Everyone’s always talking about the next beer style, and I’m always thinking about the last one.
By that I don’t mean the most recent one, the style of beer that ranked as the new hotness for trendy drinkers until the new new arrived on the scene. How would I even know what that was? By the time I finish writing this, the world will have seen the arrival of at least one new beer style that didn’t exist this morning. By the time you finish reading my words, there will certainly be several more.
Calling these infinite variations “styles” might be uncharacteristically generous of me, but they are certainly made and titled as if they were actual styles: Fruit [Something that Previously Didn’t Have Fruit], Milkshake [Something that Probably Doesn’t Go with Sugar], Sour [Something that Should Not be Tart or Acidic], and so forth. Like a line shooting towards the horizon, these will never stop. For all practical purposes, the combination of new techniques and new ingredients seems endless from this point on the timeline.
But on the other side of whenever “now” is, beer styles are severely limited. As we look into the future, new styles will keep being invented—but the number of beer styles lying behind us in the past is clearly finite. If a big part of craft brewing is innovation, its flip side is tradition, at least part of which has meant the revival of extinct, historical styles. And to be honest, we’re starting to run out of those.
I had a small hand in the revival of one: at Jopen in the Netherlands, Michel Ordeman, Ron Pattinson, Sebastian Sauer, Alice van der Kuijl, and I made one of the first commercial Grodziskies to actually use the correct yeast since that style disappeared some 20 years earlier. (Pro tip: Grodziskie yeast is not a neutral ale yeast.) At this point, I think it’s fair to say that Grodziskie has been crossed off the list of missing beer styles. (As has Grätzer, if you prefer a German name for a beer from Poland, though I’d recommend you reconsider that approach.)
The list of historical beer styles that are due for a revival recently lost another prominent member, with the arrival of a commercial Horner Bier at Seedstock Brewery in Colorado, bringing the sour Austrian beer made from malted oats back to life. Once nearly extinct in its true form in its hometown, Berliner Weisse is now undergoing a renaissance in Berlin. There are at least a few historical beer styles that have not yet been resuscitated, but unlike the infinite possibilities for new beer styles to come, the list of extinct beers isn’t growing.
And so I wonder which will be the last—the very last beer style that was once gone but which came back.
If we keep resuscitating these previously extinct historic beer styles, we will run out of them—unless, of course, some contemporary beer styles also disappear along the way. It’s not hard to foresee the extinction of Amber Ale, Brown Ale or even Black IPA. Some of us can even imagine the complete and total disappearance of Milkshake IPAs.
Some of us think about the extirpation of Milkshake IPAs a lot.
The problem with this kind of thinking, apparently, is that it gets time wrong. Physicists like Carlo Rovelli assure us that there is no such thing as the past or the future, and that our idea of “now” is relative to space. Some will add that time isn’t even real. Theoretical physicists will argue that the past, the future and the present all exist simultaneously, and that our understanding of the passing of time is just an illusion.
It brings to mind that quote from William Gibson: “The future has arrived—it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” The inverse of that might mean that the past is still present, at least in some select locations.
So perhaps in some places, 2020 hasn’t actually happened yet, which is a very nice thought indeed. And by extension, we can imagine that the very terminus of the arc of the moral universe—the one that bends toward justice—is already here. All of the beers that went extinct, including Berliner Braunbier, Broyhan, and Bière Blanche de Louvain, are still around, ready to be enjoyed.
And even better: at your favorite pub, closing time never arrives.
