BJCP vs Brewers Association style guide

I like the Brewers Association style guide better than the BJCP.

I've often wondered why homebrewers usse the BJCP style guide.

Brewers Association
http://www.beertown.org/education/styles.html
http://www.beertown.org/education/pdf/BA_Beer_Style_2007.pdf

BJCP
http://www.bjcp.org/stylecenter.html

I use BJCP for two reasons:

1) if I choose to enter a beer in a BJCP competition
2) BeerSmith comes with the BJCP style guidelines pre-installed

Dennys Fine Consumptibles said:

I like the Brewers Association style guide better than the BJCP. I've often wondered why homebrewers usse the BJCP style guide.

Click to expand...

This offers us very little in the way of pros vs. cons. You like "A" better than "B". Personally, I've used BJCP because it's the default on ProMash, and its guidelines are usually pretty spot-on, at least from what I've been able to discern.

I'd be open to arguments against BJCP/in favor of AHA. But I need more than "I like AHA better".

BA is not AHA.

It's the Brewers Association. It's the style guide the professional craft brewers use for their competitions.

AHA and American Brewers Association merged in 2005 to make BA. Not sure how close the AHA guide is/was to the BA guide since ABA was professional craft brewers and AHA was a home brewing association. (as far as I can tell)

The reason I like it better is there are more catagories and they seem to follow traditional styles more accurately. Give the guide a look over. That's why the pdf is linked.

It's the style guide used for the World Beer Cup. Good enough for me. I've always found BJCP to be lacking.

I don't actually brew to styles much, but I like the BA approach better. BJCP is too tightly focused on competition (not quite it's middle name), where BA's guide is based on real world commercial offerings. That makes it easy to go out and sample a style.

Yeah. A craft apporach rather than an anal retentive approach.

I hadn't looked at the BA guidelines until now, so thanks for posting them, Denny.

My initial impression is that the categorie seem to make more sense. I may be biased because some of my beers seem to fit better into BA categoroes than into BJCP, but it seems to be a more logical approach. I have tended to think in BCJP terms, again mostly because of the default BeerSmith settings.

Here's the ones they are using for world beer cup.
http://beertown.org/events/wbc/PDF/WBC06_Style_Descrip.pdf

Same ones, just broke into numbered catagories. I think they are all listed in there.

Does anyone know if the BA categories are available in a form that can be imported into BeerSmith?

Not that i have found..yet.

Anybody know if BeerTools Pro incorporates BA guidelines?

I know you can manually add you own beer guides in beersmith, but I really hope somewhere out there is a nice simple file I can install...