Does beer style matter to you? Is it important to segment beer into styles?

“Of course it matters you moron,” you’re saying. “style is how we define our tastes.” On a macro level, and in an old-world sense, that’s true. You want to know which bottle is the IPA and which is the Dunkel-Weizen. Also, a style name evokes a certain set of expected flavor characteristics.

Style is also vital to determine how close the beer inside the bottle relates to the label stuck on the glass. If you know a style’s parameters, you can tell with your senses whether a brewer was, say, actually trying to make a Pilsner or just lying to the consumer and taking the style name in vain.

Thing is, with a vastly more beer-educated consuming public, style means increasingly less in therms of enjoyment.

For one thing, some styles are so similar to each other that the demarcation between them is unclear (well, to anyone who doesn’t pore over the BJCP guidelines by candlelight). It’s difficult to distinguish many stout variants from porter, and many pale ales from IPA, but when pint is in hand, the number of people whochose to obsess about that delineation instead of taking a big, healthy quaff of cool deliciousness is small.

These days, many American beers blur those style guidelines completely. What style is a Dogfish Head Palo Santo? The relentless experimentation by indie brewers results in beer descriptions that bring to mind that weird friend of yours describing the sound of his band: “It’s kinda like punk-meets-Tibetan Nose Singing-Meets Klezmer.” This approach leads to the creation of new styles, categories like “Belgian IPA,” that spring up to serve perhaps only a handful of beers.

Fixation with style can also be limiting. If you know you love IPAs, and never order a brew without those three initials on the tap handle, you miss out on the beers just outside that flavor profile, and your tastes never mature. You’re like that infuriating kid I had to sit across from at dinner on Thanksgiving, who had a whole range of delicious foods in front of him, but kept insisting that, even though he’d never tried them, he didn’t like them and ONLY LIKED hot dogs. The little shit.

Ahem. Anyway, style is important. That’s how we wind our way through beer history and track the evolution of our favorite beverage. But just like one doesn’t fret over whether a book is a biography or a travelogue, beyond the sense of having to find it on the shelves, most drinkers probably don’t worry about style as much as we beer-obsessed imagine them to. It’s a good thing; there’s the potential for a fresh, new experience in every glass.

-Mark