it is most suited (flavor wise)? Or should the beer be in the category to which the label refers? Or there’s the third option of course, just add another cross-over niche style that nobody really cares about and makes things needlessly complicated for the future.

So depending of your taste, you will put it in one style or the other…another person with different taste than yours might put it the other way…so in the end, if everyone enters beer in a style they think it’s better suited instead of what it it labeled (and rating it good or bad according to that style), it will become chaotic…every styles (well almost) can be sour, but not the other way around…

Maybe that will help consumers realise that brewers are sometimes bullshitting them. I consider that a good thing. Letting bullshit propagate unquestioned, however, I consider a bad thing.

2 Likes

Sour up front with a hoppy touch is completely different than IPA with a sour touch. There really is no differentiating here, so it shouldn’t end up in a different style. Also, about scoring it badly when it doesn’t fit the style is something we are not expected to do. In the FAQs -if they actually still exist- it is clearly stated we should NOT rate to style.

Beers spanning across different styles is not a problem per se, if done correctly.
Tags can be used either to refine a subset of a style (e.g. Traditional Lambic) or to group elements that belong to different syles (e.g. Citra).

Hopfenweisse: if it has Hefeweisse yeast character it can be categorized as such, if it doesn’t it should be a Wheat ale; unless the local admin has an itch to define as Hefeweizen something that hopped beyond tradition, and puts it anyway in Wheat Ales.

White Stout: my understanding is that these are Golden Ales with colourless cold brewed coffee; as such they should all be S/H/V.

Adambier: @rpattinson wrote here “Until now, I’ve been unable to discover anything about how it was produced, except that it was matured for a very long time” and at the end of the article “Er, that’s about it. Not a great deal, is it? I’m not sure I’d like to try recreating Adambier on the basis of that. Though the description wasn’t bad: brown, clear, sour, a bit like Porter.”.
I’m not sure if he found anything else in the last 8 years.
But based on that it doesn’t really matter where you put them, or just add them to Traditional.

This is mostly correct.
With the current categorization framework, we cannot add a style for every possible combination of profiles.
If some day we move to a different framework, where beers are categorized by characters rather than styles, then we would have the flexibility to manage every possible combination. E.g.
a today Imperial Stout would be {dark + roasty + sweet + strong},
a today Black IPA would be {dark + roasty + hoppy},
a today Imperial Black IPA would be {dark + roasty + hoppy + strong}

If you reverse that, when you see {dark + roasty + hoppy} you can say “ah sure, that’s commonly called Black IPA”, and when you see a lonely beer {fruity + smoked + blonde + roasty + rotten} you can say “there’s not a recognized name for that yet, but my local brewery did that”.

A bit of both.
In our arrogance, if we believe that the brewer doesn’t know what they’re doing (for example, in faraway countries where craft beer is not a thing yet), we tend to overrule the label.
Or if it’s an evident play. For example, Imperial Berliner Weisse → Sour.

1 Like

I think this is the mark by which I do my adminning. I go by the label apart from where the label is very obviously wrong. If the label says IIPA but it’s 6% then it doesn’t go in IIPA. Or the infamous (in NZ) case of Tui East India Pale Ale - a 4% amber lager with an utterly bizarre name.

1 Like

I guess this is why I think having a white stout style would help consistency - I don’t think the addition of coffee and chocolate is enough to put stuff in SHV. I generally put white stouts into sweet stouts because that’s the flavour profile they’re going for.

Gotta ask…Alaskan Amber, says Alt on the label. To me, it’s more of an Amber/Red than an Alt, using Uerige as a compass.

1 Like