The Trouble with Putting Belgian Beer in Crates

If you have read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, you may remember his discussion of classifying the natural world.

One of the central characters is Carl Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century naturalist whose great achievement was to help create a system for organising the extraordinary variety of living things. By giving organisms agreed names and placing them into categories, Linnaeus helped bring order to a world that seemed impossibly complicated.

It was a brilliant idea, but also an imperfect one. As Bryson explains, scientific classification did not end with Linnaeus. New discoveries continually reveal unexpected relationships, categories are revised, boundaries shift, and things that once appeared easy to separate turn out to be much harder to define. The system made the natural world easier to understand, while also revealing just how difficult the natural world was to classify.

We faced a similar challenge when creating The Belgian Beer Glass Museum. We wanted systems for classifying both the beers represented in the collection and the glasses in which they are served. Without those systems, the Museum would simply become a collection of individual objects with no obvious connections.

Categories allow us to explain relationships:

This is a Dubbel. That is a Tripel. This glass is a tulip. That one is a goblet.

But experience quickly teaches us that not everything stays obediently inside the crate in which we first place it.

One beer-style guide we consulted runs to more than 120 pages. Before it begins classifying beer, it acknowledges that different organisations classify styles differently, that styles evolve over time, and that brewers regularly produce beers which do not fit neatly within established guidelines.

Having explained why classification is difficult, it then proceeds to classify beer. Quite right too, because classifications are useful. They provide a shared language, allow comparisons and help visitors understand connections between different beers and glasses.

The problem is not the existence of categories. The problem is that the things being categorised have a habit of wandering across their boundaries. We discovered this repeatedly while developing the Museum.

At one point, we thought we had created a sensible beer-style taxonomy. Then a visit to Ghent introduced us to Gentse Stadsbrouwerij Gruut, which revives the ancient practice of brewing with herbs rather than hops. Suddenly, our neat list required another category.

While researching Antwerp’s beer culture, we realised we had somehow omitted Spéciale Belge, a style so important to Belgian brewing history that its absence was rather embarrassing.

Glassware presents the same challenge. Annick De Splenter of Gentse Stadsbrouwerij Gruut has developed a thoughtful system based around eight principal forms of Belgian beer glass. Like all useful classifications, it helps us navigate a complicated subject. It also demonstrates that classifications are never perfect. Real glasses borrow characteristics from one another: a tulip can resemble a goblet; a goblet can resemble a chalice. Designers create hybrids which are more interesting than the categories used to describe them.

The relationship between beer styles and glass shapes introduces another layer of complexity. The 120-page beer-style guide recommends a tulip glass for Lambic and Gueuze. A specialist lambic café in Brussels, Moeder Lambic, serves its lambics in a straight-sided glass that we chose as our Type Specimen for a Lambic glass.

So, who is right: the guide, the café, or the Museum?

In biology, classifications are anchored by type specimens: real examples against which names and categories can be understood. We have borrowed that idea for the Museum, not because one glass is the only possible example, but because a representative object helps tell the story.

Our classifications are not intended to be the definitive guide. They are tools to help you explore the collection.

De Splenter makes another excellent point: "The beer glass itself should never distract from what really is at stake: the content, beer!"

That is an important reminder. We can debate whether a glass is a tulip, goblet or chalice, but ultimately the object exists to present the beer. Unfortunately, we then discover that nobody entirely agrees which crate that amber-coloured liquid belongs in either.

Belgian beer received perhaps the ultimate recognition in 2016, when UNESCO inscribed Beer Culture in Belgium on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Surely someone, somewhere, must therefore have sorted all this out? Unfortunately not.

UNESCO recognised the culture but did not decide where a Dubbel ends and another Belgian style begins. It did not rule whether a glass is a tulip or a goblet.

Perhaps that is ultimately a good thing. The joy of Belgian beer is not that we have solved the puzzle, but that every time we think we have, another glass, another brewery, another forgotten style or another unexpected tradition appears.