The endless world of beer guarantees a huge number of drinks in every bar. Each beer style produces more subcategories than drinkers, starting with classic lagers, bold IPAs, and funky sour ales. Project beer menus in local watering troughs have gone from offering a few daily labels to listing out-of-world beverages – and every beer tastes more nuanced than the last. Knowing the taste and look of certain beer styles makes minimizing a favorite much easier.
The main difference between beer types is the form of fermentation yeast. Depending on the fermentation process, a beer may be either larger or ale. Ales are made by high fermentation, a process in which yeast ferments at warmer temperatures on top of the beer. The fermentation process is slower and under colder conditions. Yeast seemed to settle down at the bottom of the beer. Ales yeast has higher alcohol tolerance than lagers yeast.
Beers start with their specific styles and flavors as an ale or lager. The wide variety of beer types includes pale ales, India (IPA), porters, stuffed beer, and Belgian beer styles. Camp forms include pale Pilsners, German Helles, and darker American lagers. Here’s how beer styles break down to sound like a bar pro.
What’s the warehouse?
Storage is a typical beer entry point for new drinkers. Made of low fermentation yeast with lower alcohol tolerance, lagers can taste light and malty. Miller High Life, Coors, Budweiser, and Yuengling are American lagers. And Jim Koch, co-founder of Boston Beer Co., making Sam Adams beer, says lagers are a great pad for newcomers.
What’s IPA?
Indian Pale Ales’ characteristics, which include different forms of beer, are mainly derived from hops and herbal, citrus, or fruity flavors. They can be bitter and contain high levels of alcohol, but the final product depends on the variety of hops. Some IPAs may taste pure citrus, others are strong and bitter. West Coast IPA, British IPA, and New England Model IPA are popular types of IPA.
According to Bon Appétit, the New England IPAs have a fruity scent with low bitterness, while the British style is more malty and bitter. IPAs on the west coast seem to combine fruitiness and bitterness right in the middle. The best way to find your favorite is to determine which IPA style best suits your tastebuds.
Typically, according to Koch, IPAs are the first introduction of beer drinkers to the craft beer world. He recommends investigating a variety of IPA types before settling into a few favorites.
What’s Ale Blue?
Pale ales are usually hoppy but have lower alcohol levels than IPAs. Most types of pale ale are malt, medium-body, or drinkable, such as American amber ale, American blonde ale, and English pale ale.
What’s that alligator?
The Czech Republic’s Pilsners fall under the larger category. German pilsners are a little darker with higher bitterness, offering pale gold color and crisp taste.
What’s amazing beer?
Sweet stores come primarily from Ireland and England and are known for their low bitterness. Indeed, Ireland’s Guinness brand produces some of the world’s most popular stout beer.
According to the Beer Judge Certification Program, which rates and measures all forms of beer, the stuff is a “sweet, full-body, slightly rusty bowl that can suggest coffee or cream or sweetened espresso.” Although darker beer is hard to drink, the stumps contain sweetness from unfermented saccharose that compensates for any bitterness.
Stouts produced in the US combine traditional dark body and creamy notes with American beers’ bitter hoppy aromas. American flowers are heavy, highly rusty, bitter, and hoppy with high malt aromas that, according to BJCP, give them a taste of coffee or dark chocolate.
What’s a wearer? What’s a porter?
Traditional porters, which can trace origins back to the United Kingdom, are dark in color due to common ingredients such as chocolate or other dark-roasted malts. Porters tend to taste less like coffee than coffee and feel more chocolate.
What’s Belgian beer?
Over the years, Belgium’s rich beer culture has poured into the US and deep appreciation has been given to enthusiasts on this side of the Atlantic for its wide range of Belgian flavors. Blue ales, dark ales, fruity beers, and sour ales cook Belgian beers. The WebstaurantStore that provides restaurants, bars, and other institutions with information typically describes beers of Belgian style as carrying fruity, spicy, and sweet aroma with high alcohol content and low bitterness.
Belgium’s popular beers also include Trappist ales, made only in Trappist convents that brew their own beer. Trappist ales include beers such as the mildly strong and complex Belgian Dubbel and the pale, spicy and dry Belgian Tripel. Blonde ales such as Delirium Tremens add to the flavor of Belgian beers.
What’s beer?
Wheat beers are based on wheat, the malt ingredient that gives the drink a light color and alcohol content that it is suitable to kick back with and mix with fruit in summers, such as a slice of lemon or orange. Some wheat beers with funky and tangy aromas are in Belgian style while those made in the United States have a faint taste reminiscent of bread.
What’s vinegar beer? What’s the acid?
In recent years, this beer has grown in popularity in the US, becoming a lovely drink for people who want to branch out their beer palates or try something different. Highly cut, sour beers can take a wide variety of types, including Lambic, Flanders Ale, and Berliner Weisse beer in a lovely Belgian style. With fruit like cherry, raspberry, or peach, sweet and sour beers marry to make beer taste entirely different from the lagers and IPAs of the past.
