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Walk down the beer aisle and you are hit with a wall of adjectives. Hazy, west coast, dry-hopped, imperial, session, kettle-soured, Baltic. None of it means anything unless you know the handful of underlying styles those words are modifying. The good news is that there are only about eight families of beer that matter, and once you can place a beer in a family you can predict roughly how it will taste before you open it.
This guide covers craft beer styles the way a brewer would actually explain them: what the ingredients do, how the styles relate to each other, and which ones are worth your time on a given evening.
Every beer is one or the other, and the difference is the yeast. Ale yeast ferments warm, roughly 18 to 22 degrees, and works near the top of the vessel. It throws off esters, which are the fruity, spicy, sometimes banana or clove-like aromas you notice in a Belgian beer or a wheat beer. Fermentation is fast, often finished in a week.
Lager yeast ferments cold, around 8 to 12 degrees, then conditions for weeks at near-freezing temperatures. That long cold rest strips out esters and leaves a beer that tastes of nothing but malt, hops and water. This is why brewers say lager is harder to make than stout. There is nowhere for a mistake to hide. A stout can absorb a flaw behind roasted barley; a pilsner cannot.
Stella Artois, Heineken, Peroni, Asahi and Corona are all lagers. Guinness is an ale. Almost everything described as craft beer is an ale, largely because ales are quicker and cheaper for a small brewery to turn around.
Pale ale is the reference point of modern craft brewing. Pale malt as a base, a clear hop aroma of citrus, stone fruit or grass, moderate bitterness, usually 4 to 5.5 percent. It should taste balanced, with the malt sweetness and the hop bitterness roughly matched.
The IPA is a pale ale with the hop dial turned up and the alcohol raised to carry it. Within IPAs, three sub-styles do most of the work. West coast IPA is clear, dry and firmly bitter, with pine and grapefruit. New England or hazy IPA is cloudy, soft and low in perceived bitterness, tasting of mango, peach and orange juice thanks to heavy dry-hopping after fermentation. Session IPA keeps the hop aroma but drops to around 4 percent so you can have more than one.
Hops are also the most perishable thing in beer. An IPA is at its best within about three months of packaging and noticeably duller at six. Check the date on the can. This matters more than almost any other buying advice in beer.
Pilsner is the classic. Czech pilsner is golden, softly bready and rounded with a lingering bitterness from Saaz hops. German pilsner is drier, crisper and more sharply bitter. Both reward being served properly cold but not ice cold, around 5 degrees.
Helles is Munich pale lager, softer and maltier than a pilsner with much less bitterness. It is one of the most drinkable beers ever made and one of the hardest to brew well. Vienna lager and Marzen are amber, toasty and slightly sweet, the beers you find at Oktoberfest. Bock and doppelbock are strong dark lagers, rich and malty at 6.5 to 8 percent, and are far better in October than August.
Dark beers get an undeserved reputation for heaviness. A standard dry Irish stout is around 4.2 percent and lighter in body than most IPAs. The colour comes from roasted barley, not from strength.
Dry stout is dry, roasty and coffee-like with a bitter finish. Milk or sweet stout adds lactose, an unfermentable sugar, giving a rounder, sweeter body. Oatmeal stout uses oats for a silky texture. Imperial stout pushes to 8 to 12 percent with dense flavours of dark chocolate, dried fruit and molasses, and should be served at cellar temperature rather than cold, in a small glass. Porter sits alongside all of these, generally softer and more chocolate-led than roasty.
German hefeweizen is at least half wheat malt and fermented with a yeast that produces banana and clove notes. It is cloudy by design and should be poured with a decent head. Belgian witbier is spiced with coriander and orange peel, lighter and more citrus-forward.
Belgian ales more broadly, from a dubbel to a tripel to a saison, are defined by expressive yeast rather than hops. A saison in particular is dry, peppery and highly carbonated, and is one of the best beers to serve with food.
Sour beers cover everything from a quick kettle-soured gose with salt and coriander to a barrel-aged lambic fermented with wild yeast over years. Start with a fruited kettle sour, which is bright and approachable, before spending money on anything aged.
Four things on a label tell you nearly everything. The style name places it in a family. The ABV tells you the weight. The IBU figure, if listed, indicates bitterness, where under 20 is soft, 35 to 50 is a solid pale ale and 60 plus is firmly bitter. The packaging date tells you whether the hops are still alive.
Glassware matters more than people expect. Pour into a glass rather than drinking from the can, and pour with some vigour to build a head, because the head carries the aroma and roughly half of what you taste in beer arrives through the nose. Serve pale lagers and pilsners cold, ales at around 8 to 10 degrees, and strong dark beers at 12 to 14. A fridge-cold imperial stout tastes of nothing.
If you are building a mixed case to work through, cover the bases: a pilsner, a pale ale, a hazy IPA, a dry stout and a wheat beer will teach you more in one evening than a fortnight of reading. Browse the beer range, take a look at the pre-mixed cases if you would rather not choose, and keep a bottle of something from the wine selection in reserve for anyone who does not drink beer.
Run out mid-evening, as everyone does? We deliver across London inside the M25 in 30 to 45 minutes, 24 hours a day. Check the areas we cover and keep the fridge stocked.
Please drink responsibly. Drinks House 247 operates a Challenge 21 policy - you must be 18 or over to order, and our drivers will ask for photo ID if you look under 21.
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