Styles and Categories

The BJCP Style Guidelines use some specific terms with specialized meanings: 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 characteristics of one type of beer, mead, or cider. Each style has a well-defined description that is the basic tool used during judging.

When specialty beer descriptions refer to a Classic Style, we mean a named style (or subcategory name) in the BJCP Style Guidelines prior to the Specialty-Type Beer styles section.

The larger categories are arbitrary groupings of beer, mead, or cider styles, usually with similar sensory characteristics. Subcategories are not necessarily related to each other within the same category. The purpose of the category structure 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 or intended.

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

While style categories are more useful for judging purposes since they group beers with similar sensory 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.