Tag: beer style guidelines

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Tweaks

The Brewers Association made no big waves in their 2022 beer style guidelines. Clarity, spelling and grammar being the key words in their press release.

“As the craft beer landscape continues to evolve, we want to ensure that our Beer Style Guidelines continue to be a trusted resource worldwide and are in stride with the innovation that continues to be brought forward,” said Chris Swersey, competition director, Brewers Association. “We took 2022 as a year to focus on housekeeping, to address some discrepancies within the exiting beer styles, and for a small number of significant updates to certain beer styles.”

Stay tuned for GABF in the fall to see who comes up with medals.

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Hazy, Contemporary, Australian and Gose


The Brewers Association (BA) released their updated Beer Style Guidelines for 2018. After review “Hundreds of revisions, edits, format changes and additions were made to this year’s guidelines, including updates to existing beer styles and the creation of new categories…” That last bit is the big news because three of those categories are a nod to the power of haze.

~Juicy or Hazy Ale Styles: The addition of this trio of styles include representation of what may be referred to as New England IPAs or West Coast Hazy IPAs. The styles will be identified in the guidelines and Brewers Association competitions as “Juicy or Hazy Pale Ale,” “Juicy or Hazy IPA” and “Juicy or Hazy Double IPA.”

~Contemporary American-Style Pilsener: The addition of this new category addresses marketplace expansion and provides space for sessionable craft brew lager beers with higher hop aroma than found in pre-prohibition style beers.

~Classic Australian-Style Pale Ale and Australian-Style Pale Ale: This split from one to two Australian-Style Pale Ale categories reflects tremendous diversity in the Australian craft beer market and authoritative input from the technical committee of the Independent Brewers Association. Classic Australian-Style Pale Ale can run slightly darker and typically exhibits relatively lower hop aroma. The Australian-Style Pale Ale category provides ample room for a range of somewhat paler, more hop aroma- and flavor-forward beers being produced today by hundreds of breweries in Australia.

Gose and Contemporary Gose: Predominantly technical tweaks were made to create more differentiation between these two categories.

I don’t have a great reason to not include new categories but it seems to be getting a bit nitpicky now. I would prefer that the categories were split differently. IPA, for example, could have sub-categories like regular, hazy, British, Australian, Session that had winners and the top of those could make up the best three. Split DIPA out with Imperial and do the same. This way you give shout outs to more beers while keeping the category count manageable. All I know now is that the yearly awards show just got even longer.

The 2018 Beer Style Guidelines are available for download HERE.