IPA: The *style* disruption that keeps on giving

There will not be a quiz.

– Jenny Pfäfflin kicked it off last Friday with this tweet that when I last looked had 508 likes.

– Joe Stange followed with this.

As happens, threads shot out in different directions. Feel free to explore.

– Yesterday, Alan McLeod pointed to to all of this in his Beer News Notes, choosing to highlight a comment from Garrett Oliver:

“I don’t ‘know’ a lot about jazz, but I still enjoy jazz. And I really don’t care what a jazz critic thinks I need to know – I’m having my own good time and I will not be fenced in by anyone. I’ve worked to demystify beer for more than 30 years. It’s supposed to be fun. And it is . . .”

– His post alerted Jeff Alworth to all this ruckus and he honed in on another Oliver comment (why in a moment):

“Because once your definitions and terminology mean nothing, your culture is ruined and cannot be recovered. Ask the French how they won. And then take a good hard look at the German brewing industry. Words have meaning (ask the Republicans). And nomenclature is culture.”

– And Stephen Beaumont joined the conversation, choosing still another Oliver comment:

“Yes, and that communication is super powerful. The French know this. Champagne is Champagne, period. Caviar is caviar. Diamonds are diamonds. If your words mean nothing and it’s the Wild West, you lose. Period. Might take a while . . . but you lose.”

[Last dash] Back to Alworth. Wednesday he asked: “What is ‘good’ in the context of a hazy IPA?”

I’m staying out of this. I’ll leave it to Tom Vanderbilt, author of “You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice.” (In Chapter 6 he writes about “beer, cats and dirt,” visits the Great American Beer Festival and talks with judges. They included Oliver, who also shows up elsewhere in the book. Vanderbilt also mentions beer in an opinion piece in The New York Times. But the beer references are not essential to his theses.)

So from the Times article (oops, I lied, more dashes):

– “The human brain is a pattern-matching machine. Categories help us manage the torrent of information we receive and sort the world into easier-to-read patterns.”

– “When we like something, we seem to want to break it down into further categories, away from the so-called basic level. Birders do not just see ‘birds,’ gardeners do not just see ‘flowers’; they see specific variations. The more we like something, the more we like to categorize it.”

– “When we struggle to categorize something, we like it less.”

Not sure this explains the popularity of IPA, hazy IPA or hard seltzer — but maybe I am missing something.

4 thoughts on “IPA: The *style* disruption that keeps on giving”

  1. What a frustrating discourse! It is pretty obvious that it is helpful and sometimes demystifying to categorize beers by style. It is also obvious that some people police the style taxonomy in a way that is off-putting and hostile to outsiders.

    So an important question is whether you can get the good without the bad – the demystification without the pedantry and gatekeeping. Maybe not! Maybe you need the pedants to keep people honest, and it’s just the price you pay. But then again, maybe it would work fine if people just used styles as shorthand and not as a cudgel.

    On top of this, it’s worth remembering that styles emerged from a “thick” historical context that did not necessarily have anything to do with clear communication (for instance, if you were starting from scratch, would you draw the line between stout and porter where it is, or rather isn’t, today?). There’s a discussion to be had about whether it’s useful to make newcomers to the world of beer jump over a bunch of arbitrary hurdles in order to understand the jargon, the way London cab drivers are (were?) required to memorize the street grid even in the era of GPS. But however you come out on that, it’s worth understanding/discussing how styles actually get “made” in the world (a good example being the British brewers who would throw a handful of oats into every batch of stout so that some could be labeled as oatmeal stout). If you’re going to defend styles as an aid to communication you should be able to connect the dots between breweries’ marketing choices and the labels people use.

    Anyway, as I said, it was a frustrating discussion that didn’t make very much progress on any of the points that I think are most interesting.

    • Thanks for the thoughtful comment, James.

      Gatekeeping is particularly troubling. I’m reading “Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution” right now. In an interview when the book came out, the author said:

      “For one, people tend to think that education goes along with taste: if you have more education, then your taste is better, and if you’re less educated, then your taste is worse.”

  2. I loved that comment I made. Sparked all sorts of odd as well as good responses – including suggestions I was a gatekeeper for some interest or another. Imagine that! I wonder which interests they were.

Comments are closed.