Most Popular Beer Styles: 2012 NHC Entry Results

Two weeks ago saw thousands of homebrewers descend on Seattle, WA for the 2012 National Homebrewers Conference.  The conference, among many things, offers seminars, demonstrations, and camaraderie with amateur brewers from all over the country and beyond.  But one of the center points of the event is the culmination of the National Homebrew Competition.  The final round of the comp is held during the Conference with the venerated awards given at the banquet on the last night. 

We've explored the popularity of the different style entries in prior years (2011, 2010).  With the 2012 HNC awards in the books, it was worthwhile to revisit the results and see if the preferred beer style trends continue to be the same or if there is a shift in brewers' preferences. 

For this analysis, I’m only looking at the beer categories themselves (my apologies to the cider and mead makers out there). To normalize the data, all categories are given as the percentage of the total entry pool that they represent. From this year's NHC competition, the most popular and the least popular styles are as follows (with the full dataset given below).

2012 MOST POPULAR BEER STYLE CATEGORIES

 1. Stouts (cat. 13) - 630 entries or 8.7% of total

 2. American Ales (cat. 10) - 603 entries or 8.3% of total

 3. India Pale Ales (cat. 14) - 553 entries or 7.6% of total

 4. Belgian and French Ales (cat. 16) - 491 entries or 6.8% of total

 5. Belgian Strong Ales (cat. 18) - 454 entries or 6.2% of total

2012 LEAST POPULAR BEER STYLE CATEGORIES

 23. Euro Amber Lagers (cat. 3) - 158 entries or 2.2% of total

 22. Dark Lagers (cat. 4) - 162 entries or 2.2% of total

 21. Fruit Beers (cat. 20) - 169 entries or 2.3% of total

 20. Amber Hybrid Beers (cat. 7) - 174 entries or 2.4% of total

 19. Bock (cat. 5) - 195 entries or 2.7% of total

The top five beer categories have been the same five styles for the past 5 years with the only change being in the ordering.  Belgian & French Ales flip-flopped with Belgian Strong Ales, otherwise the top 5 style rankings remained the same.  As an overall percentage, the number of entries in the top 5 categories increased slightly from 2012 (37.5% vs. 35.7%) representing a slight strengthening in their overall popularity. 

On the other side of the spectrum, lagers still continue to take a beating.  Of the five lager beer style categories, three of them are in the bottom five.  Light Lagers and Pilsners experienced a surge this year, both jumping up two slots (to #15 and #17 respectively), while Bock beers tumbled hard by 5 slots down to #19.  As has been in the past, there are more than three times as many beers entered in the top five categories as compared to the bottom five categories.  

Looking at trends across the past five years (2008 – 2012), popularity has been surging or failing for some categories as the style gain favor or loses it.  Below are the top movers in the positive and negative direction across thefive year span. 

MOST POSITIVE MOVERS (Ranks: '12 / '11 / '10 / '09 / '08)

 1. Smoke / Wood-Aged Beer - cat. 22 (Ranks: 8, 8, 11, 13, 16)

 2. Sour Ales - cat. 17 (Ranks: 14, 18, 19, 18, 21)

 3. Herb / Spice / Vegetable Beers - cat. 21 (Ranks: 7, 9, 10, 9, 12)

 3. Specialty Beers - cat. 23 (Ranks: 6, 6, 7, 10, 11)

MOST NEGATIVE MOVERS (Ranks: '11 / '10 / '09 / '08)

 1. Bock - cat. 5 (Ranks: 19, 14, 15, 16, 14)

 2. Light Hybrid Beers - cat. 6 (Ranks: 11, 10, 9, 8, 7)

 2. Dark Lagers - cat. 4 (Ranks: 22, 20, 22, 20, 18)

 3. Strong Ales - cat. 19 (Ranks: 12, 13, 12, 12, 9)

 3. German Wheat Beers - cat. 15 (Ranks: 16, 16, 13, 15, 13)

The growing popularity of barrel-aged beers and sour beers have definitely played a factor in the rise in popularity of Categories 22 and 17 respectively. For our 2011 analysis, barrel-aged beers were the most positive mover as well.  However, this years tragic drop for Bock beer caused it to shoot up the leaderboard for most negative mover.  A good Maibock or Doppelbock are stable beers, but the style seems to be getting the cold shoulder from competition participants in the last half decade.  

The complete data set for how each beer style category performed is presented below.  

2012 NHC Entry Rankings by Beer Style Categories

2012 Rank	Cat. #	Name	# of Entries (2010)	% of Entries (2010)	2011 Rank	2010 Rank
1	13	Stout	630	8.7%	1	2
2	10	American Ale	603	8.3%	2	1
3	14	IPA	553	7.6%	3	4
4	16	Belg & French	491	6.8%	5	3
5	18	Belgian Strong	454	6.2%	4	5
6	23	Specialty Beers	383	5.3%	6	7
7	21	Spiced / Herb	362	5.0%	9	10
8	22	Smoke / Wood	335	4.6%	8	11
9	12	Porter	326	4.5%	7	6
10	9	Scottish & Irish	308	4.2%	11	8
11	6	Light Hybrids	303	4.2%	10	9
12	19	Strong Ale	279	3.8%	13	12
13	8	English Pale Ale	265	3.6%	12	16
14	17	Sour Ale	255	3.5%	18	19
15	2	Pilsner	237	3.3%	17	17
15	15	German Wheat Beer	237	3.3%	16	13
17	1	Light Lager	200	2.7%	19	18
18	11	English Brown	198	2.7%	15	14
19	5	Bock	195	2.7%	14	15
20	7	Amber Hybrid Beer	174	2.4%	21	20
21	20	Fruit Beer	159	2.3%	22	21
22	4	Dark Lager	162	2.2%	20	22
23	3	Euro Amber Lager	158	2.2%	23	21

Everyone has a list of favorite beer styles – let us know which are your favorites and how they are represented in the competition scene.

Slainte!

-JW


"In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer"
-A. J. P. Taylor

Summer Party Beer Descriptions

For several years now, I have brewed multiple batches of beer for a good friend's summer party.  The party is a definite highlight of the summer for me, with an opportunity to see old friends and to enjoy fresh seafood and good beer.  John and I have a good deal of fun picking out the beer styles and brewing them together.  I am also tasked with writing some tasting notes that get posted behind the tap handles.  I took a slightly historical bent in writing this years descriptions and I thought that our readers might enjoy seeing them.

Cheers,

TW

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Havana Flower Cedar-Aged India Pale Ale – American-style India Pale Ales (IPA) exist solely to push as much hop flavor and aroma into a glass as is humanly possible.  They were historically brewed to resist degradation over the long sea voyage between Britain and India.  They fell out of favor with British brewers until the style was saved and rejuvenated in the American Craft Beer industry.  While this IPA features the strong citrus characters found in American hops, it also contains another twist – it was aged on Spanish cedar wood.  Cedar has a wonderful aromatic quality and is usually associated with cigars and hope chests.  The alcohol in the beer extracts those aromas, as well as interesting sandalwood and cinnamon flavors.  We hope you enjoy the marriage between the wood of Havana and the flowers of the hop – Havana Flower IPA.

6.4% alcohol     IBU: 64     OG: 1.060     FG: 1.012

Rainy Day Robust Porter – Porter was once the most popular beer style brewed in the United Kingdom.  The style originated in and around London in the 18th Century and was a dark strong ale manufactured exclusively from brown, highly-kilned malts.  These malts were dried over wood fires and likely had a strong smoky flavor.  Porter was highly hopped for the time and was blended between new batches and older soured batches, resulting in a complex flavor profile favored by the British.  The blending took place in large vats, which were associated with one devastating industrial accident that flooded Giles Parish, London in 1814 with 125,000 gallons of beer in a 15 foot tidal wave, injuring many.  Modern day porters are divided into three sub styles, with robust porter containing a roast character that puts it halfway to a stout.  Robust porters also feature a balancing dark chocolate flavor and smooth aftertaste.  Our example was brewed during a thunderstorm that broke on top of us as the boil ended.  Rainy Day Robust Porter is sure to sooth your rainy day worries away.

7.1% alcohol     IBU: 37     OG: 1.069    FG: 1.016

Last Minute Rush Belgian Pale Ale – Belgium was once described by the famous beer writer, Michael Jackson, as the “Disneyland of Beer.”  The small nation has an expansive beer history, ranging from beer brewed in monasteries for Lenten fasting to beer brewed for thirsty farmhands in the heat of summer.  Flavor profiles range all over the spectrum, from fruity, to spicy, to smooth and clean.  Some of the more famous Belgian Pale Ales are associated with the City of Antwerp.  They feature a wonderful balance of Belgian yeast spiciness and smooth drinkability.  The style has much to offer the Maryland crab connoisseur, with the slightly spicy aroma complimenting the Old Bay spice on the crab, but the smooth aftertaste washing some of the heat away.  The recipe was associated with a last minute dash brew day to get the beer on tap and we hope that you will not rush through its complex but clean flavor profile.

4.9% alcohol     IBU: 25     OG: 1.047     FG: 1.010

Tater Tots Vienna Lager – Germany is arguably the originator of almost all recognized lager beer styles.  Lager, which translates roughly to “cold storage,” occurred because of the invention of different malting processes that produced pale malt, and by extension, pale beer.  A mutated ale yeast, Saccharomyces pastorianus, thrived in the colder temperatures that the pale beers were stored and produced a beverage with a cleaner and drier flavor than the dark ales of the time.  The light clear beer, when viewed through glass mugs that were also becoming more available, made lager an instant phenomenon.  The malt produced around the City of Vienna had a bready and slightly sweet flavor and was kilned darker than the malt in other areas.  The resulting lager beer was amber in color and featured a wonderful malt grainy softness, making it an excellent companion to food.  Our Vienna lager’s name has nothing to do with the beer, the brewday, or any significant event.  It is rumored to have this name because John thinks it is the beer that his girlfriend Mary will like the most.  Since Mary has done a little Tater Tot bashing on her blog (http://www.allweatherfriend.com/blog/?p=348 - oh and you can also buy her book through the main site), John decided he would really like to hear her say "I really like Tater Tots the best, I would like some more and give some to my friends."  Again, this is just a rumor.

5.6% alcohol     IBU: 26    OG: 1.056     FG: 1.014

Freeze Condensing the Eisbock - Photos and Video

After a month of primary fermentation and a month of lagering, it was time to perform a critical process step in the brewing of our collaborative Eisbock – freeze condensing the beer. We have the Kulmback region of German to thank for originated this beer style, wherein a portion of water in the beer is frozen off and removed in order to intensity the beer’s maltiness, body, and alcohol. On a homebrew scale, this freezing process can be accomplished with two corny kegs, a beer line jumper, and a freezer, which is exactly what I did.

Given that this was the first time I had attempted to freeze condense a beer, I kept my camera close by to photo-document how I implemented the process.  While I was planning out what I would do, I did spend some time searching the web for examples of how other homebrews had implemented the freezing steps.  Sadly, I found several generalized descriptions about making eisbocks, but very few descriptive or image intensive sources to help an eisbock newbie.  So below I am sharing the step-by-step photo log of how I did it along with some commentary.  Whether it is correct or incorrect, I felt the need to leave behind a little more information than what I was able to find in the chance that someone, someday may find it useful.

Step 1: Obviously before a beer can be freeze consensed, a good base base beer is requiremed.  Our beer (comically named Frosty Fool) has been sitting in a keg (i.e. the "original" keg) at 38 degrees F for almost a month at this point. 

Step 2: A second keg (i.e. the "recieving" keg) has been cleaned, sanitized, and CO2 purged in order to recieve the beer after the freezing process. 

Step 3: In order to transfer the condensed beer from one keg to the next, a jumper line is needed.  You can purchase one from a homebrew store (such as this one), or one can just as easily be assembled from some beverage tubing, two beer line quick-connects, and a pair of hose clamps.

Step 4: Make sure to sanitize the jumper line prior to any transfers.  After sanitizing the recieving keg, I left about a half gallon of sanitizer in the keg and pressurized it.  With the jumper line was connected, depressing the inner pin on the unused quick-connect allowed the sanitizer to get pushed through the jumper line.  The nice part about this was that after all the sanitizer was run out, CO2 was blown through the line clearing it of any liquid.

Step 5: The freezing process.  The original keg was placed into my small, tempurature-regulated chest freezer (as seen in Step 1) and I dropped the tempurature down to 0 dgrees F.  Even though the beer was just above freezing tempuratures at the start, it took approximately ten hours in the chest freezer before it was ready to move onto the next step.    

During the freezing process, I kept shaking the keg to listen for ice crystals forming in the beer.  When the "slushing sound" gets more and more noticable, the freezing process is almost done.  However, defining when the process is complete is very subjective.  Given I had no experience with this, determining when the sound was "slushy" enough certainly tried my confidence.  In all honesty, the only reason I stopped the freezing at ten hours was due to the fact that it was 1 AM, I was tired, and I wanted to get to bed (and leaving the keg in the freezer for another 6 hours was not an option).  Luckily it turned out to be the right decision, as the amount of beer that was frozen was close to what I was targetting.

Below are two videos I snapped as I was hoping the audio would pick up what the slush sounded like when I called it done.  (Make sure your sound it turned on before playing.) 

Calibration Sound - this is the beer when it was just placed in the freezer (i.e. 100% liquid).

The slush sound at the end of the process (after ten hours in the freezer).

Step 6: After the freezing was deemed complete, the beer was transfered from the oringial keg to the recieving keg via the jumper line and the application of gas pressure to the original keg.  I was concerned that the freezing process might have frozen the original keg's dip tube or connector post, but the beer flowed smoothly as soon as the gas was turned on.

Step 7: Once all the liquid was run out of the original keg, I did let the gas continue to push through the line for an extra 10-20 second to make sure everything that I could got pushed through.  When the gas was turned off and the jumper line was disconnected, the recieving keg (and the eisbock inside) was finished.  The beer was moved back into fridge at 38 degrees F for another month of lagering before it will be ready for any type of consumption.

In order to determine how much was removed through the freeze condensing process, I opened the original keg and looked inside.  The beer slush would need to be measured so I could calculate the consensing ratio which would allow me to recompute the beers FG and ABV.

Step 8: The nice part of the corny kegs is that their stainless steel walls are great conductors of heat.  To quickly melt all the beer slush, the original keg was placed in a hot water bath with the water only touching the bottom 6 inches of the keg (where the slush was residing).  It only took about 15-20 minutes for the heat to penetrate the keg and completely melt the beer slush.

Keg in a warm water bath

Going....

Going...

Gone.

Step 9: Once everything in the keg was melted, I closed up the keg and applied gas to it,  This allowed for the beer to be carefully poured through a cobra tap into a measuring pitcher to be measured.  A total of three quarts were left behind, or 15% of the total volume.  Sources had suggested to target about 1 gallon of liquid to remove from a 5 gallon batch, so while I was a little under the target, I was quite pleased I got as close as I did just by listening to the slush in the keg.

One surprise, however, was the amount of color that was left behind in the melted slush.  If I was able to extract just the frozen water, the melt should have been clear or incredibly light colored.  But the color was much darker, indicating that other components of the beer got trapped in the ice crystals and were removed.

Step 10: With the freeze condensing completed, I had to do a side-by-side comparison of the beer.  Prior to placing the original keg into the freezer at Step 1, I poured 3-4 oz into a glass and covered it.  After the freezing and transfer, I poured another 3-4 oz from the condensed beer into seperate glass.  I had expected the condensed beer to be a little darker, but they were visually about the same in terms of color.  Upon tasting the two (both at room temperature), the condensed beer had a noticable higher intensity (both maltiness and sweet alcohol presence) as compared to the base beer - a result that was expected, but relieving at the same time. 

Pre-condensed on left; Post-condensed on right

*   *   *

New approches and processes always seem more involved/complicated when someone has never tried them before.  When the readers had selected the eisbock style for us to brew, I was pumped that I would get to explore the freeze conditioning process for the first time.  But the excitement was coupled with a little anxiety - nothing ever goes as planned and I didn't want to flub our collaborative beer if things went awry.  Despite the trepidations, the two unexpected elements were minor and easily items that could be planned for the next time around.  

Now it is back to the waiting game.  The condensed eisbock is back in cold storage for several more weeks to help mellow and meld the beer's components together.  Tom and I have a family function together in late July, so I would expect that will be the first time we'll be able to taste the finished product.

Given I am a bit of a feedback junky, please leave us a comment if you've brewed an eisbock and let us know how your freeze condensing process compares with how we did it.  

Slainte!

-JW

"There are two reasons for drinking: one is when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it."

-Thomas Love Peacock 

Brewing TV Drinking Game

Several members of Northern Brewer put together a side project called Brewing TV a few years ago.  The general idea of the project is to document the culture and people surrounding homebrewing and the larger craft brewing movement.  Chip, Jake, and Dawson interview the people and businesses that define the craft and seek to discover what motivates them and how their inspiration can be translated to the rest of us.  Brewing TV episodes come out every two weeks and are well put together and entertaining.  If you have not seen them yet, I suggest you check them out.

Brewing TV's 64th episode introduced a new and very novel concept - a drinking game.  The crew traveled to Manhattan, Kansas to visit Tallgrass Brewing Company.  Tallgrass is the product of owner Jeff Gill's homebrew passion and has developed some very interesting branding.  My favorite branding is their 8-Bit Pale Ale, who's logo and back story surrounds the old 8-bit arcade games of my youth (the Brewing TV episode has great coverage of this).  The video portion provides some other interesting facts about the brewery, including that they named their fermenters after famous American Gladiators.

But, at the very beginning of the episode, Jake and Dawson introduce the Tallgrass drinking game.  Tallgrass's head brewer, Andrew Hood, is from California and still uses a substantial amount of lingo from the area.  His favorite word is "critical" and he uses it with great abandon.  The drinking game is simply to take a drink every time someone says "critical," which happens often (more than 20 times by my count).  This game was completely unexpected and I literally burst out laughing when they introduced it.

I recommend watching the Tallgrass episode and participating in the game.  It will put a smile on your face and is more fun and informative than playing beer pong.

Cheers,

TW