Bamforth examines the history of beer consumption, the basics of brewing and the effect of beer on nutrition and health. Although he takes a scientific approach too precise for the needs of beer snoobs (for example, the chemical and molecular breakdown of beer ingredients), he also supplies in-depth examinations of beer types, components and flavours. Terms appeared as natural language in the body text and most usefully in graphs and in the back-of-the-book index.

Beaumont’s “Concise Catalogue of North American Beer Styles” describes the ingredients, brewing processes, flavour and appearance of most of the beer styles covered by the thesaurus. At the same time, it clearly delineated some of the beer types that are less commonly encountered in North America, such as Triple Bock and Rye Beer. This was useful in establishing which styles were appropriate to the domain of the first version of the thesaurus.

The “Glossary of Beer and Brewing” gives a dictionary-style account of key terms, with an emphasis on clarifying the differences between European and North American beers. Throughout the glossary Beaumont refers to recent trends in North American beer consumption, which helped assess the organizational warrant of terms.

This simple webpage does the service of pulling two important resources—Morton Meilgaard’s 1970s Beer Flavour Wheel graph and the text-only outline of the same—onto the same page. While these appear separately in numerous places on the web and in books, having them both together to aid comprehension is particularly helpful. Flavour and aroma terms are listed as hierarchical controlled vocabulary, and, though this resource doesn’t mention it, the flavour and aroma classifications set forth by Meilgaard are the officially adopted standards of the European Brewery Convention, the American Society of Brewing Chemists, and the Master Brewers Association of the Americas [1]. This webpage also has additional information about beer appearance, aroma and taste.

As suggested by the title, this volume presents an abundance of information on all things beer, including lengthy descriptions about ingredients, brewing, tasting, styles and history. While much of the guide is dedicated to a world tour of beers and breweries by country, it identifies ingredients, flavours and aromas, and methods of production that define the different styles.  Its dictionary style entries were particularly useful for the selection of candidate terms, and for establishing relationships between the different styles.

Aside from an intriguing title interweaving the archaic and colloquial, this book has an appendix detailing the “American Homebrewer’s Association Style Guidelines.” These guidelines are listed hierarchically by type and subtype of beer. In addition to displaying in its layout a sample classification of beer styles, the guidelines define standards for different beers in terms of appearance and taste and aroma. These standards, used in homebrewing contests, are useful in establishing the current critical vocabulary used in describing and judging beer.

As in their Homebrewer’s Recipe Guide, the authors include an appendix describing beer style guidelines, this time the “Great American Beer Festival Style Guidelines.” Where the earlier book offered guidelines to be followed by homebrewers, this appendix deals with beers made by professional brewers. Together, the two books by Higgins et al. offer terminology spanning the full domain of expert American beer reviewing, from homebrew-tasting to the judging of professionally crafted beers.

This coffee-table style book proved less useful in developing a vocabulary for styles as its discussion was focused on the characteristics of different brands of beers, a level of specificity not provided by our thesaurus.  Nevertheless, the section on ingredients were detailed and his lexicon of flavours and aromas proved extremely helpful in identifying terms. Further, it was useful in establishing relationships between ingredients and flavours and aromas.
 

The scope of this book is suggested by its subtitle. While over half of Beer Lover’s Companion is dedicated to an extensive inventory of beers of the world, the book does contain excellent descriptions of beer styles and provided many synonyms. It also contains small, useful sections on ingredients and flavours and aromas.

Natchel and Ettlinger present a vast amount of material, including defining, enjoying, buying, making and collecting beer. Their book contains two valuable beer style charts which suggest a number of hierarchical relationships, though the accuracy of the relationships presented is debatable. Nevertheless, these comprehensive charts proved essential when determining both the beer styles to include and the relationships between these beers. Two other concise sections were useful: one on appearance and one on flavours and aromas.

The focus of this title is clearly home brewing, with sections on ingredients, equipment, recipes, and the process itself. Nonetheless, there were lucid sections on beer styles and tasting terminology. For determining aroma and flavour terms, two parts of this book were helpful: the section “beer character descriptors” and the chart “beer aroma/flavour recognition.” (Interestingly, there is a brief section on flatulence and beer. The advice given is to avoid yeasty, cloudy beer.)

This dictionary is an excellent reference tool for gathering terms, clarifying definitions and understanding relationships.  Despite the irrelevancy of a good portion of the terms dealing with brewing, reviewing this source cover to cover was well worth the effort.  Some terms are listed as clear preferences (establishing a controlled vocabulary), while others are described as related terms or synonyms, which helped provide context and structure to our thesaurus.

This comprehensive encyclopedia with over 900 alphabetically arranged entries is largely based upon the beer classification system established by Michael Jackson.  With a wide-ranging scope, it is a definitive guide that presents terminology for styles, ingredients, flavourings, and much more. It also includes See references that were useful in establishing preferred terms (for example, Double Bock See Doppelbock).

The collaborative, user-edited Wikipedia has a page documenting Beer Styles, including elements such as aroma, flavour, appearance, ingredients and the styles themselves.  Terms were found in lists and chart form, with copious links to learn more about different beer types.  As equally interesting and informative was this page’s discussion forum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Beer_style), where beer enthusiasts debate the content of the Beer Style page.  Both pages helped establish user warrant for contentious hierarchical decisions.