Talk:India Pale Ale

English style

I wanted to point out that, given the recent edits changing all spelling to commonwealth/British style spelling, that because this is an English-style-neutral article, and because the first version was written in American English, the proper style is American English. Please refrain from changing to British style unnecessarily. Shadowjams (talk) 08:20, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Actually the article was originally in British English and has been changed into US English. Look back through the history of the article.83.161.192.227 (talk) 11:28, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Incoherent

This article is incredibly incoherent, with the United States section being a serious offender. I'm not knowledgeable enough to rewrite, so hope someone else will soon. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.197.155.211 (talk) 07:02, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Removal of inaccurate statement

I have removed the entirely inaccurate statement "The October beer of Loren Jennings' Bow Brewery was the world's first India Pale Ale." and replaced it with a sentence stating that George Hodgson was one of the first known named brewers whose beer was exported to India. The rest of the piece then flows on from there. Zythophile (talk) 23:48, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Northwest Pale Ale?

I know that some breweries have used this term, but I don't think it refers to anything distinct enough to count as a recognizable sub-"style" within the IPA family, as in the present article. How is "Northwest Pale Ale" different from other IPA's brewed with Northwest hops that are just called IPA's or American IPA's. I think this an independent source identifying this style and discussing its characteristics is in order. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.109.160.198 (talk) 03:52, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

IPA Shelf life at sea a Myth?

The article states that the commonly repeated statement that IPA derives it's recipe and name from having a long shelf life while being shipped to India around the great horn of Africa. "Moreover, porter shipped to India at the same time survived the voyage, and common claims that Hodgson formulated his beer to survive the trip and that other beers would not survive the trip are probably false." The source for this myth busting is weak at best, see the footnote:"Myth 4: George Hodgson invented IPA to survive the long trip to India" Ozten (talk) 23:04, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

New sidebar

I'm surprised to see the beer style articles in such a sad state! I designed a simple sidebar for beer categories here: User:JauntBox/Infobox_beer_styles. I got the style info from Brewing Classic Styles (Zainasheff and Palmer) and the BJCP guidelines. I was a little unclear on what to do for the entire IPA style category values since there's quite a bit of variation from and English IPA to an Imperial IPA. I left them as the global bounds on the category for simplicity (eg. overall IBU from 40-120 whereas an English IPA would have 40-60 IBU) since adding all the detail for larger style categories would probably get overwhelming to the reader. I've never made a component like this before, so what's the procedure for adding it to the article? Do we need to request a beer style infobox? Did I leave out anything or is too much there? JauntBox (talk) 06:11, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

The procedure for adding BJCP styles to the articles is: not to do it. They are unhistorical and inaccurate.

92.235.37.187 (talk) 23:42, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

On what do you base your assertion? BJCP guidelines and BJCP certified judges have been used for many years for judging beer at the largest beer festivals in the world. Guinness323 (talk) 02:03, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Exactly, they are guidelines used by one organisation for judging beer at festivals. They have no validity outside that function, are not based on historical beer styles (most of them only exist in the BJCP's head having been thought up by them in the last twenty years) and they are therefore not a reliable source when it comes to the history of beer or brewing. Haldraper (talk) 13:17, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Even if the BJCP guidelines aren't meant to be taken as gospel, they are still useful as far as explaining styles to the layperson. You're telling me there is no room for common IPA flavor profiles in this article? You think a non-beer drinker is going to have any idea what the difference is between Chinook and Fuggles? This information is meaningless on two fronts: 1) it gives almost no tangible, relatable information to the layperson, and 2) it doesn't have any information that any moderately-informed beer drinker hasn't already heard a thousand times before. All we are doing is listing the "history of IPAs"? For a style that has exploded over the last few years, this article is a pale shadow of much better resources out there. I'm with JauntBox, sad sad sad. Bill shannon (talk) 05:04, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

I have to disagree about the validity of the BJCP guidelines. They are widely used in homebrewing competitions and have been cited by reliable sources like the Wall Street Journal and Zymurgy magazine. Fortunately, we have other sources we can use besides the BJCP - Ray Daniels's "Brewing Classic Styles" gathers IBU/gravity data from many historical recipes and samples, as well as from modern home and commercial brews. TO be more specific about this article, the sections on American IPAs need significant revision and expansion. The laundry lists of "IPAs are produced by breweries A,B,C,D...N" have rightly been removed, but there is a lot of referenced information we can add about this vibrant and popular style. I recently picked up a copy of the Oxford Companion to Beer that will be a good place to start looking for material. Skinwalker (talk) 15:16, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

I think that, in the absence of any kind of listing of flavor profiles, listing examples of style is really the only recourse we have in this case. I think it's really unfortunate that the IPA is one of the most popular (and growing) styles of beer in the United States, and this is what passes for an article. Unfortunately, it appears that most people really only want "the facts" about beer, such as gravity, IBU's, etc, but without any kind of explanation of what the flavors are (or at least ones that reputable sources have cited: Michael Jackson, Randy Mosher, Stephen Beaumont, Ratebeer, BeerAdvocate, All About Beer, etc., take your pick), the information is essentially worthless. [Note: I think this applies to all the beer articles on Wikipedia, it's just that IPAs are the style that I feel gets the shortest shrift here.] Bill shannon (talk) 04:51, 7 January 2012 (UTC)