Of course not, but here’s one anyway: this Monday, April 7, is Session Beer Day. Founded by beer and whiskey writer Lew Bryson of The Session Beer Project, it is as simple as it sounds—a day dedicated to enjoying session beers.
Session beer is essentially low-alcohol, flavorful, balanced beer. It’d be easy to write a few hundred words and another blog post about the contentious ABV cutoff limit for session beers (the Brewers Association style guidelines call it as less than 5.1% ABV, others accept nothing over 4.0%), but the Session Beer Project’s 4.5% ABV or below cutoff is a good in-between.
I started searching for session beer inspiration by perusing draft lists of bars with a consistent, interesting selection of lower-alcohol beers. At Boston’s Deep Ellum, for example, an impressive six out of twenty-four beers on their current draft menu are under 4.5% ABV; ten are under 5.0% ABV. What makes their list stand out, however, is the variety of local and imported lower-alcohol offerings, such as the Guineu Riner, a 2.5% hoppy, unfiltered pale ale from Spain’s Brewery Ca l’Arenys, served in a .4L mug; or session beer company Notch Brewing’s Černe Pivo, a 4.1% ABV Czech-style black lager that comes in an imperial pint.
This triggered a reflection on the trend of session beers, namely that while IPAs seem to still be dominant in the session beer category, bars and breweries are offering a greater variety of lower-alcohol beers that are smoky, funky, and sour—and less than, or equal to, 4.5% ABV.
Washington, DC’s Right Proper Brewing Company, which opened to the public in December, brews a 3.3% ABV “Danish ship’s beer” called Skibsøl, made in the tradition of Scandinavian table beers, with rye and smoked malts. Or there’s the intriguing Boson de Higgs, a “BerlinerRauchSaison,” from Quebec’s Hopfenstark brewery. A smoky, slightly tart 3.8% ABV beer, it requires having more than one glass of in order to wrap your taste buds around it.
I suspect there will be more smoky session beers to come, too. New Belgium and 3 Floyds collaborated on a not-often brewed Polish style called grätzer, to be released in New Belgium’s Lips of Faith series in June. According to the label, it comes in at 4.5% ABV and is brewed with oak smoked wheat, midnight wheat, Polish Lublin hops, and the souring bacteria Lactobacillus for a sour finish.
Wheat-based German-style goses and Berliner weisses often fall under the session beer decree of low-alcohol and full flavor. Chicago’s Off Color Brewing’s Troublesome (4.5% ABV) gose is a tart blended wheat beer; they blend a standard wheat beer with one fermented solely with lactobacillus and add coriander and salt at the end of fermentation.
And for farmhouse-style refreshment, there are table beers like Jester King’s 2.9% Le Petit Prince and Mystic Brewery’s 4.3% ABV Table Beer (or, as they call it, “artisanal lawn-mowing beer”).
So while Session Beer Day, as Bryson has pointed out, is less about the beer itself than the act of drinking and enjoying several rounds of it, it is nice, however, to have options.