While up early this AM I looked at my blogger dashboard and decided to check in on a few of the blogs I follow. One of the blogs I follow, The Session Beer Project, no surprise it has lots to say on session brews. Another is Northern Brewer: The Blog which has a recently posted article titled, Session Beers. As is obvious from this thread, these blogs got me to thinking about session bier.
Links: http://northernbrewer.blogspot.com/2010/07/session-beers.html#more and http://sessionbeerproject.blogspot.com/
There are lots of things to discuss relative to session bier. What I'm most curious about are 3 questions.
1) What percentage of the homebrew you make for yourself is session bier?
2) What percentage of the homebrew you make for yourself is imperial strength?
3) What is the current standing of session bier in the craft bier market and why? I thought we might get some interesting answers here.
While I think a true session bier is probably 4% abv or less, for the purposes of the discussion I'd frame it as 4.5% or less to give a bit of wiggle room. I'll say anything over 7% is imperial for sake of discussion.
Me first.
1 & 2) Probably 45% of what I brew is session bier, and 13% is imperial. Obviously this leaves me with 42% mid range.
3) From a euphoria/buzz stand point 90% of what gets the publicity are big biers, either imperial or close. There are certainly some companies that thrive off of this market paradigm. However I think for most of the meat and potatoes breweries the dynamic is somewhat different BUT it's still a driving force. Mostly due to the marketing/buzz/publicity side of things session beers are an afterthought. Sure for most craft brewers the sales are driven from their browns, pale ales, etc, obviously non-imperial biers. However most aren't session biers either.
Schlante,
Phillip
Links: http://northernbrewer.blogspot.com/2010/07/session-beers.html#more and http://sessionbeerproject.blogspot.com/
There are lots of things to discuss relative to session bier. What I'm most curious about are 3 questions.
1) What percentage of the homebrew you make for yourself is session bier?
2) What percentage of the homebrew you make for yourself is imperial strength?
3) What is the current standing of session bier in the craft bier market and why? I thought we might get some interesting answers here.
While I think a true session bier is probably 4% abv or less, for the purposes of the discussion I'd frame it as 4.5% or less to give a bit of wiggle room. I'll say anything over 7% is imperial for sake of discussion.
Me first.
1 & 2) Probably 45% of what I brew is session bier, and 13% is imperial. Obviously this leaves me with 42% mid range.
3) From a euphoria/buzz stand point 90% of what gets the publicity are big biers, either imperial or close. There are certainly some companies that thrive off of this market paradigm. However I think for most of the meat and potatoes breweries the dynamic is somewhat different BUT it's still a driving force. Mostly due to the marketing/buzz/publicity side of things session beers are an afterthought. Sure for most craft brewers the sales are driven from their browns, pale ales, etc, obviously non-imperial biers. However most aren't session biers either.
Schlante,
Phillip