johnlittle.com

Early in my brewing, I spent alot of time learning from my Huntsville homebrewing buddy Todd, who brews great beer and has a valuable perspective on beer styles. I liked his approach and decided that my first two or three years of homebrewing would involve not only learning various techniques, but also educating myself on as many recognized beer styles as possible. Since I’d been hearing alot of homebrewers frequently refer to the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) guidelines, I decided to focus on those and try to brew through all the beer styles there, without brewing the same style twice. Currently, there are 98 styles, 80 of which are beer styles. The remainder are meads and ciders. Some people don’t like referring to or being bound by the BJCP Guidelines, and that is fine. But my perspective currently is to think in terms of and shoot for “styles” of beer rather than commercial clones. After all, most commercial brewers are brewing styles of beer that have been around for a long time. Some attempt to very closely match recognized attributes of a style, and a few care nothing for generally accepted style attributes and do whatever they want, creating their own new and unique styles. I respect both perspectives.

But for me, at least right now, I prefer to judge my success of getting a beer right with whether or not I was able to reflect the intended style, and whether I have avoided significant flaws. I haven’t yet attempted to duplicate particular commercial brands. For example, there are many commercial examples of the Northern English Brown Ale style. Newcastle is one of them. If I were shooting for that style, rather than the commercial clone, I wouldn’t be disturbed at all about a small color difference. My color might be within the generally accepted parameters for the style, but a bit different from the Newcastle brand of the style. My color might be closer to another commercial example. I’d still be happy to have been able to exercise the kind of control necessary to hit the intended style, Northern English Brown Ale, fairly closely.

As of this post, I’ve managed to brew about 60 of the 80 beer styles and a few of the meads and ciders. I can tell it’ll be difficult to stay on track. There are some styles I really love that I haven’t brewed in nearly 2 years. But the education I’m getting about different grains, hops, yeasts and techniques has been really valuable. So I’m going to keep going for it… the 80 beer styles anyway. Well, make that 79 since a Gueze is simply a one, two and three year Straight Lambic blended.

I know its going to be a blast going back through the styles a 2nd time…. then a 3rd…. then a 4th…. and so on.