Today’s beer market is filled with all types of beer. You have your IPAs, APAs, porters, pilsners, lagers, stouts, wheat beers, fruit beers, smoked beers, and on and on. One could run through every beer on the shelf and find countless names for beer styles and a few of them mean the same thing. One can look through all the beers on taps and find many different names, however, perhaps few of them mean the same thing.
Beer has been developed and re-imagined over and over again through the ages and because of this, there are dozens and dozens of styles that have established themselves.
Adding to the confusion, there new styles of beer emerge all the time.
American pale ale, for example, is a play on the classic, hoppy British-brewed India pale ale. American pale ale, or APA, is similar to an IPA, but it uses more ingredients from the American brewing tradition like bright, citrusy hops instead of the woodsier, floral hops from Britain.