Introducing the ABCP

It has come to my attention that there is not nearly enough poorly-informed quibbling about beer styles in the world. Therefore, I and some like-minded beer lovers and misanthropes are launching the Arbitrary Beer Classification Project.

We will draw on a wide range of sources, including vague and unreliable memories of beers drunk on holiday, defects found in commercial examples, and errors made by Michael Jackson, to create systematically arbitrary descriptions and categorisations of beer styles, so that high-functioning autistic men worldwide will be able to neatly and inaccurately classify any beer they come across into an easy-to-remember box. Or even better, start arguments about them with others.

We hope, given time, to create an entire fantasy beer universe which, up to a point, vaguely resembles the beers available in the real world, then goes off at a tangent. Each beer style will be tightly defined based on historical speculation and something I was once told on a brewery tour.

Beer is a popular drink worldwide, so of course foreign beer styles will be included. We will make strenuous efforts to shoehorn them into our existing categories, or, where this is not possible, lump them together until it is. In the interests of objectivity and universality we guarantee that at no point will the categorisation or naming of beer styles be swayed by how the local drinkers or brewers think about their beer, and we shall replace the unpronounceable local names with English alternatives.

If you would like to help in our work, please apply to be certified.