EBCU STYLE GUIDE
The beer styles of Europe and beyond
Welcome to the most comprehensive guide for consumers to the growing range of beer styles found across Europe and beyond.
What is a beer style?
A beer style is a cluster of beers with common features that distinguish them from all others. These may relate to their ingredients, the methods of brewing, fermenting or conditioning, their alcoholic strength, or in a few cases, simply the way they are served …
Groups, styles & sub-styles
If you are just starting your beer journey, you may want to delay this part. Instead go and find a few specialist shops and beer bars, try a lot of different beers, work out what you like, then come back and see what makes sense …
Lagers versus ales
Historically, lagers and ales differed in a wide variety of ways, mostly involving the type of yeast used and the temperature and timing of fermentation and conditioning. In contemporary brewing the differences are rather more theoretical than practical …
The Style guide
Industrial lagers
However encouraging the last couple of decades may have been for consumers trying to access interesting beers, around 90% of the beer we drink comes from a narrow range of relatively dull styles …
Authentic lagers
The same obsessive streak that a brewer must deploy when making an industrial lager is also needed, in a completely different way, when they aim is to create a lager brewed, fermented and conditioned in the older …
Ales
Back in 1975 the number of ales produced worldwide by commercial brewers was between five and ten thousand. Today, there is somewhere between a quarter and half a million. Ale brewing is where the craft beer revolution happened.
Specific style clusters
Certain types of beer are so different from the mainstream, and well known, that they deserve consideration in their own right, rather than simply as a type of ale or lager. They might even be both – though they can be neither.
Regional specialities
Most beer styles can be said to have come from somewhere, even if their original form may have become obscured by time. Some are far more clearly associated with an area, a region or a country, and a few remain specific to one place.
Flavoured beers
The modern brewing practice of making beers taste of other things by adding them, owes little to historical brewing and much to advances in food technology ….
Find individual beer styles
If you are looking for a specific established beer style, click on it to find a link to the relevant part of our website. If the one you seek is missing, please let us know.
About The Style guide
The lead author and curator of The Beer Styles of Europe and Beyond is Tim Webb, co-author of The World Atlas of Beer. We welcome all comments on the factual accuracy of these pages. These should be sent to beerstyles@ebcu.org.
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EBCU is happy to license brief direct quotes from this website (up to 500 words) provided that these are attributed clearly to Beer Styles of Europe and Beyond (ebcu.org)
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