DRAFT Magazine

By Zak Stambor

While extreme beers, like ultra-rare Russian imperial stouts, viscous bourbon barrel-aged double stouts, or inordinately hoppy double IPAs garner the spotlight, there’s a craft beer counter-movement quietly brewing in the shadows.

Session beers — a wide range of lagers and ales that are ideal for extended drinking sessions in that they check in roughly around or below 5 percent alcohol by volume (ABV) and are well-balanced between malty sweetness and hoppy bitterness in order to offer (Bud Light catchphrase be damned) high drinkability — are finally getting some respect both from brewers and imbibers.

The reason is twofold, says Greg Hall, brewmaster at Chicago’s Goose Island Brewery. The number of craft beer drinkers continues to grow exponentially, which means there are more people drinking all styles of microbrew beer. But also, extreme beers are often too extreme — both in flavor and ABV — to drink all the time.

“I love Bourbon County Stout but most of the time when I have it, it’s one and done,” says Hall of his brewery’s 13 percent ABV bourbon barrel-aged imperial stout that the brewery’s Web site claims has more flavor in one sip than your average case of beer.

With a session beer, like Goose Island’s Honker’s Ale, a 5 percent English-style bitter, Hall can have a few pints when he gets home from work without forcing his taste buds to work overtime and his wife to wake him for dinner.

“Craft beer drinkers can’t just drink double IPAs and Dark Lord [Three Floyds’ Russian Imperial Stout] all the time,” he says. “If you want to have a beer with flavor, and you want to stay in craft beers, you need to reach for a session beer for a day when you’re cutting the lawn or watching a ballgame.”

Session Beer Project
If there’s a ringleader to this quiet counter-revolution, that man would be Lew Bryson, a Philadelphia-based drinks writer who mans the blog, “Seen Through a Glass.”

At a barleywine festival in 1998 Bryson found his calling while drinking a pint of cask-conditioned Young’s Old Nick Barley Wine Ale.

“It was so damn good that I thought to myself, ‘I wish this was 3.7 percent so I could drink it all afternoon,’” he says. “And that’s when I realized that that’s really what I want — a beer with a lot of flavor that I can drink a lot of.”

Nearly 10 years passed before he decided to make embark on the quest for the best low-alcohol, full-flavored pints with the January 2007 launch of the Session Beer Project. Bryson describes the venture as a “non-profit, unorganized, unofficial effort to popularize and support the brewing and enjoyment of session beers.”

Seven months later he helped organize what very well may have been the first-ever beer festival devoted to session beers, the three-day Zieglersville, Penn.-based Session Summer of Love in which all the beers were 5.5 percent ABV or less. Then, this year he launched the Session Beer Project Web site and dubbed 2009, “The Year of the Session.”

These efforts aim to raise the profile of less alcoholic, less extreme beers, like Yards Brewing Company’s Brawler Pugilist Style Ale and Harpoon Brewery’s Brown Session Ale. He hopes that with more attention, brewers will brew more session beers, restaurants and bars will carry more of them and beer drinkers will drink, and appreciate, more of them — especially since subtle beers require just as much, if not more, skill to brew than the extreme beers.

“It seems like all we ever talk about is the latest outrageous beer,” he says. “I’m not anti-big extreme beers. I love them. But I also get bored by them because often they offer the same whack in the head with a different label.”

One reason that extreme beers continue receiving attention, he says, is that they boldly stand in such stark contrast to macrobeers like Budweiser and Miller Genuine Draft.

“The beers that bored beer drinkers and drove them to craft beers were bland lager beers,” Bryson explains. “And now people just assume that all lagers or lower alcohol ales suck. To be fair and honest, a lot of lower alcohol craft beers have sucked, but that’s not necessarily the case anymore.”

In fact, there are some like Tom Kehoe, founder and brewmaster of Philadelphia’s Yards Brewing Company who are focused on brewing beers that can be someone’s “everyday beer.”

“Not every beer we brew is meant to knock someone’s socks off because you can’t drink that all the time,” he says. “We’re not looking to do anything crazy, just brew a good beer that you can have a few of every day.”

Less is more
Truly appreciating session beers requires an attention to subtlety, says Kehoe.

While they can — and should be — full in flavor, they can’t overwhelm the palette so that you can’t have just one or two.

That’s the reason Kehoe named his 4.2 percent English dark mild ale Brawler since “you can go a few rounds with it.”

The challenge of brewing a beer like Brawler, he says, is that it has both “mild” and “dark” in its name.

“Mild beers have these negative connotations,” he says. “And people run away from anything that’s close to mass-produced macrobeer — whether in alcohol content or subtlety. I think that’s what has happened to milds and bitters [traditional English-style beers]. They’re just everyday kind of drinks. And isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Drink a beer a day.”

While session beers may be every day-types of beverages, ensuring their consistency is not. They require absolute precision, says Goose Island’s Hall.

“Anyone can order a pound of Amarillo hops and make a beer pretty hoppy and delicious,” he says. “Obviously some are better at that than others, but when you add all those hops you can cover up your flaws and inconsistencies. But with a 20 IBU [International Bitterness Units scale which provides a measure of bitterness in beer -- from 5 IBU American lagers to 100-plus double IPAs] the beer has to be clean. People can taste the difference.”

– Zak Stambor agrees with Tom Kehoe: We should be drinking a beer every day.