i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

As with just about everything for which one would create an ontology, the beer ontology could have been done a few different ways, but I actually think having fermentation style on the first level works well and seems logical (to me, anyway, as someone who has a few batches of homebrew under my belt). However, there are a few picky points of contention. "Bitter" doesn't really belong in its own alongside those styles because a bitter beer is usually a heavily hopped pale ale, and since you include pale ale as its own term, then bitter could spring from that. Furthermore, since a stout is essentially a style of dark porter, an IPA could have been extended from pale ale, as it is a specific style of pale ale, and then Double IPA could branch out from IPA. "Extra special bitter" could also have been built off of pale ale to effectively capture a very specific style of bitter beer. The top-fermented side is missing wheat beer, kolsch, malt liquor (a style of lager, albeit a shitty one), and the whole universe of lambics, which are top-fermented but use a process of spontaneous fermentation so could theoretically justify another fermentation style on the level of top- and bottom- fermented. Finally, and most importantly, bottom-fermented is missing steam beer, which really was a style and is now a term trademarked by Anchor Brewing. Beers brewed in a similar style are called "California common."

And this is what the bottom of the fermenting bucket looks like after transferring a top-fermented beer to secondary fermentation:  www.flickr.com/photos/agreatnotion/3637104525/. Not delicious but the batch turned out pretty good!

And since this class is all about words and meaning, here's a useless fact I learned from a book I've been reading about the history and future of brewing: it's no secret that men are called "brewmasters" but did you know that female brewers are called "brewsters?"