Homebrew Session Beer in Time For Session Beer Day!

Denny Conn and Drew Beechum, well-known homebrew authors (Experimental Homebrewing and the upcoming Homebrew All-Stars), interviewed me on their podcast Experimental Brewing about Session Beer Day (and session beer in general, and the horrible Pennsylvania liquor code) recently. I'm going to get a link up to that shortly, but I wanted to get this up ASAP.

Homebrewer selfie: Dana Cordes mashing in a dark mild

Denny and Drew are long-time supporters of session beers (I remember drinking one of Drew's excellent milds years ago at a homebrew event, and loving it), so in celebration of Session Beer Day, they posted a Session Beer Day Recipe Bonanza at Experimental Brewing. It's FOURTEEN homebrewing recipes for beers like milds, bitters, table beers, Berliner Weisse, session IPA, even a session-strength lager. Most of them can still be brewed in time for consumption on Session Beer Day, April 7.

Are you a homebrewer? Get at it! And you'll be quaffing fresh-brewed session beer on Session Beer Day!

Philly Homebrewers: time to show off your session chops

I heard from Mat Falco at Philly Beer Scene magazine that they're running a homebrew competition specifically for session beers! Check the details here; it's actually a bit more complicated -- and interesting! -- than that. It's a two-round competition, run through the area's homebrew shops; homebrewers affiliate with a shop and enter their first beers by March 3. (Update: there's a session competition in Pittsburgh, too: see below!)

The first round is the session beer one. Competitors may brew any 'style' of beer, as long as it is 4.5% ABV or under: "Anything over will not be considered. There are no other restrictions for this round." Furthermore, no style guidelines are imposed. "Good beer is good beer no matter how close or far off it is from the style it’s categorized as. We are looking for a well-brewed, flavorful interpretation of a session beer." I'm all for that; part of the impetus for the Project is to engender innovation in flavorful lower-alcohol beers.

Here's where it changes, and gets really interesting. For the second round, the top two brewers from each of the homebrew shops then brew another beer, using a pound of beans from One Village coffee roasters (supplied by the homebrew shops; not all the beans must be used in the beer)...and just to make it fun, there is a stylistic restriction on this one: no stouts or porters, the usual suspects in coffee beers. (Not to make a suggestion, but I recall a coffee-infused dark mild Gordon Grubb made at Nodding Head that was quite tasty; called it Up All Night, I think, and it was definitely not a porter.) Winners will be announced during Philly Beer Week.

Great to see this kind of interest and love for session beers!

Got word that TRASH, the Three Rivers Alliance of Serious Homebrewers, is also doing a homebrew competition with a session component -- and also using the 4.5% limit, thanks! Details are here; the winner will be scaled up and brewed on commercial scale at East End Brewing, where Scott has been a friend of The Session Beer Project for years.

Homebrewing Session Beers

I took your suggestion, and suggested a Session Beer homebrewing competition to the American Homebrewers Association. Here's their response, from Project Coordinator Janis Gross (who we like; check out what she's brewing!):

Thanks for sending us your link and your thoughts about something I'm really big on too! I'll definitely check out your blog, and I may even be able to post the link with one of the Big Brew recipes this year, English Mild. (It appears that this year's Big Brew recipes aren't up yet; I'll link to them here when they are. Meantime, here's last year's Chiswick Bitter recipe (in all-grain, or extract-plus), an ordinary bitter brewed in honor of the extraordinary life of Michael Jackson.) I have been championing session beers for some time now, and the mild recipe will be the one I brew for Big Brew.

As for your reader's comments about having a competition for session beers, we had a Low Gravity/Session Beers Club-Only Competition 2 years ago (February 2007) that was hosted by the Maltose Falcon Brewing Society club who are renowned for their giant beers. (Results are here; and the Maltose Falcons may be renowned for giant beers, but as I found out, they do a pretty damned good mild, too!)

The Club-Only Competitions (COCs) are the only competitions the AHA puts on apart from the National Homebrew Competition. The COC schedule is currently booked through May 2012 and there is one session style competition scheduled for January/February, 2010, a year from now. That competition is being hosted by the Impaling Alers in Kent, WA.

The styles for the COC are for the most part chosen by the hosting club from a list I provide. My policy is to not repeat a BJCP style for 3 years, so my available BJCP style list is always changing. I don't see the AHA specifying a Session Beers competition to be one of the 6 COCs each year, but I could be wrong.

So there you have it. Now...if any of you who homebrew would want to start up a session beer competition in their local club (ahem...Bob), I'd be happy to post about that here if you let me know. Meantime, I'll see what I can do about prodding the Philadelphia homebrew scene on sessions.