Craft beer styles explained
Ale or lager, IPA or stout, sour or saison: a plain-English guide to the craft beer styles on a bar menu, and what makes each taste the way it does.
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By Eurobeverage Editorial5 min read
A good craft beer bar can offer dozens of taps, and the menu can read like a code: NEIPA, gose, dubbel, helles, imperial stout. The good news is that almost every beer comes from the same four ingredients, water, malted grain, hops and yeast, and the styles are simply different ways of balancing them. Once you know the main families, craft beer styles become easy to navigate, and much more fun to explore.
The first split: ale or lager
The most important difference between beers is the yeast.
- Ales are fermented with top-fermenting yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, at relatively warm temperatures. They ferment quickly and often produce fruity, spicy aromas from the yeast itself.
- Lagers are fermented with bottom-fermenting yeast, Saccharomyces pastorianus, at cooler temperatures, and then conditioned cold for weeks. The result is usually cleaner and crisper, letting malt and hops show more plainly.
A third group sits apart: beers fermented with wild yeasts and bacteria, or with deliberately mixed cultures. These are the sour and funky beers covered below.
Two numbers help too. ABV is the alcohol by volume. IBU, International Bitterness Units, measures the bitter compounds that come from hops. A high IBU beer is not always the most bitter-tasting, because sweetness from the malt can balance it, but the number is a useful guide.
Lagers: more than pale and fizzy
Many drinkers think of lager as one style. It is a family.
- Pilsner was first brewed in Plzeň, in today's Czech Republic, in 1842. Czech pilsners are golden, soft and bready with a clean, spicy hop bitterness. German pils is usually drier and crisper.
- Helles, from Munich, is a gentle, malty pale lager with just enough hops to stay refreshing.
- Märzen and other amber lagers are toastier and fuller, the traditional beers of German autumn festivals.
- Dark lagers, such as the Czech tmavé and the German dunkel, show cocoa and bread-crust notes without the heaviness of a stout.
Pale ales and IPAs: the hop-forward family
Pale ales put hops front and centre, balanced by a light malt base. The name India Pale Ale comes from pale ales exported from Britain to India in the nineteenth century. The popular story that brewers invented extra-hoppy beer specifically to survive the voyage is a simplification, but the name stuck, and IPA is now the flagship style of the craft movement.
Today's IPAs come in several distinct styles:
- West Coast IPA: clear, dry and assertively bitter, with pine, resin and grapefruit aromas.
- New England or hazy IPA: cloudy and soft, with low bitterness and juicy tropical and stone-fruit aromas from late and dry hopping. Oats or wheat give a fuller texture.
- Double or imperial IPA: a stronger, bigger version of either, with more malt and more hops.
- Session IPA: the opposite, a lighter-strength beer with IPA aromas.
Dry hopping means adding hops to the beer once it has cooled, usually during or after fermentation. It adds aroma without much extra bitterness, which is why a hazy IPA can smell intensely of fruit yet taste soft.
Stouts and porters: the dark side
Porter emerged in eighteenth-century London as a dark, malty beer popular with working people. Stout began as a name for stronger porters and became a style of its own. Both get their colour and flavour from roasted malts and grains, which bring notes of coffee, dark chocolate and toast.
- Dry stout, the Irish style, is lighter than it looks: roasty, dry and often surprisingly low in alcohol.
- Porter tends to be softer and more chocolatey than stout.
- Imperial stout is strong, rich and warming, sometimes aged in spirit barrels.
- Milk stout includes lactose, a sugar yeast cannot ferment, which leaves a creamy sweetness.
Wheat beers: banana, clove and citrus
Wheat gives beer a hazy look and a soft, light body.
- German Weissbier, or hefeweizen, is famous for aromas of banana and clove. Neither comes from added fruit or spice: they are produced by the yeast during fermentation.
- Belgian witbier is brewed with unmalted wheat and spiced with coriander seed and orange peel, giving a bright, gently spicy beer.
Belgian ales: the yeast takes the stage
Belgian brewing traditions give yeast an even bigger role, producing fruity and peppery aromas.
- Saison began as a farmhouse beer: dry, lively, peppery and very refreshing.
- Dubbel is dark and malty, with dried-fruit notes.
- Tripel is golden and strong, but often surprisingly light on the palate, with spicy yeast character.
Several of these styles are associated with the brewing traditions of Trappist monasteries, a small group of breweries whose beers are protected by their own label.
Sour beers: tart and refreshing
Sour beers get their tartness from bacteria, most often Lactobacillus, or from wild yeasts.
- Berliner Weisse is light, low in alcohol and sharply tart, traditionally served with a flavoured syrup.
- Gose is a tart wheat beer brewed with salt and coriander.
- Lambic, from the area around Brussels, is fermented spontaneously by wild microorganisms, then aged, often for years. Blends of young and old lambic are called gueuze, and lambic aged on fruit becomes kriek (cherry) or framboise (raspberry).
How to explore craft beer styles
Start with small pours so you can taste several styles in one sitting. Serve lagers and light ales cold, but let stronger and darker beers warm up a little: their aromas open as the temperature rises. Use a glass rather than drinking from the bottle, because much of what we perceive as flavour is actually aroma. If you want to go deeper, brewers and judges use the BJCP style guidelines, a detailed catalogue of beer styles and how they should taste.
Not drinking tonight? Alcohol-free beer has improved remarkably: read about the rise of zero-proof drinks, or find everything we publish about beer.
Topics
- beer
- craft beer
- ipa
- stout
- lager
- sour beer