Indigenous American beer styles
This week fellow Hop Press writer and editor Mario Rubio had a great, thought-provoking article featuring a thought experiment from Moonlight Brewing‘s Brian Hunt:
Imagine, then, that brewers on the New World continents would have been brewing beer with barley for thousands of years and today wouldn’t merely be copying beer styles from thousands of miles away in Europe. Imagine just in North America how many indigenous beer styles would have developed that would be completely unlike any we know today. Instead, the World Book of Beers would have been written about the delicate beers of Denver, the hoppy ales of Seattle, Steam beers of San Francisco, roasted beers of New York, herbed beers of Ann Arbor, wheat beers of Kansas, Spruce beers of Alaska, sour cherry beers of the Columbia River Valley, Rye beers of Fargo, and on and on.
It got me thinking about the styles of beer that are indigenous to America, both the established ones and ones that are still emerging and evolving. So I thought I’d take some time to explore the original American styles (as opposed to the ones that are simply American versions of Old World beer styles), possibly over several articles.
Now, I’m not a style Nazi: I love learning about the various styles of beer and how they developed but in the end I’d rather just enjoy the beer than nitpick it to death. In other words, while I think the BJCP and other guidelines have their place (and I believe RateBeer’s style guide follows the BJCP conventions), I think there are many more “styles” than are listed by the “official” guidelines, and some of my style notions are pretty liberal!
Established styles
Steam Beer, or California Common. Arguably the most famous of the indigenous American beer styles, Steam Beer originated in California (and likely San Francisco in particular) around the middle of the nineteenth century by brewers producing beer with lager yeasts at ale fermentation temperatures. Without access to refrigeration, these beers wouldn’t produce the clean, crisp profiles typical of lager yeast, and instead developed a fruity roundness similar to ales while stile retaining some of the lager characteristics.
The most famous (modern) example is of course Anchor Steam Beer, though how similar it is to the original California Commons is debatable.
Cream Ale. This was traditionally a “hybrid” style of beer, developed as an ale version of the American Light Lager (which I list below) and which may or may not have been a blend of an ale and a lager (hence the “hybrid”). It’s a very light session beer, historically brewed with corn as an adjunct, but with more flavor and character than the Light Lager. From various readings it sounds to me like Cream Ales were an American version of English Cask or Real Ales, though influenced by the German brewing roots that took hold here in the mid-1800s.
Pumpkin Beer. Nowhere will you find this an official style, but to my mind pumpkin beers (though often encompassing many different base styles) are a category unto themselves. Brewing with pumpkin as a fermentable traces its roots to Colonial America, when malt shortages led desperate brewers to produce beer with whatever was available—including pumpkins. These early pumpkin beers were considered inferior and quickly discarded for proper barley beers when the grain became available, but today the pumpkin has made a comeback.
Today’s pumpkin beers are (usually) brewed with actual pumpkin (mashed with the malt), and often spiced (think pumpkin pie).
American Pilsner (Light Lager). I’m sure this will spark some, er, interesting discussion, but I would argue that when Anheuser-Busch introduced Budweiser, their signature Pilsner clone in 1876, it signified a new American style: the light adjunct lager, also known as the American Pilsner. Brewed with corn and/or rice in addition to barley (due to the fact that American barley by itself couldn’t produce a light enough beer), it is now the domain of the macro industrial lager. The pre-Prohibition versions of the style were much more flavorful and hearty.
Emerging Styles
Cascadian Dark Ale, or Black IPA. Here in the Pacific Northwest there’s a movement to “claim” this style—and I’m good with that. Lisa Morrison has covered this well already, so I will refer you to her article to find out more.
Fresh Hop Beers. Like the pumpkin beer style above, these are more related to process and ingredients that any one particular “style,” and are just as seasonal as pumpkin beers for obvious reasons. This style is another that I would consider Pacific Northwest-centric due to the fact that much of the world’s hops are grown here, so they don’t get any fresher. These are typically pale ales, brewed with fresh or “wet” hops rather than dried, and thus develop a greener, more vegetal character than a similar beer brewed with dried hops.
American Wild Ales. Actually I think this is a category that will shake out into several different styles, but I don’t rightly know what those would be yet. I have in mind beers like those being brewed by Russian River, Jolly Pumpkin, and Allagash: innoculated with Brettanomyces yeasts and the like, or (in the case of Allagash) spontaneously fermented with a completely indigenous strain of wild yeast (like the Belgian Lambics). So perhaps something along the lines of “American Sours,” “American Wild Ales” and more?
Imperial [fill in the blank]. This is a tongue-in-cheek set of “styles”—Americans are hardly the first brewers to double-up on their beers to Barleywine-levels of strength and/or bitterness, though we certainly seem to love doing it and slapping an “Imperial” label on it, thus “inventing” a new style. So no, I don’t really count these Imperial beers as “new” or uniquely American but I’m sure someone will bring them up.
So, what other indigenous American beer styles might there be, or might emerge?
13 Comments to “Indigenous American beer styles”
Leave a Reply
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by ratebeer. ratebeer said: From The Hop Press: Indigenous American beer styles: This week fellow Hop Press writer and editor Mario Rubio had … http://bit.ly/cMarQB [...]
Where did all these coffee beers start off from? I can only think of three European breweries who make coffee beers.
Oh, Coffee Stouts and Poters (and maybe others?), that’s good; I’m not entirely sure the would qualify or not, but I like the idea. They certainly do seem like more of an American-centric styling, so let’s add them to the list and see what people think.
Pumpkin beers belong in the Spice, Herb, or Vegetable category. There is a BJCP category for just about every style, even if that means one of the catch-all categories, which may develop into their own categories with time and prevalence. You don’t need to be a style-nazi to understand that just about every beer can be classified in accordance with the BJCP style guidelines; you just need to read them. Additionally, it shouldn’t affect what you brew by any means.
BTW, I really agree with Brian Hunt’s analysis and interpretation of styles; I love that he is getting so much attention this week.
JSKC: true, you can fit or classify every beer by BJCP guidelines, but just because any non-sanctioned style can fit into a catch-all doesn’t make it the catch-all style. I don’t think Pumpkin Beers “belong” in any category other than their own; now having said that, I think the BJCP styles are useful for competitions and such (having entered my Pumpkin Ale in a competition going on today, in fact, in Category 21A) and I enjoy the perspective they bring.
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by ratebeer: From The Hop Press: Indigenous American beer styles: This week fellow Hop Press writer and editor Mario Rubio had … http://bit.ly/cMarQB…
[...] styles. Still in Oregon, Jon Abernathy examines indigenous American beer styles, linking to this from Mario Rubio and “600 Words About Beer Styles” by Brian Hunt of [...]
Adjunct “pilsners” were made in Denmark since the 1890s. A very quick googling didn’t tell me if it was after American inspiration, or just what everybody did (lots of corn has been used in English bitters to, for example). I don’t think any country has to take responsibility for the adjunct lager. You could claim the LITE lager if you want, but why?
In my nose and on my tastebuds, American Sour is a style. I’m no expert, but 90% of the sour American beers I have had, have had a specific character that set them apart from the Rodenbach style. A cleaner, crisper tartness, and less vineous. Maybe it’s because they fall somewhere between flemish red and lambik, using both brett, lacto and pedio?
I judged homebrew yesterday, and we had a flemish red that I immediately thought tasted American. It didn’t help that it was golden rather than red-brown
Also IPA is an American style. It may share the name with an old style, but the “must be drunk fresh” hop juice of today could hardly have anything to do with the India export beers…
Christian: adjuncts have been used in beer long before the Americans started playing around with them, of course. And I don’t mean to claim all “Lite” styles for us, either, just observing the development of our particular version.
I’m not sure I’d call “just” IPA an American style. I think there’s a case for the Imperial/Double IPA (despite my ragging on “Imperial” in the post), and I rather like the name Garrett Oliver came up with for it: San Diego Pale Ale. (Though of course Vinnie Cilurzo at Russian River brewed the first commercial IIPA back in the mid-90s.)
[...] the pieces earlier by Mario Rubio and Jon Abernathy, I wanted to add my own two cents to the question of American beer styles. Where Mario wonders about [...]
[...] been a lot of talk on the Hop Press lately about beer styles (see articles by Brian, Mario, and Jon). It’s something that I’ve given a lot of thought to, so I decided to share my [...]
[...] farmed goods, heirloom grains, and Southern botanicals” which intrigues me greatly from an indigenous American beer style [...]
[...] Beer, Category 15. Now, I’d like to think I have a pretty good handle on what “indigenous” beer means, at least as far as American beers go; I’m not sure this is it: There are many excellent and [...]