Session Beers

My beer club is having a session beer tasting next month. What a session beer is, I’m not completely sure. I knew that it was something lower in alcohol so as to keep sessioners from over-doing it. I also knew that session beers has a different meaning to those in the UK than here. Steve over at Wait Until Next Year shudders whenever I mention drinking beers 6% or higher, yet he loves to partake in the beer session whenever possible. To me, a session consists of a beer or two at 6-7%, followed by a 9+% beer to finish off the evening^[1].

Over at Make Mine Potato, the author ponders the end of the session beer as limited to 4 or 5% ABV. He proposes some nice IPA’s or extreme sours as the ideal session beers, none of them fitting neatly beneath the British threshold of 4% ABV. Instead, he views the session as a daily occurrence when he can enjoy a beer no matter the ABV. Of course, as he argues elsewhere, who’s the deity that decided a session beer had to be 4-5%^[2]?

My good friend at Double Word Score had his own take. To make a long story short, he defined a session beer like so:

A session beer is a beer an individual consumer enjoys (subject to personal tastes in, among other things, hop to malt ratio and logo design) and is able to enjoy and drink more than two 12 oz. cans or pints of without doing something stupid (including but not limited to: making a wager of more than 10% of your paycheck on a poker game, calling old rivals and/or former lovers, urinating on your neighbor’s porch, etc.^[3])

I don’t know that there’s a better definition I’ve read than the one above.

So, where does this all leave us? I don’t really know. Is ABV a good barometer over taste or quality^[4]? Is an arbitrary number what I want to use to choose a beer for a session? What about sessionable beers that are crap? Are they worth an evening of my time?

To take the argument in another direction, I responded to Steve’s own post on the session beer in this manner:

That’s a rather reasonable take on the subject. However, I’m not sure why a higher gravity beer cannot be sessionable. Say we hit the bar and over the course of a few hours, you down four or so beers near 4% ABV and I sip on two beers in the 8-9% range. We’re looking at about the same amount of alcohol even though it’s obviously not equal amounts of liquid. I would argue that the advantage in the session goes to me.

1. Since you are drinking more beers, you are hitting the can at least twice as often during the session than I^[5]. In fact, I may never once interrupt conversation with a trip to the restroom.

2. When one consumes more, they spend more. Typically, a session beer might run in the ballpark of $3.50 for a pint (usually tonic, not imperial). My barley wine is probably $4.50-$5.00 a glass. You’ve just spent $14 and I have given the bartender $10 at the most.

3. “Traditional British beer is best when it is quaffed. It is not there to be sipped and savoured [sic]^[6].” I couldn’t have said it better myself. While I would like to discuss the complexities of the beer on hand, you would gulp the remainder of your second, immediately raising a finger for another. I look at beer drinking as more of a Zen-like experience, meant to be savored in the moment.

4. What do binge drinkers really drink? A hefty Russian Imperial Stout with notes of coffee, chocolate, and cherries as it sits at 10% ABV and 70 IBU’s or the bros downing a case of rather sessionable Bud Lite and it’s sub-4% 10 IBU status? I’d argue that the more sophisticated, more civilized drink is the high gravity beer.

That comment pretty much sums up my entire opinion of drinking beer. The question of what’s sessionable is merely a distraction^[7]. What we’re talking about here is drinking beer. Which would you rather do? Would you rather drink all that your belly can hold over the course of an evening or would you rather sip and enjoy a finely crafted beer over the course of a session? I mean, we all know the results of the former, don’t we Great Britain?

I choose the high gravity session beer for the same reasons I choose LP’s over MP3’s. There is care put into the recording and sequencing of an entire album. I don’t want just the hits, give me the filler; give me the bridge between hit #1 and hit #2. I want the big picture to give the great songs context. I want to enjoy all aspects of the craft, not simply consume it.

Of course, the biggest difference in opinions with which we are working is between the opinion held by Brits and the one promoted by Yanks. As with most of our language, the session is based on a British idea. The trouble is that a session, like many British philosophies^[8], doesn’t work in an American context. There was never a prohibition period in the UK like there was here^[9]. That time greatly affected the way Americans viewed beer. While British brewers continued to perfect their craft and beer drinkers across the United Kingdom met in pubs for a session of pints, Americans were going ape-shit for any beer or other alcoholic beverage they could obtain.Prohibition was lifted and the few brewers who survived produced a bland shadow of beer, opting for abstracts such as rice and corn, brewing flavorless, characterless “beer”.

American beer became something to guzzle. It was a means to an end. That end was to get wasted. Sure, there were sessions, but Americans do everything to the extreme. Binge drinking became a common occurrence as beer was cheaper by the case. It’s ingrained in our modern culture that to drink beer is to consume as much as possible. That has somehow become the norm in the American beer session.

Enter the craft beer movement…

Another group of brewers and beer enthusiasts discovered that beer didn’t have to be flavorless. They discovered the sessions in British pubs. They found there were monks in Belgium crafting the most beautiful beers. In other parts of Europe, brewers used the best ingredients in order to produce the tastiest beers. These were people who were choosing beer for its flavor and not just its “medicinal” purposes.

So, the session here in the States is either a binge-fest with your bros or an opportunity to sip on something more refined with other beer enthusiasts. This model doesn’t fit the British session. In the UK there is a culture of the session as community builder. The beer is merely the lubricant that does little damage in the process. I won’t bash British cuisine too harshly here, but let’s just say the flavors enjoyed across the pond are not the most spectacular, especially when it comes to the beer^[10]. Of course, that’s OK when you’re not sipping the beer slowly. The British session doesn’t depend on flavor as much as the American craft beer session. It depends on friendship, good conversation, and whoever is buying the next round. It seems to me that the Brits aren’t about savoring the beer, they’re about savoring the experience.

At some point, Steve proposed that maybe there needs to be a new term for the session of higher gravity beers I prefer. I considered something like “high-gravity session” or “craft beer session”, but they seemed to take the fun out of the session. Maybe it doesn’t matter what I call it. It’s a session. It’s a chance to try a really great beer. It’s beer on my deck on a hot summer night. It’s beer in front of the fire in the dead of winter. It’s beer with pizza. It’s beer for dessert. Really, it’s just beer.

So, I still don’t know that a session beer is the same for everyone. I guess it doesn’t really have to have one definition. I suppose it’s whatever you want it to be. If you’re at the pub, it’s probably a 4% bitter. If you’re at Sycamore, it might be a 9% hopbomb. If you’re at the frat house, it might even be a case of Natty Light^[11]. The term “session” doesn’t really matter. I’ll show up to my tasting next month with a beer in the 4-6% range as anything lower isn’t really worth the cost in flavor, but I’ll long for the session that will take place after the tasting when I finally get a chance to sip on that big, oak-aged imperial stout I’ve had my eye on.

[BA’s Top Session Beers]
[The Session Beer Project]

Notes:
1Although, I don’t choose my beers based on ABV. It just usually ends this way. Also, I usually opt for a lower gravity beer at the end of the evening in order to keep that hangover bug away.
2Please don’t name-drop some king or queen here. First, monarchs are not deities. Second, they have no say over Americans via the Revolutionary War.
3I have never done any of these, but I suspect the “etc.” refers to the things I have done when intoxicated inebriated annihilated.
4However, we beer geeks often discuss the booziness of a beer, suggesting that ABV does have an effect on flavor. Also, it was suggested somewhere that American brewers up the ABV so as to squeeze more flavor out of generally flavorless American strains of malt. I don’t think that’s true at all. However, if American malt is weak, I’d argue that British yeast tastes like stale vegetables. I don’t want to go there. This is not an anti-UK post. I promise.
5This is quite possibly the strongest point of my argument.
6This “[sic]” is only meant as a jab at British spellings. It’s meant to be funny. Even more ironic is how many grammatical and spelling mistakes can be found in the original comment which I have conveniently edited for the purposes of not looking like a bumbling idiot on my own blog.
7A distraction that has warranted many a blog post.
8“Philosophies” is a bit hyperbolic, I admit, but we’re talking about a cornerstone of British culture here.
9I sort of half-assed Googled this and decided Britain has never had prohibition. This very well could be wrong, but I stand by the fact that the British never experienced anything like our prohibition.
10A friend often refers to beers as tasting “British”, meaning that odd, stale, vegetably flavor in British yeast. The Belgians produce raisins in their beer; the British produce old vegetables. That’s not a knock on British beer. That’s just how it tastes to me.
11No. It’s never a case of Natty Light.