Collaborative Session Beer effort

Brewers are getting together to brew beers all over the country (just read about another one on Facebook this morning); why not beer bloggers? With that lame intro (coffee's just not doing it this morning...), let me introduce Desperately Seeking Session Beer, a project that's been started by blogger Ken Weaver (of The HopPress) who, you'll recall, wrote the piece I discussed here. Here's how Ken explained it to me (edited from an e-mail):

I'm planning to introduce some shorter, recurrent (and biweekly) themes into the column that will allow me to get a bit of breathing room from the larger-scope topical pieces I tend to focus on. One of these added elements will be a "Session Beer Spotlight" column, with a focus on West Coast beers. This is a topic about which we both feel pretty strongly about, and it seems like there might be some way to coordinate the effort on my end. I'm not sure what exact form this would take, but I could imagine something along the lines of a clarifying statement at the top of each column stating something like, "The Session Beer Spotlight is an auxiliary project to Lew Bryson's The Session Beer Project, serving to highlight session beer offerings from the West Coast and beyond" 

Which sounded great to me, and I told Ken so. He and I did a little bit of detail discussion, and I'll be posting each one of them here, as long as he maintains his interest. Might even prod me to do more. Yay.

Here's the first one, on a session beer from what might seem an unlikely source: Russian River Aud Blonde. It's a great post, too: not just tasting notes, he talks to Vinnie Cilurzo about how and why he's doing lower-ABV beers, and the reasons and techniques are quite interesting.

Cheers, Ken! Thanks, and welcome aboard!