Comments | reverendjim: 100 Belgian Beers: Three Nearer The End

reverendjim

100 Belgian Beers: Three Nearer The End

Oct 26, 2010 23:15

Comments 3

randy_byers October 26 2010, 23:10:11 UTC

I understand that there's a big discussion going on amongst beer bloggers at the moment about whether styles are a useful way to discuss beers. Belgian beers are perhaps particularly problematic, and at this point I actually have no idea what differentiates a trippel from a blonde, for example. They both have nice legs as far as I can tell.

reverendjim October 27 2010, 20:30:25 UTC

I'm always vaguely amused when I see the awards list from somewhere like the Great American Beer Festival and there are about seventy odd categories. The British one has about five. Admittedly the US has a lot more breweries being diverse but there does seem to be a lot of hair-splitting on the style front.

I've no real objection to them being used as long as it's understood they're only a pointer, rather than something that can be accurately defined. Apart from anything else, when the style names have meant different things over the last two hundred years what's "authentic"?

As far as blondes and tripels go, I'd say a tripel tends to be strong, possibly with noticeable alcohol, with some sweetness, probably with some spicing and a dry finish. Blondes are, er, beers that aren't that but are blonde. Something like that.

So, "Black IPA" or "Cascadian Dark"?

randy_byers October 27 2010, 20:48:18 UTC

One of the blog posts I ran across said that Michael Jackson was responsible for coming up with many of the type names that we use for Belgian beer, and that the Belgians hadn't thought of them that way themselves. But any categorization system is prone to the same problems, so as you say, it's okay as long as you don't take it as written in stone. It's one way to try to point at other beers that are "like this ( ... )