At Sunny Barrels we want everyone to understand the beauty behind craft beers and experience and discover fantastic brands and flavours. So one of the first questions we want to address is a high level of the concepts of craft beers.
Ale vs. Lagers
As you can see in the below picture there are “only” 2 main families of beers depending on their fermentation: Ale and Lager. The big difference between the two of them is where the fermentation happens.
Photo from https://alchemixingblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/17/beer-styles-ale-lager/
As the picture shows, in ale beers the fermentation occurs in the top of the fermenter while in the lager ones this takes place at the bottom.
As well depending on how the ingredients and how the hops are added you can find the other subtypes as described in the picture below.
Photo from https://cervezaartesana.info/curiosidades/tipos-cerveza-artesanal/
Color
Another important thing is the color. This is mainly defined by the malt but yeast, type of hops and even sugar may influence it. In general there are 2 ways of measure the colors depending mostly of the country you are in:
Standard Reference Method (SRM). These results are expressed as degrees SRM, and for most purposes these units can be regarded as the same as degL.
European Brewing Convention; The EBC method is quantitative and involves measuring the beer sample color in a cuvette that is placed in a spectrophotometer at wavelength of 430 nm.
Here you can find a basic table which describes and compares SRM vs EBC with beer styles.
IBU
Last but not the least it is the International Bitterness Units -IBU- also called BU. IBU is used to measure bitterness of the beers. As you may know, hop is the main responsible for the bitterness of our favorite drink.
There is a whole science around this, but just to let you know there are a lot of brewers that use some tables as guides in the brewing process so they are able to predict how bitter the craft beer is going to be after fermentation. You can find below an example of a very high level table regarding IBU classification by beer style. Please find this link if you want to learn more about it.
In general how you measure the IBU is pretty subjective. The craft world is continuously experimenting and, with new styles appearing almost every year, there is a lot of controversy on how IBU is measured. For more information you can go to this link.
We will continue with more information and culture about craft beers on a different entries but in the meantime if you want to enjoy great craft beers at your home, join Sunny Barrels - www.sunnybarrels.com- and experience the beers that best suit you.
Links
More links for your reference:
https://cervezaartesana.info/curiosidades/tipos-cerveza-artesanal/
https://www.wildabouthops.nz/srm-beer-colour-chart.html
https://alchemixingblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/17/beer-styles-ale-lager
