Kvass - what style?

An Eastern Europe/FSU question:

What style is kvass - Low Alcohol or Traditional Ale?

On ratebeer it is categorised as both. There doesn’t seem to be any agreement on this:

An advanced search of "kvas" gives about 90 results for low alcohol and about 50 for traditonal ale.

However, searching for it in Lithuanian ("gira") gives a single traditional ale and around 50 low alcohols. Same with Estonia - 17 LAs and a single TA.

The Moldovan spelling (Cvas) yields 12 traditional ales and zero low alcohols.

I see your issue! I would personally put them under traditional ale. The actual RB description of traditional ale mentions them.

I would also say Traditional Ale.

If you send corrections on those you see that are labelled as Low Alcohol, the Admins can investigate further.

It should be Trad. Ale. Same as the Scandinavian "Hvidtøl".

I would say it needs it’s own separate style. Some styles in RB are merged and they shouldn’t. Other style sit separately and should be merged. Old record playing.

Thanks everyone for clearing this up.

I have long argumented for that Kvas, Hvidtøl and Dutch oud Bruin should be a "new" style. They have in common that they are old traditionel very sweet, low alcoholic beers.
I am calling the "Sahti" argument.

Originally posted by HenrikSoegaard
I have long argumented for that Kvas, Hvidtøl and Dutch oud Bruin should be a "new" style. They have in common that they are old traditionel very sweet, low alcoholic beers.
I am calling the "Sahti" argument.

Swedish "Svagdricka" could likely be placed in some such category as "traditional low alcohol sweet stuff not produced by that many these days"

Originally posted by HenrikSoegaard
It should be Trad. Ale. Same as the Scandinavian "Hvidtøl".

Low alcohol and Traditional ale are not styles as such, they are crude descriptors which allow us to hold beers which don’t fit any other RateBeer style guidelines. We tend to use Traditional ale for older styles which are still brewed but which for one reason or another we don’t have a style guideline. Low alcohol catches those beers which are low abv but which don’t fit into any other RateBeer style guidelines. Sometimes, a beer can go into either, though if a beer is an older style, for me it makes sense for the Traditional one to be preferred, as I would regard that as the more note worthy aspect of the beer. It’s interesting, as omhper points out, that the Low alcohol descriptor includes some older styles that folks may think of more as traditional than low alcohol., especially as it names Skibsøl, and a search for Skibsøl on RateBeer gives nine results, only one of which is under 3%. Most of them appear to be listed under Smoked. It also names oud bruin, which is another beer that turns out to be mostly over 3%, and that is listed on the site either as a Sour, if it’s over 3%, or a low alcohol if it’s under 3%.

Abv can be a deciding factor in what style a beer is. We have various categories for stout, depending on abv. And bitter/pale ale in the UK is regarded as session, best, premium or ale, strong ale, then barley wine, depending entirely on abv.

We talked some years ago about having a slightly different approach to categorising our database, and one option discussed was of having more than one criteria to which a beer could be classed - so abv would be one criteria, and colour another, and hop levels another, for example. Since then in the UK a similar idea was developed to describe beers, it’s called Cyclops: http://www.cyclopsbeer.co.uk/ - personally I don’t like it as it’s using subjective taste opinions which influence the drinker, but it does indicate that a number of folks would like something a bit more helpful than a beer style name or category to give them information about a beer. Especially as some beer styles have a certain selling power, so brewers often use style names to sell a beer, even when the beer properly does not belong to that style or have that provenance. Think Champagne and sparkling wine; Lambic and sour ale; Pilsner and pale lager, etc.