Stacey Stolmaker

Professor Coleman

IRLS 501

14 December 2001

The Process of Creating a Classification System for Beer

Beer has been a part of our world for centuries. According to Plato, "He was a wise man who invented beer (Quotes on Beer)." George Washington stated that, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy (Quotes on Beer)." Consumption, however, is not the only reason that people utilize beer. Brewers who work in breweries and those who brew at home need to know more about beer and the beers' contents than most people who drink it do. It is important for them to have the right ingredients in order to make the best beer possible. Liquor stores are continuously searching for the top brands of beer to serve in their establishments. Restaurants and breweries choose beers that best pair with the individual food offerings. The beer drinking population is enormous. There are novice and expert beer drinkers. There are people who drink beer solely for its taste and there are people who consume this alcoholic beverage for various other reasons. With so many different brands available, how can one find a certain beer that he or she is interested in sampling? No matter what the reason is for drinking and choosing a specific brand of beer, it is important that an organized and efficient system is established so searchers can find the beer that they want. The aim of this paper is to establish a classification system that can be used for cataloging beer. The outline of the paper is as follows:

A. Presentation of the Problem

B. Literature Review

4. Solutions for Solving the Problem

• Collection Description and Organization
• Metadata Standards
• Descriptive Content Standards
• Controlled Vocabulary Tools
• Subject Vocabularies
• Classification System

E. Samples of the Results

F. Conclusion

There are thousands of beers in this country. They range from ales to porters and domestics to imports. Let's say that someone has heard from a friend of theirs that a certain beer is great, but that they can not remember its name, then how is one going to locate it? Well, they are probably going to have a difficult time since most beers today are not cataloged or indexed in a way that people can easily retrieve them. There are some Internet sites that contain a few brands of beer which are located by using an index, but the information about the beer is limited. The only information that is provided is the name of the beer, its alcohol content and volume, and what the beer tastes like. Sometimes the brewery or the company that manufactures the beer is also mentioned. Regardless, this system is limited and unless one knows the name of the beer, the data can not be retrieved.

When I lived in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, I worked at Liberty Steakhouse and Brewery. The entire brewing process, how the beer was distributed, and the diverseness of the brands of beer intrigued me. My interest with this topic has encouraged me to create a classification system for beer. The methods that will be used to establish this system will be discussed later in the paper. The retrieval tool that will be implemented for this classification system is a catalog. Not only am I categorizing beer, but I am also using the bottles to decipher between individual brands. Bottles can be considered artifacts for social history research. There are set criteria for itemizing bottles since they are considered objects and in this system they are a format. By reviewing and integrating the cataloging standards that are used today and by also implementing new guidelines, I will be establishing an organized and efficient classification system for beer.

The following literature focuses on restaurants and breweries and why a classification system for beer is imperative to those who consume and distribute it. Restaurants are now serving microbrews and imported beers, so many are offering a beer list which features descriptions of the beers available (Scarpa, 1998). Not so many years ago, beer lists were in restaurants and the product was taken for granted. There was no need for descriptions because everyone knew how the national brands tasted. Today, since there are so many varieties of beers, people need some type of catalog that describes the brands being offered in the restaurant and the breweries. The challenge is making a beer list that effectively communicates what is for sale.

What do customers want to see on a beer list? Larry Dwyer, the general manager of the Hudson Club in Chicago designed a beer list. His beer page consists of 20 draft and 80 bottled beers that are categorized not by geography or by style, but by the type of fermentation (Scarpa, 1998). For example, Samuel Adams and Pilsner Urquell appear in the bottom of the fermented lager category. Anchor Steam beer is dubbed a hybrid ale/lager (Scarpa, 1989). According to Dwyer, "People are just thirsting for more information" (Scarpa, 1989). Actually, Dwyer is frustrated by the amount of information he had to leave out to accommodate Hudson Club's large listings of wines, single malt scotch, boutique bourbons, and cigars. "If I had more space, I'd put out a book with taste descriptions and characteristics," says Dwyer (Scarpa, 1989). Hence the reason that beer catalogs should be developed. The more people know about beer, the more likely they are to try it. Considering that breweries brew their own beer and plan home brewing supply stores, one would think that they would provide more product information. Any establishment that postulates to be a beer merchandiser should provide as much information as possible about its product to its customers. "It keeps customers' interests up and gives them something to talk to their friends about," says John Baldy, brewmaster of the Typhoon Brewery, a brewery-restaurant in New York City (Scarpa, 1997).

Customers are not the only people who want more information about the beer that is being sold in restaurants and breweries. Chefs need to know which beers should be accompanied with certain dishes. Matching suds with food has become more of a challenge, complicated by the growing diversity of complex craft brews (Scarpa, 1997). The more information that a chef knows about a particular beer, the easier it will be for him or her to adequately equate it with the best foods. Chefs need to pay attention to many elements when they are mixing and matching beer with restaurant offerings. For example, the amount of the hops in the beer, that is the additive that gives it the flowery aroma and the bitterness, is an element that chefs need to be aware of. Those with high hops are the most difficult to match, and probably should not be pitted against delicate-tasting foods (Scarpa, 1997). Chefs also try to match cold, clean tasting beers with complex, spicy foods - the attraction of opposites. Put another way, if the food is complicated, make sure your beer isn't (Scarpa, 1997). Therefore, a chef needs to be familiar with the ingredients of a beer to decipher if it is a "light" beer or a "heavy" beer. Steve Brendlinger, executive chef of Salty's on Alki in Seattle says, "Today's explosion of beer styles offers the chef both challenge and opportunity" (Scarpa, 1997). Chefs will greatly benefit from using beer catalogs. The knowledge they will gain will help them create the perfect match between beer and food.

From the brewer who makes the beer, to the customer who drinks it, to the chef who matches it to its complimentary entree and to the merchant who markets it, all of these people want to know about beer. The creation of a beer catalog will be of great importance to each user group. The next part of this paper is going to examine the criterion that is needed in order to establish a system for cataloging beer. Each method will be defined and I will provide explanations as to why I am using the techniques that I have implemented in creating a classification system for beer.

In order to explain how I am going to create the beer catalog, I have put each main section from the preliminary outline into the following sub-sections.

The collection that I am using for this catalog is beers from Arizona breweries. I have chosen six samples from five breweries breweries. The form of my collection is beer. Beer comes in various formats such as cans, kegs, and growlers, but I am only focusing on bottles. The Arizona breweries are the subjects of this collection. The names of the beers are 8^th Street Ale (Four Peaks Brewing Company), Superstition Pale Ale (Mogollon Brewery), Wapiti Amber Ale (Mogollon Brewery), India Pale Ale (Sonora Brewing Company), Amber Ale (Oak Creek Company), and Nut Brown Ale (Nimbus Brewing Company). The scope of this project is to create an organizational system that can be utilized by my user groups in order to find information about beer.

Who are my users groups and how are they going to use my collection? Let's start with my largest group first - the beer drinkers. Last year, more than 2.75 billion cases of beer were consumed in this country. That adds up to 24 gallons of beer per capita (Fried, 2000). 46.6% of African Americans and 45.1% of White Americans are beer drinkers (Fried, 2000). Individuals who consume beer enjoy sampling and experimenting with beer on a daily basis. The more they know about the beers being made today, the more apt they will be to try new brands. My second user group is brewers. This includes brewers in breweries and those who do their own home brewing. In order to stay current with new trends in the brewing process, it is extremely important for these people to be aware of the beers that are available and the contents of the beers. The third user groups are the breweries and restaurants. Today, there are over 500 brewpubs nationwide (Fried, 2000). If breweries are distributing their own homemade products, it will be beneficial to have a descriptive list available to their customers that promotes their beers. Chefs who work in restaurants need to pair their dishes with the beers that they offer. It would be helpful to them to have a beer catalog that lists its ingredients and describes its composition. My last user group is the liquor stores. There are so many kinds of beer, that a catalog will help merchandisers choose only the top selling brands. These are a few reasons how this collection is going to be utilized.

The next step is actually putting the six beer bottles into an organized system. The register that I am using is a catalog. A catalog is a retrieval tool that provides access to individual items within collections of information packages (e.g., physical entities such as books, videos, and CDs in a library; artists' works in an art museum; web pages on the Internet, etc.) (Taylor, 1999). I have chosen a catalog because I feel that it is the most effective method in displaying the varieties of beer and describing their contents and their bottles. It can be compared to a catalog that is implemented for a book in that this is a collection, but each item will be individually listed and described.

The preliminary step in creating a catalog is to decide upon the choice of a descriptive standard and an essential cataloging standard that is used in the modern library. When choosing standards, it is important to evaluate what best suits the collection. In addition to the systems and collection-based constraints, the application of metadata standards must also reflect the collection's intended use (Marshall). One must also keep in mind the user groups of the collection. As of today, there are no metadata standards set for cataloging beer so my efforts on this subject are stemming from information that I have gathered from the course textbook, The Organization of Information, and the article, "Making Metada: a Study of Metadata Creation for a Mixed Physical-Digital Collection."

I will first explain the difference between descriptive and metadata standards. Descriptive data is data that describes an information package, such as title, its associated names, its edition, its date of publication, its extent, and notes identifying pertinent features (Taylor, 1999). When one takes the descriptive data and access points other than subject and uses them for surrogate records, than a descriptive catalog is created. The purpose of metadata standards is to provide an intermediate level at which choices can be made as to which information packages one wishes to view or search, without having to search massive amounts of irrelevant full text (Taylor, 1999). I am starting choosing Dublin Core as my metadata standard and from there am going to build on with descriptive standards that I feel are relevant when classifying beer. I chose Dublin Core because the core set can be extended with further elements as to what is needed by a particular user group, the elements are optional and most important, any element may be modified by a qualifier or qualifiers. I feel that these methods of flexibility are essential in designing the first beer catalog.

Dublin Core was created in order to have an internationally agree-upon set of elements that could be implemented by the originator of an electronic document. There are fifteen elements that can be divided into three groups: Elements related to the content of the source, elements related to the resource when viewed as intellectual property, and elements related to the issue of resource-as-an-instance (Taylor, 1999). Out of the fifteen elements, I have chosen the ones I want to use for establishing metadata standards.

Title - the name of the beer

Description - a description of the beer label and the bottle

Coverage - the physical region where the brewery is located

Creator - the manufacturer or brewing company

Format - bottle (important to mention since beer comes in a few formats)

Resource Identifier - described in the section "Classification System"

Dublin Core provides key elements to describing the beer, but these descriptors mainly focus on the bottle and not the beer itself. As I mentioned before, I am cataloging beer, but I am including the bottles as well. These are the descriptive standards that I have chosen.

Alcohol beverage volume - the amount of alcohol the beer bottle contains

Alcohol beverage content - the number of ounces the beer contains

Ingredients - the composition of the beer

Color - the color of the beer

Type of beer - ale, porter, stout

Definition of the beer - provides the flavor of the beer

Awards - any previous or current honors given to the beer

The elements that I have selected utilize the collection's use and the user groups. The purpose of this catalog is to provide people with information about different types of beer. Even though I have several user groups, all of the information is valuable to them in one way or another. All of the features that are listed describe either the beer or the beer bottle and that is what this collection is about. Now that I have chosen certain standards, the next step is devising a vocabulary tool used to select subject headings. In the following section I will explain why I have chosen these elements and which subject headings will be used for each.

A controlled vocabulary is a list or database of subject terms in which each concept has a preferred term or phrase that will be used to represent it in a retrieval tool (Taylor, 1999). Controlled vocabularies fall into three main categories and the one I am choosing is subject heading lists. A subject heading list has not been created for beer catalogs, so I am making my own called the SBSH which stands for the "Stolmaker Beer Subject Headings". I am using subject headings because I feel there is more flexibility with searching options when one is looking for a particular item. Subject headings have phrases and precoordinated terms in addition to single terms (Taylor, 1999). Precoordination shows the researcher additional options that he or she did not know they should ask for. In return, one would receive a greater number of "hits" when looking for a topic. Subject heading lists also tend to be more general in scope and they cover a wide subject area, or the entire scope of knowledge.

Under each of these standards that I am using for my catalog, I will list the subject headings that accompany each one. This criterion only applies to the six beers that I have chosen. If I were cataloging a larger selection, the scope and range would be much larger. I chose terms that are most commonly used in the beer industry.

Title - These are the names of the beers, which many users are familiar with. When looking for a certain beer, most people will use these subject headings. The names of the beers are Wapiti Amber Ale, Nut Brown Ale, Amber Ale, India Pale Ale, Superstition Pale Ale, and 8^th Street Ale.

Description - This element briefly describes the label and the beer bottle design. Many people enjoy drinking beer for its look and do not remember its name, so these descriptors will help them while searching the catalog. These are the main logos that are featured on the bottle labels that will most likely catch the eye of the person consuming the beer: trees, monkey, snake, brewery, cowboy, mountains, and river. The bottle designs are the primary shapes that most bottles use. They are Lager Style, Export Style, Ale Bottle, and Stout Bottle. Another important feature of a beer bottle is the color. The main colors are brown, black, blue, clear, green, and red.

Coverage - This element lists the region from where a certain beer is made. This is extremely important for merchandisers. I am using the principle of uniform headings. A searcher will retrieve not just the works with these two words in their titles, but also an enormous variety of other relevant works that discuss the topic in quite different terms (Mann, 1993). One will receive a huge number of beers that are brewed from all the breweries in that specific area. The areas are Sedona Breweries, Tucson Breweries, Phoenix Breweries, and Flagstaff Breweries.

 Creator - This is a more specific subject heading that limits the beers to only the breweries from which they are made. I am using the brewery name as it is listed on the bottle. The breweries are: Sonora Brewing Company, Four Peaks Brewing Company, Oak Creek Brewing Company, Nimbus Brewing Company, and Mogollon Brewery.

Format - The samples I have chosen are in the form of a bottle. Therefore, my format is solely "Bottle".

Resource - This is the call number of the beer. The call numbers for the beer are located in the section "Classification System". If a beer catalog were ever created, call numbers would be essential for organizing the bottles.

Alcohol Beverage Volume and Content - The alcohol beverage content of a beer is useful to packagers and beer distributors. Beer is served in a standard amount of eight ounces to forty ounces. Therefore, a searcher would have the option of choosing numbers between this range. For example, one could use the whole number 16. The alcohol beverage volume is an important element for bartenders, restaurant owners, and drinkers in general to be familiar with. In many cases where someone has had too many drinks, the ABV is important to know. Most beers' volumes are from 4.0 to 8.0. A searcher would need to round a number off to the nearest tens place and it would need to be in this range. For example, one could use numbers such as 4.5, 6.0, and 7.1. Many beers do not have a set number such as 6.0, but many use 6.1, so there are many different numbers between four and eight that can be used.

Ingredients - Most beers contain the same ingredients and I have chosen the ones that most people are familiar with. This is an important element for brewers to utilize when they are making new beer. The ingredients are: Malt, Hops, Water, Barley, Yeast, and Grain.

Color - Many people define beer as either light in color or dark in color. Yet, there are specific colors that identify all beers. They are copper, brown, black, dark brown, and yellow

Type of Beer - Every beer is given a specific label for the type of beer that it is and the following are the most common names given to the different brands of beer: ale, lager, porter, stout, pilsner, pale ale, and India pale ale

Definition - How does beer taste? When one is sampling beer for the first time, this is usually their first question. Below are the subject headings that describe the flavor of beer. The definitions for styles of beers were taken from Michael Jackson's Beer Hunter Page. They are mild, hoppy, bitter, sweet, and strong.

Awards - When merchandisers are looking for only the top selling brands, this element is very useful for their choices. I am using very general subject headings due to the large number of awards that are presented every year to beers and breweries. The subject headings that I am using are Arizona honors and Arizona awards.

The last part of the catalog is to actually devise a classification system that categorizes each beer bottle by a call number. The next section will describe the classification system that I am using.

The classification system for my collection is the SBCS, which stands for the "Stolmaker Beer Classification System". The system is designed as follows. Each beer will have a call number - that is a notation on an information package (the beer bottle) that matches the same notation in the metadata record (Taylor, 1999). The call number is called the "Beer Number". Here is an example using Superstition Pale Ale from Mogollon Brewery.

Sup

100

Mog

The first line represents the name of the beer, the second line is the cutter number, and the third line represents the name of the brewery. The cutter line is used when there is more than one beer from the same brewery. For example, Wapiti Pale Ale would read as follows:

Wap

101

Mog

For other beers that are from another brewery, the first and third lines would be the same, but the cutter number would be entirely different to represent another brewery. For example, 8^th Street Ale from Four Peaks Brewing Company would read as:

Eig

200

Fou

Each brewery represents a different number. There are so many beers that come from one brewery that each one needs its own hundreds number. For example,

Mogollon - 100's

Four Peaks - 200's

Nimbus - 300's

Oak Creek - 400's

Sonora - 500's

With the Stolmaker Beer Classification System, I am incorporating the Dewey Decimal system in that the numbers maintain the same meaning and are not used with other meanings. All the 100's belong to Mogollan, the 200's, Four Peaks, and so on. I am also integrating the Library of Congress system by using letters of the English alphabet. With DDC, the numbers are on the top line, but not when using LCC. Since most people look for beer by its name, I wanted the first line to represent the title of the beer and the third line to represent the creator of the beer. In the next section of this paper, I will be providing samples of how each beer would be classified in a beer catalog. Each sample will have its own table and the elements for each beer will be represented. The name of the catalog is The Stolmaker Standard Beer Catalog. Drum role please…

Beer is a substance that is going to be a part of our world for as long as it exists. Some people see this alcoholic beverage as a pleasure to taste while others brew it and distribute it as a way of life. Any type of organized system is helpful when one is searching and retrieving information. The creation of a beer catalog would benefit all people who drink beer. A catalog that lists beers from all over the world would be a large task to complete; yet it can be done. Michael Jackson has been on a world tour for thirty years in pursuit of exceptional beer. He is a beer hunter and has his own series, "The Beer Hunter". He also published The World Guide to Beer in 1977. My future work with this project is to send him some information about my beer catalog. This catalog would be of great benefit to him and others who specialize in this field. The name of his company is Real Beer, Inc. Until a real beer catalog is created, beer drinkers, brewers, and merchandisers will have to retrieve their information from either the small amount of sources that are available to them or they will need to create their own methods. I will end this paper with a quote by Dave Berry. He says, "Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as Hydrogen and Oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water; a vital ingredient in beer," (Quotes on Beer). To all those out there who love beer as much as I do, enjoy!

Works Cited

http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Lagoon/9819/drinkquotes.html/

http://www.beerhunter.com/