"I come in praise of session beer"

Pete Brown has a great beer blog, and you should read it all the time.

It's tempting to just let that stand as the whole of this post -- and it would be good enough! -- but I didn't realize that he's also writing a column for a website called London Loves Business, and when he posted a link to one on Facebook, I started reading back through them, and came to this one: Step aside craft beer, it's time for our "session beers" to shine. Please, go read it and come back for a discussion. I'll wait here.

Nice piece, right? I loved this bit:

The only problem, if not with beers like this [big flavorful 'craft' beers, by which I'm pretty sure he means 'American-type craft beers'] then with some of the people who drink them, is the tendency to think in binary black and white. If extreme and experimental beers are exciting and flavourful, it follows – in some minds at least – that traditional, lower strength beers must be boring.
I’ve never believed this.
I’ve always disagreed with it in principle.
But I have found myself, whenever I’m given a choice, opting for the adventurous.

I tend to do that myself...or I did. Now I find myself shying away from the huge palate wreckers -- mostly, I still grab one occasionally, and it's probably a 'vacation' -- and seeing what's offered 'on the left side of the dial.' Can a brewer make interesting low alcohol beers? That's a talent, a skill, and I'm curious to find it.

Now, let's take this on:

The British tradition for the low strength sessionable pint is unique in the world. The craft beers we enjoy now are heavily influenced by North America where, lacking the British cask ale tradition, high alcohol levels are an important factor in delivering character to a beer.

That first sentence, of course, is the drum that beer contrarian Andy Crouch pounds here until the head breaks. "In choosing the ‘session’ banner, American promoters have knowingly wedded themselves to a beer culture that is entirely foreign to this country." We have no session beer culture, Andy says, so this seed will fall on stony places, and because it has no root, it will wither away.

I say this underestimates both craft brewing and the American beer drinker. In fact, if you paraphrase Crouch's piece and substitute "microbrews" for "session beers," it reads almost exactly like it was written by a smug mainstream brewer in 1992: micros get lots of press but they don't actually sell; ales aren't American and they're heavy so most Americans won't like them; they cost more than anyone's going to pay; the whole idea's too complicated because we really just want to drink a beer; it's too much work for a bar to carry or a bartender to answer questions about so it won't work.

Well, it took 20 years, but every one of those points has been crushed. I see the same kind of thing working out for session beer (and cask, for that matter: after years of muddy crap and struggle, more and more American bars are regularly serving cask beers -- often session beers -- in good condition). What's more, it's working faster, because we've already been here and we know how it works: good beer, talking to bartenders, spreading the word, and not worrying about naysayers. We've also got brewers who have seen a philosophy of "We're brewing it because we like it, and we'll keep brewing it that way" work, so if they're session fans, they're just going to brew it, and give it a chance to catch on. (Just talked to John Trogner at Tröegs yesterday, and he said, "We're going to be brewing more session beers." Out of the blue, just like that. They want them for the large new tasting hall they have. Smart.)

But...are we doomed to ridicule because of the number issue? Is Andy right when he poses the setpiece question, "Is 4.5 ABV session worthy or must it be 3.5 or lower? Often obsessed with the numbers, the side of session beer that promotes balance and flavor harmony is lost in the process. Belaboring such beer minutiae escapes or disinterests most drinkers."

It's an issue, but I disagree that the idea, the love, of balance and flavor are lost in the process. Those are the keys for me, but you can have balance and flavor harmony in beers of any alcohol level. The numbers are necessary -- if it's not below a certain ABV level, the whole idea of a low alcohol beer with balance and harmony is lost -- but the friction is not. The GABF's "definition" of session beer has not helped things at all; forget the ABV levels -- which are laughable -- it's that "session beer" is defined as a lower strength "version" of a style (more on that here). That's a problem for the next post: "session" is not "imperial," because I believe that's where the whole issue is bogging down.

Meantime...I'll leave you with Pete's close, because I loved it:

So let’s hear it for the session pint – the pint you can drink at lunchtime without falling asleep at your desk in the afternoon. The pint you can sink quickly on a hot day without setting a trajectory towards oblivion, via the kebab shop. The pint where the aromatic hops stroke your cheek rather than punch you in the face, and where flavours dance subtly rather than pogo on your tongue.
My love for strong, heady craft beer will never die. But sometimes you find yourself at a bar where every beer you want, you want it to be the last beer of the night. That’s when you yearn for the session pint – your trusty friend with whom drinking responsibly doesn’t have to mean not drinking enough.

Some Consistently Interesting Session Beer Commentary

Joe Stange's blog Thirsty Pilgrim has featured some interesting posts on session beers, and I've been neglecting reposting them here. So...

From October, a post about "session" as both adjective and verb, something that's gotten a few knickers twisted -- relax, it's just beer.

And from November and January, Joe notes the Public House Brewing Company in Rolla, Missouri is opening as an all-session beer brewery, and then visits and tells us about their "toasted-bready, dryish, full-flavored mild weighing in at 2.5% strength."

Keeping it up, he posted this week about the trumped-up "Session vs. Extreme CAGE MATCH!!!"...and suggests we should trump it up even more. And you know? Might be a good idea!

Check out Joe's blog; it's a good one.

(And thanks for reading the Session Beer Project! It's actually passed my 'main' blog in the Wikio ratings, which is kinda cool.)

RateBeer Top 100 reactions

The Rate Beer Best Beers in the World list is out -- which is nothing more than an aggregate of the 100 beers with the highest rating on the site -- and yes, no surprise, it is heavily weighted towards big beers, and heavily weighted towards a relatively small group of pants-wettingly hyped breweries (over half of the 100 "best beers in the world" come from only nine breweries?). I have no real problem with the second issue -- things like that happen in this kind of rating/voting -- but the first one? As Stephen Beaumont said,

"In the style listing of the top 50 beers, the word “Imperial” appears 39 times! The word pilsner? Zero times, in the entire 100."

Beaumont titles that post "Why Brewers Make So Many Strong Beers." Martyn Cornell, a strong voice for session beers and traditional British beers, takes it a step further, titling his post on the subject "Why extremophiles are a danger to us all," a post that has set off a tiny bit of a firestorm. Both posts point out that this kind of widely-reported excitement -- in what is essentially a niche within a niche -- has an effect on what beers are available for the average craft beer drinker.


It is not my intention to set off a firestorm today. Not my nature, you know. What I do want to say is that this is exactly the reason this blog is here: to draw more attention to session beers, beers "to the left of the dial," that are under the big ABV radar but still have deliciously full flavor. It's working, but maybe we need to deliver a louder statement. You know...set off a firestorm. 

Accordingly, I am reading manifestos this week, learning from the masters.

A specter is haunting American craft breweries -- the specter of Session Beer.
All the Powers of extreme craft brewing have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter. Where is the beer under 6% that has not been decried as "weak session beer" by its opponents in extremism? Where the extreme brewer who has not charged that session beers take attention from the extreme beers that fire the public imagination?*
Two things result from this fact:

I. Session Beer is already acknowledged by all extreme craft brewers and drinkers to be itself a Movement.
II. It is high time that Session Beer brewers and drinkers should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Session Beer with a Manifesto of the movement itself.

Or:

When, in the course of enjoying beer, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of drinkers to assume among the beer drinkers of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all good beer drinkers are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are beer, variety, and the pursuit of hoppiness; that to supply these rights breweries are instituted, deriving their just powers from the purchases of the drinker. Whenever any form of beer hype becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new movement, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its definition in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their drinking pleasure and happiness.

Hmmm...who would have thought Elizabeth Cady Stanton's writing would serve as a model for a drinking platform? Will wonders never cease? I am liking the manifesto idea. But I think I'll keep it shorter. Much shorter, it's got to fit on a t-shirt!


*Guys...absolutely all in fun. I know that all involved have made or enjoyed session beers. I'm just riffing on Karl Marx here, and his Manifesto is the most famous...and required a bogeyman. The manifesto I write for the SBP will not. Promise you that.

Another from England; just a good day for it

Martyn Cornell, one of the new breed of beer history revisionists (and a fearless writer), has a piece up on his excellent blog The Zythophile about "The mystery of sessionability." Martyn was nice enough to provide a quote for me for a piece I did on session beers earlier in the year, and has taken that original quote, in its entirety, and put it here; it was, as he says, much too long for me to use.

But I think that's part of the issue about 'session beer.' It's NOT an easy concept, and that's part of why so many people here in the U.S. don't get it (right, Keith?). Here's the first part of what Martyn says:

I love session beers. I love the way they make a good evening down the pub with friends even better. What makes a good session beer is a combination of restraint, satisfaction and “moreishness”. Like the ideal companions around a pub table, a great session beer will not dominate the occasion and demand attention; at the same time its contribution, while never obtrusive, will be welcome, satisfying and pleasurable; and yet, though each glass satisfies, like each story in the night’s long craic, the best session beers will still leave you wishing for one more pint, to carry on the pleasure.

That's just the start. Go read the rest. It's lovely. And Martyn? Thanks again for the quote!

Another Country Heard From

The ball is rolling. Joe Stange at Thirsty Pilgrim, an American blogging about beer while living in Brussels (the dog!), has posted this about Belgian session beers. Most American beer geeks don't realize it, but Belgium has just as strong a session beer -- "table beer" -- tradition as their strong beer tradition. The UK gets it, the Czechs get it, Belgians get it...what more examples do you want, folks?