Styles and Categories

The BJCP Style Guidelines use some specific terms with specialized meaning: Category, Subcategory, and Style. When thinking of beer, mead and cider styles, the subcategory is the most important label - subcategory means essentially the same thing as style and identifies the major characteristic of one type of beer, mead or cider. Each style has a well-defined description, which is the basic tool used during judging. When specialty beer descriptions refer to a Classic Style, we mean a named style (subcategory name) in the BJCP Style Guidelines; see the Introduction to Specialty-Type Beer section for more information.

The larger categories are arbitrary groupings of beer, mead, or cider styles, usually with similar characteristics but some subcategories are not necessarily related to others within the same category. The purpose of the structure within the BJCP Style Guidelines is to group styles of beer, mead and cider to facilitate judging during competitions; do not attempt to derive additional meaning from these groupings. No historical or geographic association is implied.

Competitions may create their own award categories that are distinct from the style categories listed in these guidelines. There is no requirement that competitions use style categories as award categories! Individual styles can be grouped in any fashion to create desired award categories in competition, for instance to balance out the number of entries in each award category.

While style categories are more useful for judging purposes since they group beers with similar perceptual characteristics, we recognize this may not be the best way to learn about beer styles. For educational purposes, the styles may be grouped into style families so they may be compared and contrasted. Beers may also be grouped by country of origin to better understand the history of beer in a country, or to learn about a local market. Any of these groupings is perfectly acceptable; the styles have only been grouped as they are to facilitate competition judging. See Appendix A for alternative groupings of styles.