Ale Styles

One of the more enjoyably confusing tasks for me has been understanding the differences between the many different styles of beer. Allot of the US beer market is flooded with rather nasty examples of brewing, unless one begins to branch out into the craft brew and microbreweries. Even Wikipedia has a bad page on beer styles!

To understand if a beer is tasty or not you need to frame the experience with the proper context. Once you start understanding the unique profile of each style you can really start to seek out (or make) the perfect batch!

So here is a short, definitely not complete but still useful, list. They are arranged from lightest to darkest and common styles we’ve run into when brewing Ale’s.

Note: These are all Ales, which mean they use a top-fermenting yeast that works best around 60-75F. Lagers are the other style, and are brewed much colder (ie, harder for us to make).

Pale Ales
This is generally a light colored ale with emphasis on the hops. Two common examples of this are the Indian Pale Ale (IPA) and the American Pale Ale (APA).

IPA’s usually have large amounts of hop flavor, with some bitterness. This comes from the large addition of hops to the wort and sometimes even additions of hops while the beer is still fermenting.

APA’s are smoother, with a much more aromatic level of hoppiness. These beers are defined by the use of the American Cascade hop strain. As mentioned in the last post, Deschutes Brewery makes a great APA.

Wheat Ales
This is a beer that also uses a large portion of wheat as a source of sugars for the yeast. This gives a foggier beer that is usually a nice golden color. These beers have a small bite from the wheat and hops, but nowhere near the level of an IPA. This style is often referred to as Hefeweizen, the original German name for an unfiltered wheat beer.

Amber Ales
Anyone who has opened a Fat Tire beer from the New Belgium brewery has had an amber. Amber ales strike a great balance between the hoppiness of the pale ale styles, and the malt-centric taste of the brown ale, porters, and stouts. Like the name implies, these are usually an amber colored beer. The varieties are all over the place, like most beer styles! This is a great beer style for people who want to break into tasty beers.

Scottish Ale
This is a delicious beer that came about due to heavy taxation of hops in Scotland many many years ago. Unlike England, the place of origin for very hoppy beers like the IPA and bitters, Scotland had plentiful access to barley. Because of this situation we have a great malty beer that is somewhere between an amber to redish in color. If you love the malt taste, give one of these a shot! They are generally named by their 'shilling cost,' which was the price per barrel in the 19th century. The shilling mark is abbreviated with the /- symbol. The higher the shilling number, the higher the alcohol content of the beer.

Brown Ales
These beers are still influenced by the hoppy flavors, but rely allot on the malt flavor to achieve a very nice beer. This was a style I was not familiar with at all before I began brewing.

Porters
Porters are a deeply malty beer that is almost as dark as a stout, but not quite. A good style if you want to try something deeper. These beers start getting the deeper roasted flavors of the longer roasted specialty malts, like chocolate malts or black roasted barley.

Stout
Oh, the stout. How I love thee. This is by far my favorite style of beer. Stouts are generally very dark, with a complex flavor derived from specialty malts that make up a small portion of the grains used. One of the greatest examples of the stout is Guinness. Made in Ireland, Guinness stout is a delicious chocolaty blend of goodness. Most people don’t know anything else about stouts though! The beauty of the stout comes in all its crazy varieties. Sweet stouts, dry stouts, milk stouts, and Russian imperial stouts are a few examples.

There you have it! This is a very small example of all the ale styles available, but once you understand these basics you can start placing new styles somewhere in this list.

Beer Ingredients

Beer has four main ingredients- water, hops, yeast, and malted barley. I was impressed to learn that this is all! From pale ales to stouts, only four ingredients! Here's some basic info on all the ingredients in traditional beer.

Water
It seems silly to include this, but it is pretty important. Certain beers are defined by a particular regions water supply. When making beer at home you'll run across water salts that mimic the mineral content of regions around the world. Good water will make good beer, and nasty water will definitely put you in an uphill battle for tastiness.

Cool fact- Tucson has a great mineral profile for producing ales, something like the Burton region in England. The largest brewery in Tucson, Nimbus, has some neat info in their history

Hops
Hops are a small leafy cone used to give bitterness and aroma to beers. They grow all over the place in temperate climates. There was a point in brewing when hops were just one of many different herbs and spices added. Hops as a plant are pretty crazy, with lots of fascinating oddities. There are a limited variety of hops available for use. Most fall into the category of bittering or aromatic.

Bittering hops have a high value of something called Alpha Acid Units (AAUs). These give the bite that beers like an Indian Pale Ale (IPA) have. They are usually added immediately when you start boiling the wort (future posts on that...).

Aromatic hops are added late in the boil, usually the last 30 or 15 minutes. These give that really great flavoring without much bite. A great example of this is an American Pale Ale. This type of beer has less bite than an IPA, but allot of hoppy aroma from the very-American Cascade hops variety. Check out Deschutes Brewery's Mirror Pond for a really tasty example!

Yeast
This is the critical component of beer, but it's presence wasn't understood until Louis Pasteur's work in 1857. Yeast do two important things for brewing:

1) Yeast eat sugars and produce ethanol (C₂H₅OH)
2) A byproduct of this sugar-eating is carbon dioxide (CO₂)

The ethanol is the alcohol which allows beers to be stored and safely consumed after long periods. The carbon dioxide is what gives beer that delicious bubbliness.

Yeast occurs naturally in all sorts of variations. This is how the very first fermented drinks came about. Anything with sugars in it (water and honey, grape juice or any other fruits, or water mixed with malted barley) can spontaneously ferment when left in a cool place for a short period of time. If you keep using the same vessel to ferment, it will begin to maintain a natural yeast colony.

Today yeast strains have been picked that work best with certain styles of beer. Unique strains exist for stouts, wheat beers, pale ales, and all sorts of other varieties.

Side note: Ales vs. Lagers
You will run across this eventually and be confused like I was... What is the difference between an ale or a lager? Is that a style of beer like stouts or porters?
Quick Answer:
Ales are beers that use a top-fermenting yeast, and lagers are beers that use a bottom fermenting yeast. Ales generally can be brewed at much higher temperatures (65-75F), while lagers require very cold temps (>45F). For people like us who brew at home, it's tough to make a lager! Luckily most of my favorite beers are considered ales, so we can still make some tasty drinks!

Malted Barley
This is the final ingredient for traditional beers. Barley is a grain, something like wheat or rye. Barley supplies the sugars needed for yeast to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. The 'malted' part refers to how the raw barley is processed. To really get the most sugar from the barley you need to being sprouting the seeds. Once this sprouting begins the plant starts converting the endosperm into brewable sugars. The sprouting is stopped after a short period of time, then roasted. So, malted barley is a brewing-ready seed that contains lots of sugar for the yeast!

Roasting the malted barley is where lots of variety comes in. Most beers have a base malt, something very light, to provide the necessary sugars. The real fun comes in when using specialty grains that have been roasted for different periods of time. This can give a huge variety of flavors to a beer. From caramel to chocolate, biscuit aroma to red colors, different roasts have a huge impact on the final product.



Final Notes
Beer is very well understood within the realm of these four ingredients. A neat point in the history of beer is the Reinheitsgebot, or the German Beer Law. This is an actual law that was established in 1516 in Germany. It restricts beers to only these ingredients (they added yeasts to the list when it was understood in the brewing process a couple hundred years later). Penalties for brewers who didn't follow the law included the barrels in question being confiscated without compensation! Crazy!


So there you have it. This is a pretty quick and dirty run down on beer ingredients, but hopefully you've learned something!

Beer Adventures

Shortly after turning 21, Charlie and I began discussing brewing beer. I had no idea how to do this, but always wanted to. About two months later we got our equipment shipped to us, and shortly after that started our first brew!

Brewing beer is really, really simple. It's important to remember that all sorts of people have made beer, even when they didn't have a clue what they were doing. If people managed to make a tasty drink a couple thousand years ago, you can easily do it today. As long as you do a little research and planning you'll be ahead of the curve, and produce some delicious drinks!

In light of how ridiculously fun brewing is, Charlie and I decided to throw together a place to capture our processes, tips and tricks, and a general chronicle of our beverage adventures.