Beer styles

IPA

950

A hoppy pale ale that the American craft revival rebuilt from the ground up. The English original was a keeping beer for long voyages; the modern one is about hop aroma and nothing else.

Pale Ale

711

The balanced middle ground — enough hops to notice, enough malt to hold them up. The style most breweries use to prove they can brew.

Hazy IPA

499

Deliberately cloudy, low bitterness, heavy on late and dry hopping. Tastes of stone fruit and citrus rather than resin, and drinks soft where a West Coast IPA is sharp.

Stout

312

Roasted barley, coffee and chocolate, with a dry bitter finish. Originally 'stout porter' — the strong version of a porter, until it outlived the thing it was named after.

Blonde Ale

309

Pale, approachable, low-drama. The beer a brewery makes for the person who says they do not like beer.

Amber Ale

248

Caramel malt with enough hop to keep it upright. The beer people order when they want something with colour but not a project.

Double IPA

177

An IPA with the volume turned up — more malt to carry more hops. Strong enough that the alcohol should hide, and rarely does.

Porter

164

The first beer brewed at industrial scale, and the one that made London brewers rich. Named for the porters who drank it.

Imperial Stout

135

Brewed strong enough to survive the journey to St Petersburg and sweet enough for a court that liked it that way. Modern versions go into bourbon barrels and stay there.

Witbier

135

Unfiltered wheat beer with coriander and orange peel. Effectively extinct by the 1950s until Pierre Celis restarted it in a Hoegaarden barn.

Session IPA

130

IPA hop character at a strength you can drink all afternoon. The word session comes from British licensing hours, not marketing.

Hefeweizen

120

Banana and clove, straight from the yeast rather than anything added. Cloudy by design, and one of the few styles where the yeast is the headline.

Brown Ale

118

Nutty, caramel, gently roasty. Unfashionable for decades, which is usually a sign a style is about to come back.

Saison

103

Originally brewed on farms over winter to be drunk by seasonal workers the following summer. Dry, peppery, highly carbonated, and enormously variable — which was the point.

Low-carbonation cask ale, served cool rather than cold. Gentle, malty, endlessly drinkable, and the style CAMRA was founded in 1971 to save.

Malt-forward and lightly hopped, because hops did not grow in Scotland and had to be shipped. Geography as a recipe.

Fruit Beer

40

Beer with fruit in it — a category rather than a style, covering everything from a Belgian kriek to a modern smoothie sour.

Belgian Strong Golden Ale

38

Pale, sparkling, deceptively strong, with a dry finish and a lot of Belgian yeast character. Duvel is the archetype.

Tripel

34

Strong, golden, dangerously drinkable. Westmalle named their own beer and the world took the name along with the recipe.

Barleywine

31

The strongest traditional English ale, brewed to wine strength and meant to be kept for years. Sweet, sticky, and a beer that rewards forgetting about it in a cellar.

Dubbel

15

Dark, raisiny, faintly spicy Belgian ale. Westmalle's monks made the first one, and every abbey-style dubbel since is quoting them.

Quadrupel

14

The strongest of the abbey beers — dark fruit, figs, warmth. Westvleteren 12 is this style, and it is the reason people queue.

Gruit & Herb Ale

3

Bittered and preserved with a herb mixture rather than hops — bog myrtle, yarrow, marsh rosemary. What beer was before hops won.

Brewed entirely from wheat malt dried over oak smoke, then bottled before fermentation finished so the yeast carbonated it hard in the glass. Very low in strength, very high in carbonation, brilliantly clear and firmly bitter — the clarity and the bubbles earned it the name Polish Champagne.

A farmhouse raw ale whose wort is never boiled — it goes straight from the lauter tun to the fermenter. Filtered through a kuurna, a wooden trough lined with juniper twigs and straw, which strains the wort and resins it at the same time. Rye alongside the barley, and traditionally fermented with baker's yeast rather than a brewer's strain, which throws enormous banana and clove.

Brewed from spruce tips or essence with molasses when imported hops and malt ran out. Carried at sea and widely believed to guard against scurvy.

Pale Lager

849

The world's default beer. Pale, clean, cold, consistent — engineered after the Second World War for national distribution and shelf stability rather than for character.

Pilsner

432

The pale golden lager that changed what most of the world drinks. Bavarian brewer Josef Groll made the first one in Plzeň in 1842, and cheap glass arriving at the same time meant people could suddenly see their beer.

Dark Lager

121

Dark in colour, light on the palate. Roast and chocolate notes over a clean lager body — the trick is that it tastes far lighter than it looks.

Amber Lager

104

Anton Dreher's Vienna lager, brewed a year before Pilsner and largely eclipsed by it. Toasty, bready, faintly sweet, and the ancestor of Oktoberfest beer.

Bock

63

Strong, malty German lager. The Doppelbock version was brewed by Munich monks as liquid bread for Lent — a beer designed to be nourishment when food was not allowed.

Malt dried over open beechwood fire. Tastes of bacon and campfire, and was simply what all beer tasted like before indirect kilning.

Sour Ale

98

Deliberately acidic beer, usually soured quickly with lactobacillus rather than aged for years. The fast route to a flavour that used to take a barrel and a decade.

Gose

39

Salted, coriander-spiced sour wheat beer, named for the river Gose whose water was naturally saline.

Wild Ale

28

Fermented or aged with Brettanomyces and other wild organisms. Funky, dry, faintly barnyard — and different in every batch, which is either the appeal or the problem.

Berliner Weisse

22

Sharply tart, low-strength wheat beer, traditionally served in a wide bowl with raspberry or woodruff syrup to cut the acidity.

Lambic & Gueuze

15

Fermented by whatever is in the air rather than by pitched yeast, aged in barrels for years, then blended across vintages. The oldest surviving commercial brewing method in Europe.

Flanders Red & Oud Bruin

5

Aged in enormous oak foeders for up to two years, then blended. Sour cherry, balsamic, leather. Often called the most wine-like beer, usually by people selling it.

Thick, gritty, sour and opaque, brewed from maize and sorghum malt with wild airborne yeast, fermented in three to five days and drunk while still working. Low in alcohol, high in B vitamins, and treated across southern Africa as food as much as drink.

Smoke and sourness in the same glass. A wheat beer built on smoked malt and soured with lactic bacteria, so it lands somewhere between a Berliner Weisse and a Rauchbier — tart, savoury and light.

A strong, dark, heavily hopped ale aged long in oak, where time and wild yeast turned it tart and complex — closer to a barleywine crossed with a Flanders red than to anything Dortmund is known for now.

Kölsch

77

Fermented warm like an ale, then lagered cold like a lager. Delicate, clean and protected — legally, only Cologne can call it Kölsch.

Cream Ale

53

An ale brewed to taste like a lager, invented by American brewers competing with German immigrants. Light, clean, faintly sweet.

Beer cut with citrus soda. Invented, the story goes, when a Bavarian innkeeper ran short of beer for a crowd of arriving cyclists — Radler means cyclist.

Non-Alcoholic Beer

56

At or below 0.5% ABV, the common legal threshold. Once an afterthought, now a category serious enough that abbeys and macro brewers alike engineer zero-proof versions of their own classics.

Cider

9

Fermented apple juice. Included because breweries make it and drinkers order it, not because it belongs in a beer archive.