A man walks into a bar and sees unfamiliar beer on the chalkboard prompting the question: “What style is that?” It’s not much of a punch line, but it is a very reasonable question. Answering it encapsulates a lot of information about the color, intensity, body, alcohol, texture, hoppiness and history of a beer.
Styles are a language we’ve grown accustomed to using when talking beer, and a style name delivers a lot of information very efficiently. Because of the value of this specialized language, style knowledge forms the backbone of programs such as the Cicerone certification.
So what constitutes a beer style? It’s usually a mix of a written description of the general character and composition of the beer, along with numbers for specific parameters: alcohol, original gravity (the strength of the unfermented beer, called “wort”), color, bitterness and perhaps others. Styles also describe sensory and technical aspects (such as top or bottom fermentation, for example), sometimes with a bit of historical context tossed in.
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