Why Session Beer?

I've heard this before and have now experienced it.

 

There are some times it's the middle of the day, I have an hour or two to kill, I want to drink a beer, and I can only really go for the 4-5% alcohol beers.

Or if I've already had a few strong beers, I still feel like drinking but don't want to spend the night staring up at a spinning ceiling.

Oh to live in a world where the effects of alcohol stopped at the 'Pleasant buzz' phase.

 

That world is here. It's called take a break, stop at 2 or 3 or save the strong beers for the end of the night.

 

Dolores.

 

yea my wife never is happy when I cannot hold her up either.....

I hope the book is selling well.

cheers

 

I tart at every chance I can. The book I mean.

 

as soon as I bet back home to the states I will be working on more of your recipes, quite happy with all the milds I made. 1832 Truman XXXX Mild. I am kind of hooked on....I hot the number almost exactly with beersmith....I think it would a killer beer on cask in some pub somewhere....

 

I see.

Well, enjoy getting loaded as fast as you possibly can, I guess.

 

That was an explanation of my earlier post. I don't actually do that.

 

I tart at every chance I can. The book I mean.

Dann's first brew of that Truman Mild is one of my favourite beers of all time. All those whole leaf Goldings. Magic.

 

yea I love that hop, its so British If I can say it? I hope that is not offensive?
I love fuggle also, 1880 whitbread xx xpt is next on list. the IBU kind of scares me...
113 wow

 

My sweet spot is between about 6.5% to about 11%. Smaller beers just don't have the taste and mouthfeel I appreciate, and the larger beers can be interesting, but are usually too expensive, heavy and hard to get for me.

 

No, we have a craft beer buying problem. The seller charges what the market will bear, provided he is able to make a profit. This is ECON101, folks. If enough people are willing to pony up $8 for a 22 oz. "session IPA" to make it profitable, that's what gets charged. If more profit can be generated by reducing the price, thereby increasing the sales, that's what will happen. If more profit may be derived by raising the prise, despite the decrease in sales, it makes sense for the seller to do that instead. The objective of pricing is to find the price point where overall profit is maximized as opposed to simply trying to sell as many as one can possibly make.

If we don't buy enough at the high price point for maker to generate sufficient profit to make it worthwhile to brew, one of two things will happen. Either the price will come down until it is profitable, or the brewer will cease production of that particular beverage.

 

Well, I was just busting your balls, but I understand where you are coming from. I'll just say that I disagree with everything you just said, but there is no chance that either one of us is going to change our minds. So I bid you good day sir.

 

In my experience, if you "session" with 7-8% beers, you're gonna have a bad time. If I am out with friends having a sweet sesh, I typically drink WAY faster than I would drinking at home. That makes bigger beers a bad time. I've tried to session higher ABV beers with friends, but it always winds up being a bad time. In about an hour or two I wind up completely wasted thinking it's 4:00 in the morning. I look at my phone and realize it's 10:00 at night and my friends are just beginning to reach the drunk stage. So three things typically happen: I black out, I pass out, or wind up being a belligerent babbling fool. In conclusion, it's a bad time.

Session IPAs and APAs are great. They're low in ABV, taste great, don't fill you up, and you can enjoy a bunch of them in one night. I'd prefer a Mirror Pond Pale Ale or Go To IPA over Little Sumpin' Sumpin' (one of my favorite beers) if I'm out and about or in the mood to drink a lot of good beers. It's pretty simple, and not a bad time.

As far as the price point to ABV argument goes. Who cares? Buy what you enjoy. If I like it, it's worth the money in my eyes. The exception being the 40-50 dollar bombers that brew-douches charge for "special" beers.

If I ever make a beer I've patented the name "Brew-Douche".

 

The point is that if no attempt is made to define a "session beer" it becomes meaningless just like the ad I saw which said "you could save up to $1000 or more"(just how much is that?) , for physiological reasons (balance between dehydration by the alcohol and the hydration by the water content of the beer) it works out at around 4% ABV.By chance the standard pub "session beers" have always been in the 3-4% bracket; experience shows that, like patto1ro above , you can simply go out and drink them for hours on end and still find your way home.

Me too. They actually taste of hops.Not grapefruit or mango or whatever.

 

Revisiting the issue of Bohemian Schankbier. I found a table showing the amounts of taxed wort produced in the year 1880/1881 in Austria-Hungary, divided into tax brackets based on a scale of percent Balling.

I had no idea that Bohemia was at one point part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, but it turns out that it was, and it's listed as a separate region in the table. What's striking is that the 10 degrees/percent class made up an overwhelming majority of the taxed wort in Bohemia.
Percent Balling - HL Wort
9. 335 900 HL
10. 3 981 900 HL
11. 551 700 HL
12. 273 400 HL
13. 2300 HL
14. 3600 HL
15. 700 HL
16. 1000 HL

Total volume of taxed wort: 5 150 804 HL. Which means that the 10% balling tax bracket made up 77% of all the taxed wort produced in Bohemia in 1880/1881.

In Niederösterreich, one of the most populous areas of the empire, encompassing the eastern part of Austria but not Wien, the situation was similar with 63% of the wort produced belonging to the 10% tax bracket, of a total volume of 2 547 629 HL wort.

In Wien and its surrounding areas the 10% Balling tax bracket made up 66% of the wort produced in 1880.

According to an 1893 book on the Bavarian brewing industry in the 19th century (page 51), Austria introduced a beer tax system based on the Balling saccharometer scale in 1855, i.e taxation based on the beer's original gravity. I don't know the ins and outs of the Austrian Hungarian Empire, but obviously Bohemia either was or came under the rule of Austria/Austria-Hungary and implemented its beer taxation system at some point prior to 1880.

It's very interesting I think that the gravity strenght which still today dominates Czech brewing was dominant already 134 years ago. The numbers for Wien specifically show that the 10% tax bracket was dominant there already in 1874, but whether its dominance goes back as far as 1855, or if subsequent tax increases helped push gravities downward into lower taxed brackets, I can't say.

 

Session beers just taste like watered down IPAs to me. I'd rather drink one "regular" IPA than 1.5 session IPAs.

 

So then an IPA is just a watered down DIPA?

 

You can't go wrong with Lagunitas!