What triggers trends and leads to the emergence of new beer styles and sub-styles?
In a thought provoking post last week Jeff ‘Beervana’ Allworth reflected on the emergence in the US of IPAs with their balance tilted heavily towards hop aroma:
The more important mistake is thinking in terms of imitative causality at all… There has been a shift from very bitter IPAs to IPAs marked by flavor and aroma, but it has happened around the country as brewers each made natural discoveries on their own. It developed incrementally, inside hundreds of breweries across the country, as the national palate shifted toward not just IPAs, but IPAs that expressed as much of that heady flavor and aroma Americans hops are capable of. When you understand the mechanics of trying to produce these qualities, it makes sense that the discoveries would happen brewery by brewery, with hundreds of little “a-ha!’s” happening co-emergently around the country.
And, in a subsequent comment, he hammers his point home:
It’s not enough to cite an antecedent if you’re arguing causality. There are always antecedents. You have to make a case for how it actually influenced other breweries and beers and sparked this wholesale change in brewing. Having talked to a number of brewers about their own process, I have yet to find anyone who was particularly influenced by [The Alchemist ]Heady [Topper] or any other beer.
This is, in general terms, an interesting question: can every innovation, twist or change in beer be traced back to source?
Martyn Cornell’s masterful book Amber, Gold & Black — the essential guide to how British beer styles developed — makes the important point that Exmoor Gold was the first of what we would now recognise as golden ale but it was Hop Back Summer Lightning, which came several years later, that triggered a slew of imitations in the early 1990s. Golden ale might have developed anyway as brewers independently found themselves (as did John Gilbert at Hop Back) looking to lager for inspiration but there is a strong case to say that Summer Lightning’s success in CAMRA sponsored Champion Beer contests brought it to people’s attention and kicked off the flood that followed.