I entered about 100-200 beers in the last few days and I came across at least 40 beers that were described as either NEW ENGLAND PALE ALE or HAZY PALE ALE.
Checked on tags and we have around a thousand of them…
How did we missed this in the last style updated?
Is this a thing worlwide?
I have seen some too. And, what about Session NEIPA?
Hazy Pales are really common in the UK too.
There needs to be some clear guidelines around that. Looking hazy/murky doesn’t qualify as a NEPA. Needs to have the NE yeast varieties specified in the contents of the beer.
The split of the IIPA style has caused quite a few issues with serious IIPA raters as the guidelines are as hazy as the beer.
Does a new style really add anything to the site/data quality or does it add another layer of confusion when trying to add beers.
That is not a viable way to separate hazy and non-hazy IPAs. In the US most breweries do not state which yeasts they use, but the overwhelming amount of IPAs coming out these days are by taste, aroma, and appearance hazy/New England IPAs. On the same token, I have had Vermont IPAs in Europe that I would be hesitant (or more so) to include in their number. This generally creates a disjoint, as it seems like UK admins are much more hesitant to mark things as hazy/NEIPAs than are US admins. It seems that other descriptions mention yeasts being a contributing factor, but not a dispositive factor (https://www.beeradvocate.com/articles/15649/its-official-new-england-india-pale-ale-is-a-style/ and https://www.brewersassociation.org/edu/brewers-association-beer-style-guidelines/#216).
As for NEAPAs, they are real and probably should be included although such inclusion will again be a Brobdingnagian task for the admins, as we are still slowly working on the last style shift and I suspect there are still tens of thousands of beers that need to be changed.
I’ve been one to sometimes disagree with chasing styles as I think brewing has become more conceptual in this matter. Brewers often paint outside the lines of style and we will never have catchalls for everything.
Again recently I had two IPAs released by brewery X, one was a NEIPA (marketed and labeled) and one was an IPA (marketed and labeled). Side by side you couldn’t tell the difference in appearance. So is it my place to then add them to RB both as Hazy/NEIPA, this is where I’m hesitant as I don’t think that is appropriate for me to dictate the breweries intent. I believe that should be in my rating, when I say that it does/doesn’t hit the mark as an IPA.
This goes to the perennial problem of whether styles are prescriptive or merely a useful description of a mostly shared at a moment in time understanding of a loose bundle of characteristics.
One option with precedent is to declare that all bright, bitter, non-tropical IPAs are henceforth ESBs. 
Its a tough one. Part of the problem could be breweries themselves not being as proactive adding their beers here on Ratebeer as much and leaving it to users to add? I am not a admin on RB so don’t know the answer to that one, but for Untappd (in Denmark at least where I moderate) most breweries add their own beers themselves a few days before they are released. They have their own assigned brewery user to add info including the style they choose themselves, hence when I add their beer to Ratebeer I choose the style they deem it to be themselves because my understanding here is that brewery intent is what should be followed? (even if we may not agree with style based on yeast used etc)
The ‘New England yeast varieties’ are pretty much just English ale yeasts, so you can make a hazy IPA with most traditional English ale yeast strains and get pretty much the same result. The hopping schedule and malt bill are just as, if not more, important to determine the sensory properties of the beer. If you use US-05 to ferment a high oat % malt bill and then double dry hop the shit out of it, you get something much closer in all aspects to Heady Topper than you do to Alesmith IPA.
As mansquito says, breweries don’t put the recipe on the back of cans, so you have to use common sense. If it looks like a hazy IPA and tastes like a hazy IPA, then it’s probably a hazy IPA.
Very few breweries add their own beers here in a consistent manner. Lots of those that do often add them wrong as well, since they don’t use the same definitions for styles that we do here. e.g., Somebody from Timothy Taylor’s kept changing Landlord to an English Pale Ale for a while.
Given that Ratebeer has made a complete an utter fuck up of the IPA and DIPA styles, I don’t see why Pale Ales should get off the hook. Please go ahead and change it so people can add Hazy Pale Ales if they think they are hazy enough. That is a sound method after all, no subjectivity there whatsoever. Perhaps someone could go and change all the 1000s of IPAs and DIPAs I’ve had to ‘Hazy’ after all, very few of them were clear.
What is wrong with the styles? You would prefer to only have 1 style to rule them all like before?
There isn’t a week goes past where I don’t have an IPA or DIPA that someone has added as hazy, despite the fact that the brewer is not presenting it as such and they haven’t used NE yeast. It’s added because someone thinks it’s hazy enough. It’s complete bollocks, a million shades of grey and all that. Then there is the other variations. Brew a 9% hoppy beer and it’s a DIPA of one description or another. Stick some lactose or vanilla in there and now the alcohol doesn’t matter, it’s an IPA Milkshake. Sigh! A godawful mess.
What you are describing is people entering stuff using their own opinions instead of going with what the brewer described…we already had that for ages and it will still be having more in the future…
You are probably right that using the Session / Normal / Double terms based on abv created a problem since it was used “officially” for a very few styles on the website for a long time… but the problem isn’t RB based…
Right now having Session and Imperial strength Black IPAs listed in Black IPAs makes more sense (from a taste comparison perspective) than listing them in traditional Session IPAs and DIPAs
“What you are describing is people entering stuff using their own opinions instead of going with what the brewer described…we already had that for ages and it will still be having more in the future…”
True, but I don’t think the style descriptions help here, splitting on appearance and flavour was always going to be setting ourselves up for a fail. I had plenty of very hazy and fruity IPA and DIPAs before the New England thing kicked off. The level of subjectivity here makes these style splits meaningless IMO.
"You are probably right that using the Session / Normal / Double terms based on abv created a problem since it was used “officially” for a very few styles on the website for a long time… but the problem isn’t RB based…
Right now having Session and Imperial strength Black IPAs listed in Black IPAs makes more sense (from a taste comparison perspective) than listing them in traditional Session IPAs and DIPAs"
The easier and more flexible thing to have done would have been to introduce a two tier style system. For example: Primary Style is IPA. Secondary style is IPA (for a straight IPA), Fruit, Bretted/Belgian, Milkshake and if you must … Hazy. At least then the key factor is not lost and we don’t have the nonsense I described above. I honestly see no value whatsoever in splitting SIPAs, PAs, IPAs and DIPAs and the junking all of it as soon as you start tweaking those styles as brewers are always (and happily for us) want to do.
Anyway, it’s horses and bolted doors now. I can’t see this mess ever being untangled now. For me the hoppy beer styles on Ratebeer are now at best advisory and at worst derisory.
I’m off to get an IPA from the fridge and no doubt sigh when I see it’s been unjustifiably added as Hazy!
Fact is, this is exactly how it was supposed to end up with full family parenting and family styles (an IPA family style for example) but they dropped the ball on that…
Hopefully they’ll resume that idea some day because the whole style shake up started based on that idea.
Ok so my issue with the splitting of the hoppy styles in essence is that there are too many and too in consistent degrees of freedom.
1st degree of freedom - abv - session IPA, Pale ale, IPA, IIPA / Double IPA. (4) Ok Sounds good but no Triple IPA? I’ve definitely drank a Triple IPA.
2nd degree of freedom - colour - Black IPA, Red IPA, White IPA, IPA. (4) Ok I’ve definitely drank those, but I’ve also definitely drank a double black IPA and a Red Pale ale.
3rd degree of freedom - Hop breeds / hop geography - American Pale Ale, Pale Ale Australia / New Zealand, Pale ale English? (maybe not), Regular Pale Ale (4)- Ok, But we don’t make this distinction for IPAs?
4th degree of freedom - Yeast / clarity - IIPA DIPA - Hazy / Double NEIPA, Belgian IPA, IPA Brut, IPA English, HAZY IPA, IPA sour / wild, Belgian Pale Ale, IPA - (6)
5th degree of freedom - malt / adjunct - IPA milkshake, IPA flavoured, Rye IPA, Flavoured Pale Ale, Rye Pale Ale, (3)
The big problem with this approach is that the number of style balloons to the Cartesian product of these degrees of freedoms.
So drawing this forward to its logical conclusion we would have
4 abv categories * 4 colours * 4 hop geography * 6 yeast varieties * 3 adjuncts = 1152 different hoppy beer styles!!
We all can agree that would be insane.
Be nice if I could rate a beer without getting a feckin ‘Error whilst submitting review’. An error that has been around for weeks and weeks. What chance sorting out self inflicted style own goals when the basics can’t be delivered? Asking for a friend who often wonders why he sticks round here.
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