i dont brew to style

[fluketamer]

i dont brew to style. in a way it feels wrong. theres a reason that beers have styles. a pilsner is a pilsner. its been brewed that way for hundreds of years for a reason.

i am not sure why i dont brew to style i have the capability to do so. i started with kits and kits force you into a beer not a specific style. just recently smata mentioned this in another thread. my beer tastes good but its more generalized. like my lagers taste lagery because i brew them with small grain bills and lager yeast. but the hops and base or special malts have nothing to do with style it has to do with whatever i have lying around in the brewery. my stouts are stout cause they got black patent and chocolate malt with ale yeast not cause they got the right base malts.

it seems to work for me but i know it is frowned upon. maybe styles help us to feel what a beer should taste like when we are drinking them but maybe its not necessary to brew to style. i can attest that a problem with mixing things hodgepodge and not brewing to style can result in unbalanced beers that are not "great"

i love how theres literally a thread for everything already on this website.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/brewing-beer-not-to-a-style.681916/
do most of you brew to style or just throw in whatever you have lying around?

 

[lumpher]

I brew what I like, and I like what I brew. Couldn't give 1 dead rat's arse about "style".

 

[Rish]

^^Could not agree more!

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

there's a reason that beers have styles. a pilsner is a pilsner. its been brewed that way for hundreds of years for a reason.

And there are reasons why different groups of people want to classify beers based on styles.

Perhaps it's this ...

• Commercial brewers use styles to help consumers make a good choice when purchasing.

• Beer judging competitions use styles to make it practical to compare beers. /1/

• brewers (both at home and commercial) can use styles to loosely "color inside the lines" - as styles can reduce the seemingly infinite number of combinations of ingredients and processes into ranges that create a delightful beverage.

• A good understanding of styles (and style boundaries) enables brewers to both
  • "color within the lines" to meet expectations, or
  • go "free form" to create something new and delightful.

---

/1/ From BJCP 2021 Guidelines:

"The Style Guidelines are written primarily for homebrew competitions"​

​

... and a little later ...​

​

"Most styles are fairly broad. Some believe that our styles inhibit brewer creativity by rigidly setting boundaries. That is not our intent – we think creativity drives innovation, and that interpretation by brewers should be allowed."​

​

A common-sense read of the 2015 (and earlier) guidelines would likely result in the same conclusion.​

 

[Gadjobrinus]

I think "styles" give a good foundation on which to be creative. I liken it to knifework in cooking, or maybe better, understanding the broad flavors and techniques of a national cuisine. "Fusion" is cool, but without a foundation, it's garbage. Peanut butter tomato fritters with watermelon and onion foam.

 

[MaxStout]

I often brew a true-to-style beer and color within the lines. I may want an authentic Schwarzbier, best bitter, or Dubbel.

Other times I build a recipe based on ingredients I have on hand. It might be an "everything but the kitchen sink" brew to use up leftover grains. I look to see what category the brew fits in. If it doesn't fit in one, I brew it anyway. It's beer and I usually like it.

 

[ba-brewer]

Nothing wrong with brewing to style or not brewing to style, if you like the beer that is what counts.

I brew beers for contests so I do brew to style quite a bit, funny thing is that the wider the style guidelines are the harder it is produce a winning beer as the judges get to use their own preference of the ideal beer.

I also look through the style guidelines when I get a rut of brewing the same things to get ideas. If a style seem interesting I will give it a try.

 

[Gadjobrinus]

I often brew a true-to-style beer and color within the lines. I may want an authentic Schwarzbier, best bitter, or Dubbel.

Other times I build a recipe based on ingredients I have on hand. It might be an "everything but the kitchen sink" brew to use up leftover grains. I look to see what category the brew fits in. If it doesn't fit in one, I brew it anyway. It's beer and I usually like it.

Ditto. And, um, the only beer I entered in the AHAs got second in the Midwest, and, um.....it was the 7 malts left on my shelf. "Seven Suns Strong Scotch Ale" was nothing more than cleanup on aisle 5, then naming it afterwards. Zero to do with me, lol.

 

[ba-brewer]

Seems like a lot of beers I brew use only base and have deduced the amount of crystal and roasted malts I use so never too many odds and ends for grain. Left over hops getting mixed into IPAs is a different story.

 

[passedpawn]

i dont brew to style. in a way it feels wrong.

I can assure you... nobody cares what you brew. If you brew and keep it to yourself, yer good.

If you want to tell the world on a public forum such as this one, yes you should expect a response. You might not like it, who knows.

Choose your path.

 

[Drewch]

Styles are descriptive, not prescriptive.

Unless you're trying to join HORAL, brew what tastes good to you using the technique that works on your equipment.

 

[Cheshire Cat]

I brew a lot of clone beers based on books and Brewfather recipes which are generally to style but if they’re not who cares. What is more important to me now is the right water profile for a particular beer especially British ales where the water is different depending where the beer is brewed. I know that breweries talk bollocks about liquor but I’m sure most use untreated water.

 

[Zambezi Special]

I sort of brew to style as I am not (yet) good enough to deviate
The styles give me a good starting point
Having said that, in summer I brew everything with Voss kveik due to the heat. Blondes, tripel, wheat beers, IPA, cider and I'm sure thats not by style (but necessity)

 

[skunkape]

I think you do brew to style. It's called "Freestyle"

 

[mac_1103]

"Seven Suns Strong Scotch Ale" was nothing more than cleanup on aisle 5, then naming it afterwards.

So it wasn't brewed to style but it wound up fitting a style? I'm sure this is the first and only time that's ever happened.

Styles are descriptive, not prescriptive.

This.

 

[Gadjobrinus]

So it wasn't brewed to style but it wound up fitting a style? I'm sure this is the first and only time that's ever happened.

This.

Yep, though I did at least have the sense the malts would probably end up in a decent Scottish vein. Just think it's funny that it did so well, when it wasn't a planned beer at all. Slated for national finals but my in-laws drank the samples.

 

[Gadjobrinus]

To me ultimately it's all about freedom. First and foremost, who the hell cares - brew whatever you want. I find having some kind of structure gives me a better leaping-off point than jumping in without it. Given a classical French cooking background and life living inside a Japanese zen and martial arts temple can really do a number on a dude, I guess.

 

[MaxStout]

I can assure you... nobody cares what you brew. If you brew and keep it to yourself, yer good.

If you want to tell the world on a public forum such as this one, yes you should expect a response. You might not like it, who knows.

Choose your path.

How did your Tumbler clone turn out?

I'm down to the last dozen or so bottles of mine, need to brew it again.

 

[MikeCo]

For home brewers, the only reason I see for brewing to style is for competitions. A beer will not score well if judged not to be the style entered.

 

[zasada]

HORAL

Which is?

 

[DosGatosBrewing]

I use ale yeast for almost everything, including Oktoberfest and Bock (nobody complains). I don't want to lager or ferment at low temps.

I'll share that secret here, but don't tell anybody else.

 

[Drewch]

Which is?

It's de Hoge Raad voor Ambachtelijke Lambikbieren (the High Council for Traditional Lambic Beers).

https://www.lambic.info/HORAL

 

[Drewch]

I use ale yeast for almost everything, including Oktoberfest and Bock (nobody complains). I don't want to lager or ferment at low temps.

I'll share that secret here, but don't tell anybody else.

I use 34/70 in a lot of ales. It's cleaner than US-05 at ale temps.

 

[gunhaus]

It's threads like this that make me miss the wisdom of Bracconiere! Betchya he would have had a thought or two on the topic

I can't say I care all that much about style guidelines, as I have zero interest in having my brews judged by arbitrary taste buds (Remember you do not know where those taste bus have been!) But I do refer to my beers along guidelines just because it seems easier to give people a jumping off reference as the what i am making. Posting a picture of a pint of dark liquid, or handing someone the same without some form of reference could lead to confusion. It's like hard candy - when you open a piece and pop it in the pie hole expecting a butterscotch and you get a lemon drop it causes funny faces. Same thing could happen if I person thought they were getting a rich malty dark belgian sort of thing and it ended up being a soured Bam Bier sort of thing.

 

[mac_1103]

It's like hard candy - when you open a piece and pop it in the pie hole expecting a butterscotch and you get a lemon drop it causes funny faces.

I think I'll be safe with a nice toffee, don't you?
Alas, earwax.

 

[skunkape]

Sometimes the Frankenbiers are the most fun and interesting. Just toss in what you have on hand and see how it works out. Yeast and malts let you know where it's headed but the hops and process and even late adds give it a twist. And then when you get asked what kind of beer it is, you're like " Sort of a tropical Belgian Porter with Citra and Saaz and rum-soaked oak and lemon zest."

 

[passedpawn]

How did your Tumbler clone turn out?

I'm down to the last dozen or so bottles of mine, need to brew it again.

Each time I brew, I intend on making it. Then at the last minute I made something else. Maybe I'll make it next session (1st week of Jan).

 

[TheCache]

I'm still on a beer exploration. Prior to brewing I knew that certain "types" (the language I used prior to brewing) of beer could look and taste different. Once I began brewing my own, I realized that these "styles" (the language of an initiate) often describe certain characteristics of different beers and that there are reasons for those differences (i.e. yeasts, hops, waters, malts, temperatures, processes, combinations, ad infinitum).

Now I don't worry about brewing to a style. I brew what I like, but use the style guidelines as a starting point and to help me understand the characteristics of what I am making and some of the whys and wherefores of those characteristics. Plus its fun to learn about the history of styles and to learn from those who brewed before me - we stand on the shoulders of drunken giants.

...And then sometimes I just experiment...

 

[fluketamer]

hey thanks for all the great replies .
Philbilly moonshine on youtube once said "beer is 1040 - 1050". i love that saying. i think its really profound. it exemlpfies the many different ways we can make beer and how many different techniquies ingredients etc can all make beer. but it also explains the rdwhahb thing. get your gravity relatively right and dont do anything stupid like leave a hot fermenter on a kitchen counter in the summer in a six story walk up with no AC.

looking back over some brew logs i think the price of hops a few years ago seemed to me to go up or at least the amounts of hops i used in beers went up which definately was a sign of the times. but i think that also played a role in forcing me to color out of the lines. like it seemed that noble hops got very expensive and i would go looking for subsitutes on sale and like them and then branch out from there.

when asked i either say its a lager an ale or a stout. based on the yeast in the first two cases and the dark malts in the last. sometimes ill add that its a lager its just a little bitter -

 

[Beerstein]

I brew what I like, and I like what I brew. Couldn't give 1 dead rat's arse about "style".

Me too. Style becomes boring. Make something new!

 

[PCABrewing]

i dont brew to style. in a way it feels wrong. theres a reason that beers have styles. a pilsner is a pilsner. its been brewed that way for hundreds of years for a reason.



do most of you brew to style or just throw in whatever you have lying around?

Neither do I in many cases. I'll throw together a recipe bases on taste attributes that I want to try and I record it all so if I like it I can reproduce it.
I have used whatever was lying around several times and been very pleased with some and not so much with others.

But other times I'll rely on the style guide to keep a recipe within bounds of a style but mix-up the grains for flavor impact.
Like I might do a stout and try for a licorice taste on the palette.

 

[kevin58]

In a recent post by Ron Pattinson where he wrote about an English IPA and mentioned that it didn't match up much with modern IPAs but: "It didn’t seem to confuse beer drinkers in the 1940s. They had much less fixed ideas about beer styles."

Beer styles have always been fluid and many times a beer was labeled as one thing when an examination of the recipe show's it was more like something else. In the end, Ron says the beer was what the brewery called it.

There are other cases where a brewer would make a batch of a pale style beer but then add coloring to part of it to make it darker and sell it as two different styles.

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

add coloring

"we drink with our eyes"

- numerous home brewing authors​

​

​

 

[Gadjobrinus]

Neither do I in many cases. I'll throw together a recipe bases on taste attributes that I want to try and I record it all so if I like it I can reproduce it.
I have used whatever was lying around several times and been very pleased with some and not so much with others.

But other times I'll rely on the style guide to keep a recipe within bounds of a style but mix-up the grains for flavor impact.
Like I might do a stout and try for a licorice taste on the palette.

Excellent.

 

[Bobby_M]

Styles are described primarily so that we have a language and vocabulary to use when we want to. We can say German Pilsner and we don't really have to say much more. The BJCP competition scene is really the only place where "brewing to style" becomes slightly more important but even there experimental and mixed style opportunities exist. I personally enjoy the competition arm of the hobby, but I also look at brewing to style a way of systematically understanding the world of beer more than I otherwise would if I was more improv jazz about my recipe creation.

There is enough room in the hobby to do it exactly how you want to do it and you don't have to apologize for it.

 

[DBhomebrew]

if I was more improv jazz

If I recall correctly, you have some background in music performance. I'm sure you know that the best improv artists are that due to their massively solid backgrounds in the classical basics.

 

[Bobby_M]

If I recall correctly, you have some background in music performance. I'm sure you know that the best improv artists are that due to their massively solid backgrounds in the classical basics.

I don't disagree. I do feel like the best recipe creators have equal parts discipline and artistic liberty. There are hundreds of new brewers that are happy to skip the classic styles clone thing and just kitchen sink everything. If it's weird, just add lactose, fruit and vanilla beans. It's not my style, and I wouldn't necessarily drink the beer, but I wouldn't begrudge anyone from doing it if it delivers what they want out of the hobby. I guess where my indifference may break down is anyone that uses the "I don't brew to style" as a sour grapes defense mechanism because they are unable to pull off a classic style. I'm sure that rarely happens.

 

[hottpeper13]

massively solid backgrounds in the classical basics.

That might explain why my recipes always turn out, it's because of the bag of MoJo I got at the crossroads!

 

[Velnerj]

For me, I always feel like I'm doing my best imatation or an homage to a style. That is I never get it perfectly right but I'm almost happy with the results. Sometimes my beer is the only time I've ever tasted a style, other times I brew and I feel it falls woefully short of what I thought to expect in the style but am usually happy with it in it's own sort of way.

I find that the styles are the most useful when sharing my beer with others. You'll always get the "what kind is it?" question. And very few people are knowledgeable about beer styles so it's best to be general. I.e. I recently brewed an homage to fullers London pride, it was one that fell short of that expectation, but when I tell others it's a English ale they enjoy it.

 

[day_trippr]

I find that the styles are the most useful when sharing my beer with others.

Indeed, my first thought while reading this thread was how one would offer a beer without needing to provide an explanation...

Cheers!