Tonight they’ll sleep in tents, or just sleeping bags on the cold, hard cement, but tomorrow they’ll be listening to bands and drinking even more beer from when the proceedings kick off at 11 a.m., until late into the following night. The prelude to a multi-band, multi-stage rock festival?

Nope.

This is Dark Lord Day. The one day a year, late in April (this year the 25th), when the Three Floyds Brewery hosts quite possibly the biggest craft beer release party in the U.S.—a gathering of 5,000-plus people—to unleash its monstrous, and fiendishly sought-after strong stout, Dark Lord. The economy may be in dire straights, unemployment is continuing to rise, but there seems to be no shortage of people clamoring to pay $15 for a 22-ounce bottle (or six) of the latest vintage of Dark Lord, with its wax-dipped cap and cartoonish label.

Welcome to the insane world of limited-edition beers.

Power to the People

Three Floyds’ Dark Lord Day—a 12-hour marathon of beer and bands—is just the most extreme, over-the-top case of fanaticism engendered by a single beer. There are plenty of other limited-edition releases produced by equally small, regional craft brewers throughout the year.

Seasonals, by definition, are “limited”—be it a summer hefeweizen or a high-alcohol winter warmer—and most brewers have tapped into the growing popularity of that segment. But only a handful of breweries and specific beers—Lost Abbey’s Angels’ Share, Portsmouth’s Kate the Great, Foothills’ Sexual Chocolate, Deschutes’ The Abyss, and of course Dark Lord, to name a few—seem to stir up the kind of frenzy that compels people to travel from as far away as Japan and Denmark for an event such as Dark Lord Day.

It wasn’t always this way, though. And we can thank the Internet, with two sites—Ratebeer.com and Beeradvocate.com—specifically fueling the current madness. This was all surely an unintended consequence of the public ratings that members of these sites are allowed to post on specific beers they’ve tried—from pints they had at a pub to bottles they bought at a store to samples they tried at a beer festival. These, along with detailed tasting notes, then get compiled into rankings based on the points that Joe Public “reviewer” assigns the beers.

While it’s a sort of populist way to determine the “best in the world”—and isn’t that what the Internet’s becoming, giving a voice to the masses via blogs, forums and other new media?—it has also helped foster a certain hysteria. As of this writing, prior to Dark Lord Day 2009, nearly 500 BeerAdvocate users, going back to 2002 when Dark Lord was first made, have posted reviews of the various vintages of the beer released over the years, using florid language—”big malty chocolate cake with hints of toffee, coffee, clove and dark fruits”—to describe its every nuance.

One rather incredulous beneficiary of this kind of rating/reviewing hysteria is Tod Mott, the head brewer at Portsmouth Brewing in Portsmouth, NH, whose Kate the Great Imperial stout has been regularly ranked in the Beer Advocate’s Top 10. His annual Kate the Great release party in February has drawn people from up and down the East Coast and as far away as Illinois for the chance to pay $10 each for a couple of the scant 900 22-ounce bottles (there’s a two-per-person limit) that are produced. Last year’s offering sold out in a mere four hours, probably about as long as a flight from Illinois to New Hampshire. “It’s really funny because [the ratings are] so subjective,” he says. “There are so many incredible beers on the West Coast that I’m totally blown away that we’re ranked number four. This tiny little brewpub in the middle of Portsmouth. We produce 1,200 barrels of beer a year.”

But those rankings and the buzz surrounding them do have a lot of power. After all, what serious beer lover/enthusiast/geek wouldn’t want to try—cue symphonic flourish from heaven above—The Greatest Beers In The World? And since most of the beers topping these lists are, no surprise, damn hard to get a hold of because of the small production runs and, therefore, nonexistent national distribution, it just feeds that irrational desire many consumers seem to have for things that are hard to get.

A number of brewers mention these sites specifically when trying to explain the rise of the limited-edition cult beers. “[It’s] all thanks to the Beer Advocate, the goddamn Beer Advocate,” Portsmouth’s Mott grouses jokingly. “It’s ridiculous. I mean, [Kate the Great] is a good beer, but, Christ, there are so many good beers out there.”

Talk with beer aficionados, or read what they say on beer rating websites or the thicket of beer blogs, and you will discover that they often want beers to be bigger. “If it was bigger” is a common comment, or a plaintive “I wish it were bigger.” Yet you have to wonder just how big they want it, after reading about the “drinkability” of 8 percent or 10 percent beers. Sure, they may have a refreshing flavor, but after two or three…or four, how can you tell from down there on the floor?

I can remember precisely the first time I wished a beer was smaller. It was the day before Easter, 1997, and I was at a draft barleywine event in Philadelphia where the prize beer was a cask-conditioned Young’s Old Nick. As I sipped the 7 percent ABV beer, reveling in the low carbonation and the layers of malt and apricot esters, I idly wished that it was about 3.2 percent; I could have drunk it all afternoon. As it was, I stopped at one sample; I had to drive home, and I wanted to remember what my friends in the room were saying (if only to mock them later…which I have).

Drinking all afternoon is part of the idea behind session beers, a loosely-defined concept that transcends style or brewery considerations. Session beers are beers for session drinking, long enjoyable hours spent with friends in conversation, perhaps while playing cards or shooting pool. It is most often thought of as an English notion, and the milds and bitters that are cask-conditioned favorites there are the most commonly referenced session beers.

Pinning it Down

Trying to fine down that “loosely-defined concept” would be a good topic, itself, for an afternoon session. Is it the low alcohol, an ABV number below which a beer is a session beer? Is it the style, restricted to the milds and bitters that the English classically call session beers? Or is it something more subjective, maybe less concrete?

American brewers and beer drinkers generally pin “session beer” to “low alcohol.” Typically, we try to put a number to it: blame homebrew judging or just the science and engineering types that tend to be brewers.

What’s the number? That’s open to the individual. BeerAdvocate has a list of members’ top-rated session beers, compiled from all the beers on the site that are 5.5 percent or lower. I used the same 5.5 percent number in the original definition of the Session Beer Project, a series of posts I did on my blog to raise awareness of session beer (with some success; see sidebar). But 5.5 percent is well on the high side for ‘sessioning’ if you want to stay clear-headed; I’ve since revised my definition downward to about 4.5 percent and under.

Scott Smith, the owner (brewer, salesman, driver, janitor…) at East End Brewing in Pittsburgh, works by the numbers on a series of beers he calls Session Ales. “I tend to primarily define it by alcohol content,” he said. “I work in a 3.5 to 4.5 percent range. But some of my Session Ales have been sub-3.5 percent, one was under 3 percent. You can say it’s mild in flavor, but that doesn’t follow. The sourdough version of the kvass went insanely sour—in a good way! It was off the scale.” I didn’t get any of that, but Smith’s Lichtenhainer—the under 3 percent beer, he mentioned, a puckeringly tart and smoky sour-mash wheat beer—certainly didn’t suffer from a lack of flavor.

Shut Up and Have Another

Still, while those numbers are solidly session-strength, beers that are not mild in flavor don’t cut it for most British beer drinkers, who have a century of experience with session beer. I talked to Martyn Cornell, who literally wrote the book on British beer styles (Amber, Gold and Black: The Story of Britain’s Great Beers , available as an e-book at www.thecornerpub.co.uk), about what makes a session beer. He doesn’t think its numbers.

“Strength doesn’t, I think, have that much to do with it,” Cornell said firmly. “What makes a good session beer is a combination of restraint, satisfaction and ‘moreishness.’ Just like the ideal companions on a good evening down the pub, a good 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 good session beer will still leave you wishing for one more pint, to carry on the pleasure.”

An English brewer friend once put it a bit more succinctly. “A session beer,” he said, “is one you can drink all night with your mates—eight or nine pints—then get a curry, and still walk home without a problem.”

Maybe that’s where Bob Hanenberg, the owner of Grand River Brewing in Cambridge, ON, got his idea for a brewery dedicated to “full flavored beers with alcohol contents less than 5 percent for today’s population concerned about over indulgence.” That’s actually from the brewery mission statement, right at their website (www.grandriverbrewing.com).

Ask Hanenberg what a session beer is, and he falls back on the “all night” definition. “I don’t know an exact description,” he said. “Brits say it’s a beer you can drink in the pub all night, shoot the shit with your buddies all night, shoot darts and then walk home. Our Mill Race Mild is a perfect session beer.” It’s been a successful idea for Hanenberg. The brewery’s only 18 months old, but it’s been steadily growing.