How About Session Beer Day...TO GO!!!

Scott Smith at East End Brewing in Pittsburgh -- a serious supporter of session beer with his Session Ale Series and year-round Fat Gary's Nut Brown -- just Tweeted excellent news for Session Beer Day: discount growlers of session beer at the brewery and their Growler Store location! 

 

Here's the full story from East End's website: 

 

Happy SESSION BEER DAY, April 7th!

A bit of history: the Repeal of Prohibition didn't happen all at once. There was a "Little Repeal Day" where lower alcohol beer was first made legal in late March of 1933. This was eventually followed by the Full Repeall of the 18th Amendment late that year, which made all forms of drink legal again. Apparently as a nation, we needed to ease back into the pool since no one in the country had consumed a drink for roughly 13 years. Sure, let's go with that.

To celebrate this pre-victory against such absurdity, and to further the cause of treating GOOD BEER like the excellent social lubricant that we all know it to be, we're doing our part for Session Beer Day here in the US. And since we happen to have 3 Session Ales in our lineup right now (and we pretty much ALWAYS have 3 Session Ales in our lineup), we're running the following Growler special at both our locations on Sunday, on fillups of these three beers:
Fat Gary Nut Brown Ale (3.8%), Honey Heather Ale (4.0%), and The Bitter End (4.2%)

• A buck off the fill up of a single Growler of any of these beers.
• Two bucks off of EACH Growler when you fill two of them. ($4 total)
• Three bucks off of EACH Growler when you fill three of them ($9 total)

And yes, this still works if you want to double/triple up on one beer.  So stop in and see us on Sunday.  Between tipping back a couple lower gravity beers on a school night and the 60 degree temps, it's going to be a great finish to the weekend!
Cheers - Scott


How can he do it? He's KUH-RAAAAAAAZEEE!

"Dry-heathering"

Scott Smith is making it work in Pittsburgh. His incredible Session Beer Series just keeps knocking out really interesting session strength beers. Witness the latest:

Session Ale #52 "Drayman's Heather Ale" is a long-boil Scottish ale that's been cool fermented, and has 3 separate heather additions. One for flavor, one for aroma, and another "dry-heathering" done in the fermenter. This beer is 4.2% abv, fitting nicely into our "Under 4.5%" Session Ale guidelines, that we follow... most of the time.
Some history: You may already know that hops don't grow well in the Scottish climate, so rather than pay the high prices for the hops imported from their "friends" in England, the Scottish crafted their beers to have very low hopping rates... certainly very little hops were used for such frivolities as flavor and aroma hop additions. At those prices, hops were just used for bitterness, and even then as few as possible. (Don't let Ron hear you say that...) Local plants were often used as a substitute bitterness source, and since Heather was in abundance, it seemed the likely choice. So we thought we'd give it a try here.
The long boil used to brew these beers develops more carmelization in the kettle which carries through to the glass.  And the cool fermentation temps give them a bright clear malt profile without all the esters you'll find in an English Ale.

The Scottish hopping theory aside (and I'll admit, I used to repeat it), this sounds like a truly interesting beer. Again. Cheers, Scott!