The other day I was drinking Stone's Double Bastard Ale, an American strong ale, and I realized I didn't have the greatest understanding of the differences between strong ales, barleywines, old ales and, to a lesser extent, double IPAs. In my mind, they were always kind of grouped into the group of beers that have lots of hops, lots of malt and lots of alcohol! I decided to do some research into the real differences between these beers. To the best of my knowledge, there are two main organizations which provide beer style guidelines. The Brewer's Association (BA) provides style guidelines "as a reference for brewers and beer competition organizers." The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) uses a similar set of guidelines, but there are some differences from the BA's guidelines. For my purposes they are similar enough, so I am going to use the BA style guidelines for my comparison. The first think I noticed while looking at the BA style guidelin...
Writing about beer since 2012