Template talk:Infobox beer style

Discussion
I created this infobox as an easier-to-use version of the infobox style that appears on the Irish red ale article, for example, retaining many of the same fields. Not wanting to duplicate a whole bunch of effort, I shamelessly stole the code from the Infobox Actor template and hacked away at the fields, so if more experienced template editors find redundancies within the code itself, that may be the reason. The inclusion of all the fields from the Irish red ale shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as an endorsement of the current layout, it is merely a starting point. As of 1 August, 2007, the template includes the following fields: After creating the infobox, I transcluded the infobox in a few of the beer style articles to get a feel for how it affects the flow of the articles and determine how it is received. Those articles include:
 * name =
 * bgcolour =
 * image =
 * imagesize =
 * caption =
 * origin =
 * yeast =
 * alcohol =
 * color =
 * bitterness =
 * originalgravity =
 * finalgravity =
 * maltpercentage =
 * examples =
 * Witbier
 * Porter (beer)
 * Vienna lager
 * Steam beer
 * American pale ale
 * Cream ale
 * Oud bruin
 * Flanders red ale
 * Saison (ale)
 * Roggenbier

All of the fields in the template are optional. Whether or not such fields should exist in the first place is the purpose of this discussion. One of the test transclusions that I made in the Witbier article was immediately reverted with a reference to a discussion that took place on the WikiProject Beer talk page about the appropriateness of the original gravity and final gravity statistics, but I don't really feel that the inclusion (or omission) of those figures in the templates requires abandoning the template as a whole, and I'll open the discussion below as to the appropriateness of individidual fields.

Personally, I don't really feel that the maltpercentage field is really necessary or helpful to the average wikipedian, or even to homebrewers. As a homebrewer, I won't be referencing Wikipedia for guidelines for specific ingredients or "how-to" instructions, and as a beer drinker, I don't find much instanteous value in seeing statistics like "malt percentage" and "attenuation" (I admit I didn't even include the field for attenuation). I'm also enough of an amateur homebrewer that original gravity and final gravity numbers don't really tell me much, but some of the advanced homebrewers I mingle with immediately want to know those numbers any time I tell them of a batch I tried brewing, so I figured that those figures mean something to enough people to warrant their inclusion, at least until it is discussed futher.

On the other hand, as a beer consumer unfamiliar with the different styles, I'd certainly find value in being able to acertain its country of origin, typical alcohol range, color, and bitterness, for example. In addition, whether it's a lager, ale, or something else is information I'm interested in, and have fairly clumsily integrated into this version of the infobox (by suggesting a link to the type of yeast being used, which allows for situations such as ). My personal "would be nice to have" list includes the traditional serving temperature and the traditional style of glass that the beer is served in (with a graphic icon, even), but those can get really subjective and I lack authoritative sources on both, so haven't done anything with those for now.

So for now, I'll leave it at that, and wait to hear what other people think. Frankly, I've been a bit slow in following up on discussing this after the Witbier revert, but I've been a bit too occupied in real life to commit the time to discussing this at length. Neil916 (Talk) 07:41, 1 August 2007 (UTC)