SBP: Action Steps, Courtesy of Stan

Stan Hieronymus, who's been commenting on this page from day one (thanks to a little back and forth we've been on about session vs. extreme beers for months now), left this comment about how do we get brewers interested in making session beers.

As consumers, we can order the beers. Talk nice about them at the bar. Urge our friends to drink them. Leave a nice tip. Compliment the brewers. Suggest you'd like to see more beers like that. Ask how they are made (attention homebrewers: DON'T tell the professional brewer how to lower the gravity and make a better beer). Find out how the brewer might get more flavor even while tossing in less grain.

As reporters, we must write more about these beers. Back in 2000 you waxed delightfully romantic on Pa. beers (when I didn't even ask for session choices): http://www.realbeer.com/edu/abm/tastings/20000710-pa.php

I also think we need to write about more than the beer itself. Discuss the craft of brewing, and brewing low alcohol beers. Talk about how well they work with food (the buzz topic of the 21st century anyway). Mention the great conversations they allow us. Lionize pub/session culture.

Yes. Work to be done, so let's get at it. I'll try to sell some session beer pieces, you guys get to work asking for more session beers. And let's all try to get across the idea of what a session beer is. Remember: session beers mean more time drinking beer, more beer to drink, and more fun beer-driven conversation.
It's all good.

SBP: Heroes #1

From time to time, as it occurs to me, I'm going to put in breweries who do a great job on session beers. The first, an obvious one for me, is The Wharf Rat, in Baltimore. They regularly have 15+ of their own beers on, and many are under 5%, including their signature Best Bitter and SW1 ales. Very English, but not afraid to branch out, these are beers for sitting out on the sidewalk all afternoon with, as I have on a couple very happy occasions. The British ale yeast used makes for great flavor in a lower alcohol beer, and the cask ale is dead-on delish. Plan a trip, have a session. These guys get it.

SBP: Chicken, egg...or feathers?

I've been having a discussion about session beers with a couple BeerAdvocates, including Todd Alström, one of the founders. Why don't session beers sell, is the topic, and after some discussion, I pared it down to these three questions:

Do they not sell because people want more alcohol? (Brewers have told me that when people find out that a beer's low-alcohol, they shy away from it.)

Do they not sell because they're unfamiliar styles and flavors? (American craft brew drinkers have been exposed to a lot of piney/citrus American hops and clean-fermenting American ale yeasts; they often find beers brewed with the more characterful Brit ale yeasts to be funky, or just plain wrong.)

Do they not sell because the ones that are being brewed are just not that good? (A real issue: it is not easy to brew a good session-strength beer...or so I've been told.)

Interestingly, Todd raised a fourth issue: in Boston, he says, people do want session beers, thirst for them, and drink them up every time they come along...but the brewers just won't make them. All too busy following the latest hops/alcohol trend, he says.

Which brings up the old story: selling craft beer is all about education. Usually that means the brewers teaching customers about how to enjoy different -- session! -- beers, but if needs be, maybe the brewers need to be educated by customer demand.

What's the story where you are? Do you get a fair number of session beer choices? Do people drink them when they're available, or are they a brewer's conceit? Do your local brewers make enough session beers? Do your local session beers suck -- sour, insipid, over-hopped, under-attenuated? Tell us the story...and maybe some brewers will give a listen.

Sausage

I haven't homebrewed since 1994, when my daughter was born, but I did start making my own mustard about three years ago, and I started making sausage last year. Part of it was an ornery response to Weight Watchers: "I'll make my OWN sausage, dammit!" But it turned out to be pretty damned good. I just went into my first sausage-making frenzy of the winter season (you generally want to make sausage in the cold weather; the colder the working surface, the better, sanitation-wise).

Friday I made a sausage from chicken (breasts and thighs, the thighs add flavor and a bit of fat), feta, and spinach, very nice. Saturday I went nuts, up at 6:20 to start grinding pork for my own-design "Double Pig Specials" (a standard breakfast link with the addition of a pound of Hatfield double-smoked bacon for that authentic smokey flavor), Hot and Sweet Northern Italian-style (very garlicky, and the hot was interesting once I put in crushed red peppers and ground ancho peppers, but ultimately a failure: here in the Philly area, I can easily buy better Italian sausage, which I will from now on), and two other sausages inspired by a Friday morning visit to the 9th Street "Italian" Market in Philly.

Let me tell you how that happened. After the morning session of Groundhog Day at the Grey Lodge, I went down to the market. Had a fresh slice of tomato pie at Sarcone's (and got a loaf of nice crusty bread), then got a scale for sausage-making at Fante's, then got inspired. I'm in DiBruno Brothers, just schmoozing, when I see Stilton cheese. Hmmmm...I got a recipe...so I got half a pound of Stilton, and added it to my Beefy Pub Bangers recipe, along with two big tablespoons of Kelchner's horseradish. The Pub Bangers recipe is beef (odd already), with bread crumbs, and with the Stilton and horseradish, this became the lambic of sausages: stanky, distinctive, and oddly attractive: a real lonely outlier of a sausage that some people just loved.

The other sausage came around completely by accident. I was walking by a store in the market when I saw lamb patties in the window. That would be good for dinner, I thought, and got four. Well, they were fat and full, about two pounds total, and...they're already ground. Sausage short-cut!!! So I toasted some pine nuts, chopped up a lot of fresh rosemary, and made some absolutely dynamite lamb sausage.

How good were they? Damned good, but don't take my word for it: I took them to a Super Bowl party today, and two people asked me where I bought the sausage. Made it, I said. Wow, they said, it's great! Score!

And just to make it beer-friendly...let me say that the Chicken & Feta & Spinach was excellent with a dab of mustard and a glass of Lenny's R.I.P.A., which was part of a courteous gift to my host from Matt at the Beer Yard in compensation for a misunderstanding about a keg (once again proving that Matt Guyer rules the retail beer world).

SBP #3: Middle Ages Apricot Ale

I went to the Groundhog Day festivities at the Grey Lodge today, one of my favorite beer events. And I was going to write some notes on a session beer. And I had six beers in the course of the day (two two-hour visits, 9 hours apart). I thought at least two of them would be session beers: Victory Sunrise Weiss, a Bavarian hefe, and Appalachian's Zoigl Star Lager, a Czech lager. Nope. Sunrise is 5.7, Zoigl is 5.9. Damn. Sure seems a bit high, those beers. So...why have more than one? On to something different.

Like Middle Ages Apricot Ale. Yeah, a fruit beer. But I really really like the guys at Middle Ages -- and not just because they brew curst good beer, but because they are solid dudes, real mensches. So I tried one. Good call, Lew. It's 4.4%, and the apricot tastes like ripe apricot, not the half-green, "Pat-the-Bunny"-whiskery-Dad-sandpaper-face-fuzzy apricot nastiness you find in some other apricot beers. The first sip was weird after the Nodding Head Sled Wrecker I'd had earlier -- a big spicy ale -- but the second cleared it, and was simply pleasant. I wandered about the bar, sipping at my fruit-shrub, and just relaxing with it. Not a lot of beer, not heavy, not hopped all to bejayzus, not BIG!!!!!, just pleasant and well-made. Thanks, Marc and Tim: nice job.

SBP: More Sightings

They're talking about the Session Beer Project over on Real Beer:

http://www.realbeer.com/discussions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=13904

Nice community over there, too. You should check it out.

Just So No One Misunderstands...

I guess I'd better clear this up now. Just because I'm starting this blog partly as a platform for this loosely defined Session Beer Project, it does not mean that I do not like big beers, do not like experimental beers, do not like (deep breath here) extreme beers. I do like them -- to a point.

Hell, just look at the blog: the second set of tasting notes are on the Geary 20th Anniversary Ale, not a session beer by any reasonable stretch of the imagination, even you serious extreme geeks' imaginations (and you know who you are, you guys saying "Barleywine? That's my lawnmower beer, baby." Nice).

The main point of the Session Beer Project is to give session beers a little tiny bit of equality of attention, attention that's mainly going to the so-called extreme beers right now. Because, really: most of the world, every day, drinks beers that are under 5% ABV. Really.

But the Session Beer Project is not Seen Through A Glass. It's just part of it, albeit a large part of it. STAG is also my blog, where I'm going to write about whatever suits my freakin' fancy. So don't anyone be putting their preconceived notions all over my blog, or calling me on what they think is a contradiction in my terms. Cuz I got an answer to that.

Right. Onwards!

SBP #2: BridgePort Beertown Brown

I'll say this for BridgePort: they know how to send samples of a session beer. Two weeks ago a 12-pack of their new Beertown Brown showed up at my mailbox, just before we had my daughter's 13th birthday party. It was the hit of the party, enjoyed by all (the adults, yes, of course, the adults). And why not? It's a light-brown beauty, with a nice ruddy touch to it, a tenacious cap of foam, and a wonderfully malty nose with a nutty earthiness: very British, and so it's supposed to be. The nose follows through perfectly on the palate: this is a very honest, up-front beer that tastes just like it smells, and it tastes wonderfully fresh. It's hovering on the edge of SBP parameters at 5.2%, but it was with beauties like this in mind that I made it 5.5% in the first place...

I was not a brown ale fan at all for years. Things slowly chipped away at that, and when I did the brown ale tasting panel with Eric Asimov at the New York Times last year, the old prejudices were overthrown. I liked these beers, they were tasty, not overbearing, and quite good with a wide variety of foods. To use a horrible word...they were friendly. And they are archetypical session beers. Find one -- if you're going to find a Beertown Brown, better hurry; it's a seasonal -- and make friends.

SBP: We're On the Radar

Seen Through a Glass has its first comments, and now it has its first blog post: Stan Hieronymus talks about it on his blog, Appellation Beer: Beer From a Good Home. He's talking about the Session Beer Project rather than STAG itself, and says

"In working on another project, I’ve been reviewing way too much 1980s
literature about American beer. In one story a German brewer says he’d never
export his beer to the United States because Americans can’t appreciate its
flavors. He might still feel the same way, but the fact is ex****e beers helped
change what was a pathetic image (both of brewers and consumers)." [Stan is
avoiding the word "extreme" in conjunction with beer...for reasons of his own. Maybe he just doesn't want to get Googled by guys like me.]

I'll agree about the change of image, but not to anywhere near the degree Stan sees. Extreme beer may have gotten us into the Wall Street Journal, but I strongly feel that it was steady slogging of beers like New Belgium Fat Tire Amber, Goose Island Honkers Ale, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Abita Amber, and Harpoon IPA that did more to change that image than anything. Everyday people drink beers like these every day. Beers like these are showing up in restaurants every day. Check out Don Russell's recent column on how widespread crafts are getting to be in Philly.

Extreme beers are getting the press; Stan's right about that, and I agree. That's why this blog is here, after all. But session beers are getting the taphandles, and the sales, and the friends. Here's a quote from the recent piece I did on extreme beers for BeerAdvocate Magazine:

"From an evolutionary perspective, people are predisposed to not like bitter
flavors because it means poison, sick, bad," New Belgium brewer Matt Gilliland
muses. "What percentage of people in the U.S. do you think have overcome that
genetic hard-wiring and really like 100 IBU beer? There you go, that’s your
market."

The market for session beer is much larger, and sales prove it.

Naturally, I don't believe anyone is saying that extreme beers sell more. But when something starts to become ubiquitous, it has a lot of effect on the image. The image of the category as a whole becomes less crucial, and the image of the individual beer becomes more important...as it should be, I'd argue.

Tim Roberts, the tragically underrated brewer at Philly's Independence Brewpub, told me this, a quote that I thought was too controversial for the piece.

"I think this trend [extreme beer] is also bad for the industry, in that it
perpetuates a couple of myths about craft brewing—first that "micro-brews" are
thick, syrupy, too strong, too bitter, etc., and also that these are beers only
for a certain few people who are "into them," i.e. fat guys in black, Magic Hat
t-shirts [Luckily, I don't resemble that remark anymore...]. For these
reasons, it seems to me, more drinkable, session style beers are a must if the
industry is ever going to seriously challenge the big brewers for real market
share. "

Some folks will say that the craft brewing industry doesn't need to challenge the big brewers for market share; they can continue as the top of the market. I think that's naive. The industry will have to grow to survive. Not all breweries will have to grow. But overall, if they're not growing, they're dying. I think the craft brewing industry has great potential, and despite the booming market for light beer, I think craft can be a success on a major level. But it is going to be session beers that put it there.

Your turn, Stan.

First of a flood: my Irish Whiskey piece in the Philly City Paper

I was going to go to Ireland in December to visit the three distilleries...but that fell through. It's a painful story, don't ask. I did get more than enough material (and samples) to write a number of stories, though, and the first of them just came out today in the City Paper. More an overview than anything, but one interesting tidbit: Philadelphia is the number one American market for Tullamore Dew. No real idea why, to be honest. But I'll tell you: that 12 Year Old Tullamore's some nice whiskey.