Beer Styles

[AHarper]

The world of beer styles is quite complicated. When I started to brew beer I was very aware of Bitter, Stout, Lager and Best Ales - there couldn't be that many to worry about, could there?
How wrong I was. Still, the Recipe Builder would help me create any of the hundreds of "styles" of beer. All I had to do was start a new recipe, dial up the Style and Sub Category of beer I was after and it would be a simple exercise to select Fermentables, Hops and a Yeast and make sure I got all green ticks - I can't go wrong can I?

Well, yes, I can.

For example: These are clips are from a recipe for an Irish Red Ale that was selected from
Figure 1:

After selecting Fementables and Hops (as well as setting other parameters for Batch size etc.) I ended up with, what I thought to be a valid recipe.
Figure 2:

All the green ticks, and looking at my values fitting within the "Style", made me think I had created a pukka version of Irish Red Ale. But hang on. As the red box points out there are other "styles" that match the criteria above. It would seem that all the ingredients I have used could equally well describe any of the other styles. So now I have, possibly, created a Fruit Beer or, God forbid, a Spice, Herb or Vegetable Beer!!! NOT what I intended at all. The stats, it seems, are pretty widely spread.

O.K. There is a Style List on BF, let's take a look at that to see if it helps.
Figure 3:

Well not much help - thee are two entries for Irish Red Ale. All the values are very similar but for the Original Gravity and there is no SRM range values - only the Average Lovibond value.
The glaring difference is that what the Recipe Builder (Figure 1) calls the Style is actually listed as the Category and what is called the Sub Category is actually listed as the Style Name.

A further complication is the percentage of selected Fermentables. BJCP styles (should you want to follow them) give recommendations for the Fermentables and their percentages. They are "guides" agreed but it is perfectly possible to plug in the totally wrong grains or the right grains but the wrong amounts and still get all green ticks - I know, I have done it. If you are learning then you can get hopelessly lost - not much of a guide then...

So... lets look up the other Irish Red Ale (15A shown in Figure 3 above) in the Recipe Builder. Reassign the drop downs at the top of the builder to select 15A.
Figure 4:

Oops! Under 15A is a Wheat Beer. There is something weird going on here. So what is the data being used to guide us in the recipe builder. It can't be the same as the useful list of Styles.

So where else to look?
In the BF Resources there are several charts that give details on all the styles of beers. Lets look there.
Figure 5:

This data doesn't seem to match yet the graphs were updated to reflect 2017 BJCP data only recently.

Figure 6.

Well something is amis here but I'm not sure what exactly but it seems there is a mis-match of references to Styles across the builder.

Well I decided to gather as much up to date Styles data as I could - including updating all the pre-2015 references so I could cross check all my recipes with the known "good" data.
I have added a zip file of a spreadsheet with 220 BJCP records. @Pricelessbrewing Mark you may want to see this.

 

[Sunfire96]

One of my favorite things when building a recipe is to wait until all ingredients are added before selecting a style in the drop down boxes. I'll check the "more" tab to see if my desired style is even on the list of suggestions. It's a nice way to compare the quantitative aspects of a recipe, like color, gravity, abv, but I don't think it's very helpful for conveying the qualitative aspects of a style, like esters, aroma, maltiness, or bitterness.

I usually jump back and forth to the BJCP guidelines or my Designing Great Beers book for that type of info

 

[Donoroto]

A recipe builder that offers considerably more advice on brewing a specific style would have value to me.

That said, there are so many overlaps I am not sure it can be done programmatically.

(My current solution is looking at Palmer's recipes in How to Brew)

 

[AHarper]

A recipe builder that offers considerably more advice on brewing a specific style would have value to me.

That said, there are so many overlaps I am not sure it can be done programmatically.

(My current solution is looking at Palmer's recipes in How to Brew)

The reason I was pointing out was that there is some data missing and there seems to be two sets of data being used - one for the builder and another for the charts/reference table. Well I think so anyway.

Update.
I WAS WRONG........

 

[Pricelessbrewing]

Okay I think I followed along, but let me know if anything is still confusing.

Recipe Builder:
Style-> Category
Sub-category should become style

The style you chose in your recipe is 9D, so this corresponds to the OLD BJCP style guidelines (2008 was the final update of that version). the 15A corresponds to the 2015 (and later the 2017 update) which is the latest BJCP guidelines.

We have a ticket in place to update the existing "style" dropdown,and/or add a dropdown to select your guidelines (bjcp 2008, bjcp 2015, so in the future we may support other style guidelines such as GABF, or other style guidelines around the world).

SImilarly, 15A corresponds to the weizen/wheatbeer in the OLD bjcp guidelines.

Some users still use the 2008 guidelines, especially if that was what they learned and are comfortable with, but no longer judge.

 

[Pricelessbrewing]

Updating the ticket to include this thread.

The most likely solution will be to append the Style guidelines shortname (bjcp 2008, bjcp 2015) to the first dropdown.
Rename the first dropdown from Style, to Category.
Rename the sub category to style.

Update the charts.

I've outlined some really cool proposals to the owners and developers on some more intelligent matching using common ingredients, and amounts by leveraging our large recipe database, but I'm not sure when or if it will come to life. Lots of projects already in the works for the app, the mash guidelines, water chemistry, and updating the recipe builder but hopefully after that we can get to work on some fun data analysis driven features!

 

[AHarper]

Okay I think I followed along, but let me know if anything is still confusing.

Recipe Builder: #######
Style-> Category
Sub-category should become style

The style you chose in your recipe is 9D, so this corresponds to the OLD BJCP style guidelines (2008 was the final update of that version). the 15A corresponds to the 2015 (and later the 2017 update) which is the latest BJCP guidelines.

We have a ticket in place to update the existing "style" dropdown,and/or add a dropdown to select your guidelines (bjcp 2008, bjcp 2015, so in the future we may support other style guidelines such as GABF, or other style guidelines around the world).

SImilarly, 15A corresponds to the weizen/wheatbeer in the OLD bjcp guidelines.

View attachment 15050

Some users still use the 2008 guidelines, especially if that was what they learned and are comfortable with, but no longer judge.

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the update.

Yes I see where I may have been going wrong - if that is the right term - There is more to the drop down than I have explored. I notice now the "Pre 2015" entries that do define the other styles. My problem for sticking to only a few styles and not venturing out of the comfort zone and working with data where the same index number means only one set of details. Here we have two different styles with the same index and two similar styles with different indexes. Argh...

I appreciate that not everyone follows styles accurately and some that do - both using the same system - and novices like me wading through it all.

The bit above ###### yes that's what I was getting at and what led me down that path of confusion.

 

[Nosybear]

A recipe builder that offers considerably more advice on brewing a specific style would have value to me.

That said, there are so many overlaps I am not sure it can be done programmatically.

(My current solution is looking at Palmer's recipes in How to Brew)

You could select a style and it could fill in the midpoints and provide the ranges... Still there are so many variables I don't know I'd trust the results.