Since earliest times, brewers have been caught between supplying two conflicting demands. Beer needs to be good enough to savour, and cheap enough to afford. Craft brewers concentrate on the first, industrial brewers on the second.
The German word ‘lager’ means ‘warehouse’, or ‘store’, implying that a lagered beer has been stored for a time to mature. Sadly, to save on costs, the most popular lagers are not lagered, making them dull. Ales on the other hand, are doing just fine.
In order to try to help people make sense of the world of beer styles that have been revived, recreated, devised or otherwise conjured up in the last few decades, we have divided the whole of beer into six major groups.
A beer style is an informal agreement between a brewer and a customer, expressed through a name on a label, by which the former gives the latter a rough idea of what they are about to buy.
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 ….
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.
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.
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.
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 …