Spin the wheel to randomly land on one of 16 iconic beer styles from around the world! Discover each style's category, origin, and a fascinating piece of brewing history.
Click the spinning wheel in the center of the page
Watch the tap wheel spin through 16 iconic beer styles
The wheel slows and lands on a random beer style
A beer card reveals the style category, origin, and an amazing historical or brewing fact
Click 'Cheers!' to dismiss and spin again
16 iconic beer styles spanning 11 categories: Pale Ale, Lager, Dark Ale, Wheat Ale, Abbey Ale, Wild Ale, Farmhouse, Strong Ale, Smoked, Hazy IPA, and Low-ABV
Region of origin revealed for every style — from Pilsen and Brussels to Vermont and Bamberg
Rich historical fact for each style revealing surprising stories from brewing history
Color-coded by beer style category for easy identification
Dark pub and oak barrel themed design with golden amber accents
The Beer Styles Spinner Wheel is an interactive brewing exploration tool that randomly selects one of 16 iconic beer styles from around the world. From the 1842 Pilsen citizens who hired a Bavarian brewer after dumping barrels of undrinkable beer, to the Belgian monks who fled the French Revolution and accidentally created the Trappist brewing tradition, the New England IPA that went from a Vermont garage to the world's most-discussed beer style in just five years, and the Rauchbier that is literally the last surviving example of how all beer tasted before the Industrial Revolution — each spin reveals the style's category, origin, and a fascinating slice of brewing history. Perfect for craft beer enthusiasts, pub trivia nights, anyone exploring beer styles, and home brewers researching their next recipe.
The wheel includes IPA, Stout, Pilsner, Hefeweizen, Belgian Tripel, Lambic/Sour, Porter, Saison, Märzen, Bock, Barleywine, Kölsch, Rauchbier, Imperial Stout, New England IPA, and Session Beer.
Lambic is the only major beer style in the world that is never inoculated with cultivated commercial yeast. Instead, the hot wort (unfermented beer liquid) is pumped into open cooling vessels called 'coolships' and left overnight with the windows open, allowing wild airborne microorganisms — yeasts and bacteria drifting in the local air — to spontaneously ferment the beer. This method, unchanged for centuries, means every batch of lambic is shaped by the local microbial ecosystem of the Senne valley near Brussels. True lambic cannot be reproduced anywhere else because the Brettanomyces bruxellensis yeast population is unique to that region.
Before 1842, virtually every beer brewed in Europe was dark, murky, and often unpleasant — clear beer was essentially unknown. The citizens of Pilsen in Bohemia were so disgusted by their locally brewed beer that they publicly dumped 36 barrels in front of City Hall as a protest. They then hired Bavarian brewer Josef Groll, who combined Pilsen's unusually soft water (which prevents harshness) with cold-fermenting lager yeast to produce a beer of unprecedented golden clarity. The glass drinking vessel was invented around the same time, allowing people to see and appreciate the clarity for the first time. Today, 90% of global beer volume is descended from this single 1842 invention.
Rauchbier ('smoke beer') from Bamberg, Germany is a living archaeological artifact — the last surviving example of how all beer in the world tasted before the Industrial Revolution. Before indirect kilning technology was developed in the early 1800s, the only way to dry malted barley was over direct wood fires, which meant every batch of malt absorbed wood smoke. When industrial kilning made smoke-free malt possible, virtually every brewery in the world abandoned smoke almost overnight. Only Bamberg chose to preserve the ancient method. The oldest beer recipes ever discovered — on Sumerian clay tablets (3,900 BC) and Egyptian papyri — would have produced smoky beer. Schlenkerla brewery has been making Rauchbier since 1405.
The term 'session' derives directly from British World War I government policy. In 1915, faced with declining munitions production, the British government passed the Defence of the Realm Act, which restricted pub opening hours to just two 'sessions' per day: noon to 2:30pm and 6pm to 9pm. The intent was to keep workers at armaments factories sober enough to work safely. Workers who wanted to drink during both sessions needed beer with low enough alcohol content that they could drink several pints without becoming incapacitated. This is why 'session beer' came to mean low-ABV beer — the term is a direct legacy of WWI industrial-era social policy.