Beer style guides are just guidelines
21 July 2007 @ late afternoon | Comments (0)
I recently listened to an archived Brewing Network podcast featuring Brian Hunt of Moonlight Brewing Company. His recipe formulation strategy is quite simple: toss a combination of grains in your mouth and chew; if it tastes good, use that same ratio to compose your grain bill.
It’s a distinctly different approach that some brewers would disregard as impractical in both a commercial and competition setting. In a nutshell: if it tastes good, brew it — screw the BJCP.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not devaluing the importance of the Style Guide in craft and home brewing. The BJCP Style Guide provides a starting point that helps brewers (and judges) gain fluency in historical and regional differences in beer styles, as well as the language commonly used to describe the character of those styles. However, there comes a time for any student to put down the textbook and learn to trust his or her senses.
It is fairly easy to mechanically compose recipes in ProMash or BeerAlchemy, adding and subtracting until you hit the target attributes of a style definition, without actually thinking about the impact of each ingredient you’ve chosen.
Next time you brew, taste each ingredient throughout each stage of your brewing process. Decocting a weizen? Eat some grains straight from the decoction mash, just like it’s oatmeal. Purchasing ingredients from your local homebrew shop? Chew a few grains for comparison while you’re weighing out, e.g. crystal 40L vs crystal 120L or Vienna vs Munich malt. Keep a few ounces of grain from a few batches and chew them alongside a glass of beer or bite of food. This goes for hops, too!
By learning to locate the individual flavors and aromas contributed by each ingredient in your final product, you’ll find it easier to compose recipes based on your experience and intuition, rather than blindly adhering to minimums and maximums. Even if your recipe formulation strategy still involves strict adherence to the BJCP Style Guide, remember: the Style Guide is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules.
Brew like a pirate. Arrr!