One of the recent trends in beer marketing has been to advertise loudly how many pounds per barrel of hops or fruit brewers use in a beer. In the early 2000s, the arms race du jour was centered on the IBU, and how many we could possibly pack into a beer. Two important commonalities fall out of these two trends. The first is that craft beer is often about showcasing the extremes of brewing, which is sometimes pretty cool and many times borderline absurd (we do it too, though, so here’s to the sweatshirt calling the flannel black). The second, is that a certain amount of beer culture centers around relatively vague numbers.

Almost every craft drinker knows at least something about the IBU (if you don’t, stay tuned for the post on IPAs!), but there are other numbers that we cite in our blog that people may be less familiar with. One of those is SRM, which stands for Standard Reference Method, and quantifies the color of beer. In case you’re curious, the math for this found by multiplying the log of the attenuation–the amount of light absorbed–that light with a 430 nanometer wavelength experiences when passing through one centimeter of beer. Okay enough of the math shit…let’s get back to the beer.

Although each of these numbers is a testable, quantifiable measurement about beer, each of them is experienced subjectively. What one person describes as “sweet,” someone else might describe as “balanced.” Some people might be accustomed to beer with light bodies, so a medium-bodied beer could feel very full. Pale, amber, brown, dark, and black as descriptors for beer color fall into this category too, and the lines are pretty blurred when it comes to the difference between two of the earliest styles in American craft beer: Amber ale and Pale ale.

Even the BJCP guidelines, strictly stated as they are, have some overlap between these two styles. The top-range for SRM in American Pale is 10, which is the bottom of the range for Amber. We realize nobody except the geekiest of beer geeks (*slowly raises hand*) tries to guess SRM when they order a pint, but let’s face it…if you’ve made it this far into a blog post, you’ve probably got a bit of beer geek in you too. American Amber and Pale Ale are a perfect example of styles that aren’t black and white. The Amber was an outgrowth of Pale ales brewed starting in the early 1980s, so both of these beers feature American hops with citrusy, piney notes. Both also feature some caramel character, though in comparison pale has less than amber. If you order one of each in a flight from the same brewery, the Amber will of course be darker than the pale, and it will have a deeper, toastier, and more caremelly malt backbone. When we take a step back, though, this is a really cool example of grey areas between styles, and evolving concepts on beer in these two designations.

Whenever we try to aggregate and then quantify a moving target like beer–which changes brewer to brewer, region to region, and year to year–we end up trying to fit things into categories that might sometimes be okay to leave a bit vague. It’s not at all that there isn’t a distinction between amber and pale, but it’s just not always as obvious as we make it seem with style guides.