In England they head to the pub for a session. The stammtisch is a German beer hall tradition where regulars gather at the same table each week. In Ireland they crave craic on Saturday night. In America, we meet with friends at happy hour.
The stammtisch is a German beer hall tradition where regulars gather at the same table each week.
A big part of beer’s allure is how it brings together all sorts of people to hang out, talk, shoot a game of pool and cheer on the local team. Beer has a social side: you’re not there just for the beer, but you are there because of the beer.
For all of the talk about high-gravity beers and dry-hopped, triple-hopped and wet-hopped ales, when rounds are being bought over the course of the evening, it is often best to think outside of the big beer box. It’s not about pounding beers. It’s not about finding the highest alcohol content on the beer list. And it goes way beyond trying to one up the other guy with more IBUs. Sure, all of these things may take place from time to time, but this constant search for the extreme is blurring a key component of why most of us started enjoying beer in the first place—the social side.
Let’s be clear. While we are talking about “session beers” we are not imposing some uniform artificial alcohol by volume limit to a beer before allowing it to be admitted to the party. For the Great American Beer Festival a beer entered in the “Session Beer” category must have an ABV of 4.1 percent or less. If you stick to these guidelines, you would have to steer clear of Guinness Stout (4.3%), Red Stripe (4.7%), Samuel Adams Boston Lager (4.9%) and Pilsner Urquell (4.2%)—plus a bunch of other taps that no one would ever label extreme. Even Full Sail Brewing’s Session Lager comes in above the GABF limit at 5.1 percent ABV.
“There really is no defining statement as to exactly what a session beer is,” says Rob Denton, brewer at Snake River Brewing in Jackson, WY, which makes A.K. Sessions, a 4.1 percent ABV English mild. “A session beer is anything that is meant to be consumed in quantity—lower alcohol, usually lightly hopped. It can be an ale or a lager, it just has to be lighter drinking.”
Tone It Down A Notch
As craft beer enthusiasts, we all want flavor, freshness and fidelity. We want beer that tastes good, is served properly and lives up to some standards, including being faithful to a style. When we order a Baltic porter, we want a full-flavored, high-octane beer. But as a beer community we tend to get too caught up in the pursuit of doubles, triples, quadruples and imperials. There is a quieter path with plenty of great beers that won’t bring your palate or your brain cells to their knees. These are the brews that don’t always get the attention they deserve in beer magazines or blogs, but they give the beer fan a safe, flavorful haven during an evening at the bar.
There seems to be that reverb around doubles and imperials that quality is somehow attached to being extreme. But there is good beer in all styles, a beer for every purpose,” says Jamie Emmerson, executive brewmaster at Full Sail Brewing in Hood River, OR. “The truth is it is harder to brew a really good small beer. There is less there to hide any defects.”
Emmerson says the idea for the Session brand emerged after a group of painters working on a project at his house turned down some Full Sail Amber and Full Sail Pale Ale because they considered them middle-of-the-road beers, “too heavy and too bitter.”
We started thinking: Could you make a beer to intrigue these people and still make a quality beer? Could we bring these people into the craft beer fold?” Emmerson says. Session Lager, an all-malt brew with 20 IBUs and 5.1 percent alcohol by volume was the result. “We made a beer that is not diluted with corn and rice.”
What Full Sail has done with Session Lager has been going on for centuries in places like Cologne, Germany, where the typical kölsch is around 4.8 percent ABV, and London, where a good pint of bitter is often at or below 4 percent.
