Naming of Styles and Categories

We chose names and titles to best represent the styles and groupings in our categorization system. Don’t let these names interfere with your understanding the actual style descriptions – that is the main point of the BJCP Style Guidelines. We are not telling breweries what they should call their products. We are only providing names that can be used for easy reference.

We realize that many of our defined styles can have alternate names, or are called different things in other (or even the same) parts of the world. In the past, we used multiple names in style titles to avoid showing preference, but this too often led people to incorrectly use all those names simultaneously. So, we selected one unambiguous name for each style.

We added a country or region of origin to some style titles in order to differentiate between styles using a common name (such as Porter). The titles we selected are intended to be both unique and descriptive, but are not necessarily what the products are called in local markets. We are not implying any special ownership or standing based on the names we selected, and we apologize for any unintentional political, ethnic, or social offenses.

We sometimes had to choose names that included a country or region of origin to differentiate between styles that used the same name (such as Porter). The names we use in these cases are intended to be descriptive, and not necessarily what the products are called in local markets. So one should not infer that we are telling brewers that they should be renaming their beers.

Some names we use are protected appellations or trademarks. We are not saying that these should not be respected, or that commercial breweries can use these names. Rather, these are the most appropriate names to use when discussing the styles. If this concept is hard to understand, just assume there is an implied "-style" designation on every style name. We didn’t want to use "-style" in our naming scheme since these are style guidelines, and of course everything is a style.