OnTap Magazine

T here has been a lot of talk recently about the possibility of a South African beer style making it into the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP for short) Style Guidelines. It has certainly sparked a debate about what a South African beer style might look like; would it be something new, does it exist already, and would it be as simple as brewing with 100% locally sourced ingredients? Certainly, there is nothing wrong with the idea of being more environmentally conscious when picking ingredients, and with locally manufactured liquid yeast from Liquid Culture, it is possible for the small brewer to go completely local. After all, we already have access to local hops and base malts. But does the mere use of local ingredients qualify as a new style? Is Castle Lager not a 100% local-ingredient beer? Let's find out. HOW A STYLE IS ADDED From the desk of Gordon Strong, President Emeritus of the BJCP, below is a rough guide to the considerations involved. Potential styles that do not currently qualify might be because: • They are too new, still changing, might be a fad; • Homebrewers aren’t making them; • There are insufficient examples (or research data); • There haven’t been enough examples to create or validate a profile. To understand this distinction a bit better, I looked into the New Zealand Pilsner – a style listed as X5 in the BJCP guidelines – and how it got there. THE NEW ZEALAND PILSNER Let us jump (or is it hop?) to New Zealand in the 90s, where brewer Richard Emerson was trying to brew an organic Pilsner using either locally sourced or organic ingredients. “I was restricted to the choice of organic material available back in 1995 so the recipe was pretty simple,” says Emerson, the inventor of the New Zealand Pilsner. “I wanted to approach the Pilsner category in a different way. Instead of brewing a German-style Pilsner, why not do what the Americans did: take the English Pale Ales and brew them up as US Pales Ales? That is exactly what I did.” It is important to note that what Emerson was trying to do was to bring more interestingbeers to the local market, something he picked up from traveling to Emerson with one of the 30L wooden casks posing for Geoff Griggs, who used to write about the Kiwi beer scene, at the second brewery Emerson with staff at the third brewery Emerson praying that the pilot weissbier wort will go through the heat exchange. Amazing enough the first three vessels from the left to right still exist! QUESTION CONSIDERATION Are they real styles? Commercially made? Distributed? Are they made by homebrewers? Do they appear in competitions? In what quantity? Do sufficient examples exist? Need to develop a sensory profile. Is it sufficiently different from existing styles? Maybe existing styles can be broadened. Have we tasted them and validated the profile? 46 | Summer 2023 | ontapmag.co.za