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.