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.

My last five-cent hamburger? Memphis TN, in 1944. It was very small, about three inches diameter. I was weaned on 3.2 beer in the Marines during the war, which was all the military could serve enlisted people, It was free, but rationed, in combat zones. That designation indicated that the beer had only 3.2 percent alcohol by weight, the measuring standard of the Prohibition era. America’s pre-Prohibition brewers were mostly of German extraction, and they calculated their beer parameters using the mathematically simpler “by weight” system, which was equivalent to 4 percent “by volume.” Today we all use the universally understandable “by volume,” since almost all other alcohol standards, these days, are in that format as well.

Light Beer vs Heavy Beer

Old brewing texts describe the traditional difference between heavy and light in beer: 12.5 Plato. Less than 12.5 Plato (Original gravity, or OG, of 1050) before adding yeast delivers “light,” while more than that gives us “heavy.” Light beer may therefore be (loosely) defined as a beer with less than 5 percent ABV (alcohol by volume). Truly classic Guinness Draught, is a black light beer at OG 10.3-Plato and 4.4 percent ABV. Unfortunately, there’s no nationally available American brew quite like Guinness Draught, found in a surprising number of American pubs across the country.

As I noted above, most craft brews in this country are actually “heavy.” Worse, even the beer we call “session beer” is often brewed to over 5 percent ABV. Not so in Europe, where most of the beer finishes below the 5 percent edge.

We have become obsessed with the idea that light beer must be tasteless, exceedingly pale and calorie deficient. At the same time, we are taught to believe that any beer with less than 5 percent is weak, wussy beer; hence the fading malt liquor phenomenon: insipid wussy beer with plenty of alcohol. We have even become acculturated to disdain our traditional “3.2” beer (4 percent ABV). In Britain, however, such beer will not be wimpy at all. British milds and bitters will, for the most part, be delicious and very enjoyable. Good taste is possible even in non-alcohol beer. Check out NA Kaliber from Guinness!

But that’s not my point. Our craft brewers (bless them) have taken to brewing some truly magnificent beers: strong and delicious at 10 percent and up to over 20 percent alcohol. There are more such brews out there now than there are of what we formerly called “session beer” or what the British call “mild.” Strong beer cannot take the place of what I call table beer, which, if it is done in the traditional way will have less than 5 percent alcohol content. If one wanders the continent these days, most of the beer served in pubs is of 4 to 5 percent. Since the name “session beer” is no longer available, we need a new name. May I suggest “table beer.”

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.

Dark Horizons

Evidence of brewing in German goes back about 2,800 years, coincidentally to the area known as Franconia, in the north of Bavaria. Kulmbach, Franconia has the most traceable history, and the most traditional dark lagers, with documentation of monastic brewing there since 1349. This is not to say that the rest of Germany was a contemporary brewing wasteland: rather that the beers of Kulmbach were simply beter and more well-known. Other regions of Bavaria were prodigious in their own right, with mention of lagerbier in Munich brewing documents from the 1400s. But dunkel, as a distinct beer style, can be tracked to the 16th century, and is directly tied to the legendary Reinheitsgebot, the Bavarian Beer Purity Law of 1516.

The law was decreed by the Wittelsbachs, who ruled Bavaria from 1180 to 1918, and besides being royalty, were also brewers and held an omnipotent hand in much of the commercial decisions in the region during their lengthy reign. As much as the validity of the Reinheitsgetbot may be debated today, it was at the time an important protective verdict that ensured the purity and safety of not only the product, but also protected the livelihood of the farmers and brewers in Bavaria at the time. In essence, it inadvertently mandated the refinement of the local product by stating that beer could be made only with barley, hops and water (and later yeast, which was thought to be the wand of Providence).

As the local beer was dark, and lagering practices were already in place in chilly grottos of the hillsides, dunkel brewing flourished and improved. Add to this the notion of terroir as it related to hops and barley, a landlocked and somewhat isolated location relative to great exporters like the British, and local malting techniques, and one can see how a style took its intuitive identity. Germany was well ahead of the proverbial curve as far as hop cultivation and utilization was concerned, further adding to the distillation of design.

Dark Circles

Dunkel would not move towards its present form until three centuries post-Reinheitsgebot, when several innovations and one peripatetic visionary, Gabriel Sedlmayr II, brought the style into the modern world. An indirect-heat malt kiln, similar to a coffee roaster, was invented that early in the 19th century. It afforded entire control over the color and properties of the primary brewing component, malt. Having traveled to Britain and seeing the possibilities of this contraption and its ability to create pale, uniform malt, Sedlmayr extrapolated that he could still produce his dark, base malt but with even greater precision. That malt today is known as Munich malt and that which gives dunkel its profile; all of the color and character without the spurious smoky flavors of yore.

Sedlmayr, a member of the venerable brewing family that had recently taken over operations at Spaten, was a student of all things beer. He took a particular interest in the emerging science of yeast microbiology and cultivation, yet another arrow in his legendary quiver that helped delineate his brews even more. This technological convergence culminated with the invention of refrigeration, making lagerbier brewing a year-round, entirely controllable endeavor.

Munich dunkel enjoyed great popularity until the end of the 19th century, when some of the market gave way to paler beers. Many of these pale beers, specifically Munich helles, were brewed alongside the ever-popular dunkel, and as a result, may have ushered in, or at least popularized, the notion of multi-style brewing at a given brewery. Festbiers, pilsner and bock followed at many of them. Even in light of the movement towards pale beers over a hundred years ago, dunkel was unassuming and appealing enough to keep the interest of beer drinkers. That alone should be proof enough of its charm.

Dark Art

The soul of a dunkel, maybe more than any other beer, comes from its heavy reliance on a single malt. As stated earlier, it is a product of precise kilning, and one that was used in Munich to preserve the anachronistic quality of the brew. Even before the drum kiln was invented, beers were often made from a single batch of malt (directly heated, with wood or coal as the fuel). While this is not uncommon today, the difference lies in the control, and desired consistency and subtleties imparted therein. An ancient batch of malt would be smoky, probably harsh and a bit inconsistent. The modern kiln allowed degrees of malt to be made that would produce distinct beers that bear the name of the malt itself (pilsner, Vienna, pale ale and of course, Munich), but each successive dark malt would be much different than the other and could be used alone to produce each beer. The length and intensity of the kilning determines the final color, but also introduces a continuum of reactions that further resolves the unique profile.

As Munich is the darkest of the lot, it would differ the most from the original pale malt. This is especially true because of reactions that form melanoidins, a combination of protein and carbohydrate, and is responsible for the intense malty flavors and aromas. The result is a base grain that is less fermentable and therefore more full-bodied or dextrinous, but also an opulent one, full of malty, toffeeish, bready and caramelized notes in both the palate and nose, a deep brown color tinted with garnet and ruby and soft, supple contours.

A dunkel could be made exclusively of a dark version of Munich malt, as the beers of Sedlmayr were, to showcase the vast complexity that a single component can lend to a brew. Many are augmented with some caramel malt, or softened with Pilsner malt, but nonetheless a great dunkel gets by primarily with its bill of Munich malt. Such is the art of producing a beer and, in this case, creating a single descriptive, formulative entity as a means to the end. Brilliance in simplicity. All of these traits may be even more accentuated if the brewer employs decoction mashing.

Dunkels are hopped with reserve, though a hint of noble German hops should be evident, to display the malty platform on which this brew performs. Dunkels are rounded out with a cool fermentation and long cold-conditioning period typical of all lagers, lending a smooth, soft character without the brusque edge typical of many dark beers. Modest in strength, at around 5 percent ABV, dunkels can be considered a session beer and one that offers more than many others.

For a dark brew, Munich dunkel is satisfying across a broad spectrum of whims. Expectedly, they are rich, yet not heavy. Surprisingly, they finish with a quenching crispness. Moreover, the paradox of complexity from simplicity is apparent from aroma to finish, a manifestation of malting artistry and understated panache. It is a beer appropriate enough for the languid days of summer or the cuddle of winter.

Michael Jackson’s great book, World Guide to Beer (1976), described about 24 beer styles from across the world, along with good information as to where and how most of them were being brewed at that time, in the world’s great beer-making countries.

Presently there are over 80 styles (with maybe a hundred variants) presented by the Great American Beer Festival people and the Beer Judge Certification Program for homebrewers. There seem to be many more probabilities on the horizon.

Obviously, the old 1516 Reinheitsgebot, with only four ingredients allowed, is no longer satisfactory. We need to go back 5000 years to the Chinese Reinheitsgebot, Di, Huo, Qi, and Shui, the four primal elements of the universe: Earth, Fire, Air and Water—earth representing everything, but especially everything that grows; fire to make it work; air, as in spirit, from the yeast; and water as a home for it all.

For the Twenty-First Century

As I see it, there are a great number of probabilities for this 21st century, and we can see them at the marketplace already. What beer should a populist brewer brew? If they want their customers to tell friends about their “great beer,” these brewers should get busy.

Fresh Hops

First, and maybe best of the lot, is the ever more popular and annual “fresh hop” or “harvest” beers being brewed by an increasing number of brewers across the country. This beer style was probably invented by Bert Grant at his Yakima, WA, brewery. He called it a “beer-jolais nouveau.” This beer type has been compared favorably with Nouveau wines, those early season delights that titillate wine enthusiasts. This year has seen near critical mass of fresh hop brews in production across America.

The New Imperials

There is also a grand tendency to brew outrageous beers in the so-called “Imperial” department: “Imperial,” as in too strong, too hoppy, too weird and too much. Or is it not enough? Can a beer really have too much alcohol, too many hops,

It’s obvious why you don’t want to brew a double imperial pale ale or bourbon doppelbock for the uninitiated. The intensity of these beers is a visceral shock to people unfamiliar with their charms, and won’t win you any converts. A lighter touch is needed. The trick is to hook people, ever so gently; then with a tug, set the hook. Who says you can’t change people? I’ve seen it happen over and over. And so the movement grows.

It’s no big secret that bitterness is an acquired taste. In fact, the bitter taste receptors on your tongue have evolved to warn us against eating plants containing toxins that have evolved to be bitter to give us just that warning. Western culture, with few exceptions, has little use for bitter foods, although many Asian cuisines employ it with relish. And, as you know if you travel in good beer circles, the quest for bitter beers can be a bit of an obsession. But for our party beer, we’re going to want stay away from high bitterness levels.

We do want a nice hop presence. This can be accomplished by the use of high-quality, low-alpha varieties like Saaz or Goldings, and employing them so as to get maximum aroma with minimum bitterness. This means late kettle additions are critical.

As a brewer, it’s a great trick to make a lighter beer that is satisfying quaff after quaff. Great malts, top-grade hops and careful attention to the details of brewing are all critical to getting it right. In our recipe, the low hop rate and the use of some darker malts should make it work with almost any good drinking water. If you know your water is very hard, it might be best to take steps to remove the hardness or simply dilute it, to avoid any harsh bitterness in the finish. Likewise, a good liquid yeast is always recommended. Choose one that fits the style or your artistic fancy.