"Session IPAs"

FW Easy Jack was the best smelling bottle of water I've ever had.

 

Did you truly enjoy the beer or was it just a functional necessity ? Just curious, I think Lawson's stuff is as good as it gets as far as a brewery putting out IPAs, even their session brew didn't make it for me. I understand the concept , but session IPAs don't really work for me. I've had sub 4% English brews that were fantastic though.

 

Great Divide Lasso is a good session IPA

 

Dammit Jackson! A functional nessecity with a hoppy pop. You called me out functionally correct! Touche sir.

 

Lol, as a Ca guy who likes hops I suspected that was the case. Why don't these brewers make a session beer in a style more suitable?

 

IPA is an ancient name for a beer "style" which has changed and evolved almost out of recognition during that time.There really is no "correct" IPA because of this; you can't undo what's already happened.
You mention the early and original IPAs. These must have had very little malt backbone , they were modest in ABV (the strongest on record was around 7.5% and the trend was always towards lower , stopping at 5.5% because of tax reasons) and they were fermented to dryness even before the Brett got to work.But in fact most IPAs at the time never left the country and in the days before styles were even thought of the names IPA, PA and bitter were used indiscriminately and interchangeably.Which is why for around a century or so before the "style" was revived IPAs abounded because it was just another name for bitter.The biggest selling cask ale in the UK is Greene King IPA which is 3.6% ABV and around 28 IBU. Is it an IPA though? Absolutely because it has undisputed parentage and provenance. That many people don't regard it as an IPA suggests that they assume that only the current fad of throwing masses of hops into a beer makes one. Nobody makes anything like an 1840 IPA after all.

 

Still love SNPA as a session. I think for the money and flavor its a tough one to beat.

 

Maybe the draft at 5% abv. In the bottle it's 5.6%, most of these session IPAs are weighing in at 4.7% or less.

 

Agreed. But generally when I "session" it, it involves summer time odds and ends. Meaning over the course of a saturday or what not, and sweating my nuts off, it becomes more sessionable.

 

Yes it's true that these styles were rooted long ago as small beers, but one example that was cited was a 3.6% abv 28 ibu beer. That's exactly what I was saying about malt backbone. It's balanced with the proper malt backbone because a 28 ibu beer doesn't need as much malt to make it balanced. A 4.5% abv 80 ibu "session ipa" is quite a different story ... not balanced at all really. But to your point about the origins of the ipa style, I will not argue with you on that, but my point is that based on the writings of Michael Jackson back in the 1970's a more recent style guideline has been widely accepted and used for these beers which is the status quo and has been for quite some time. Why muddy the waters with differing definitions of styles, especially when the farther you go back in time the more general the style definitions become. I like having a style guideline that has clear lines between a 3.5% bitter and an 8% ipa. It gives the drinker a general idea of what they're getting. Whether you want to use the brewer's association style guidelines, or the bjcp style guidelines, or as some like just traditional style guidelines from the the origins of brewing, one thing's for sure... if everybody defines these styles differently, then eventually the words used to describe the beer mean very little. That's why it makes no sense to me redefining existing styles with new names, especially for marketing purposes. And I didn't undo what was already done with regard to styles.... Michael Jackson did.

 

Michael Jackson in the 1970s would have had any number of British IPAs to choose from but with the exception of Worthington White Shield were basically bitters.But that's what IPA had evolved to.As patto1ro has already pointed out, bitters actually are session IPAs.
The problem with any sort of style guidelines is that things don't stand still (they never have done for that matter) for example there are posts suggesting that beers which a few years ago would have been regarded as IPA should now be classed as APA.But no beer will be the same at present as a beer with the same name which my father drank and possibly unrecognisable as what his father drank before him.

 

At a local brewery last night my wife had a Session IPL.

 

Oh no....

 

The sample I had was tasty.

 

Next up: Session IPAL (Imperial Pale Adjunct Lager)

 

The brewers who brew "Session IPAs" are lucky that the term session is used (or misused) in the craft world. If Founders had released Centennial IPA Lite they would have been laughed at!

 

Why don't these guys just make a sessionable English style Bitter or Mild? It goes well with a sub 4% abv, the ones here I can get are really expensive. If I want a pounder in the summer there are some nice Pils available that are around 5%, if I want something really hoppy I'd just drink one less or mix styles to keep it under control, but I still think good PA's or IPA's at under 5% is too much a compromise on a style that usually clocks in at 7%.

 

You are a wealth of knowledge on british styles for sure and I don't challenge that, but Michael Jackson was the one who wrote the book on modern styles which todays style guidelines are all based on. Yes I would agree with you that styles change from generation to generation and will continue to change, but todays guidelines have been fairly stable for 20 years or more, so I would prefer to use the language that most people understand which is the modern style guidelines. We can interchange bitter, or pale ale , or ipa all day long, but at the end of the day those individual descriptors are more accurate than a general term such as "ipa" that lumps them all together, so I'm glad that someone decided to differentiate between the 3 . After all it makes sense to differentiate between an 8% ipa and a 3.5% bitter. They are completely different beers. OTOH we don't need to split hairs between a 6.5% ipa and a 5.5% ipa those would be considered a fair overlap between pale ale and india pale ale.

 

No matter what they make it will be called ------------ IPA because people try beers called IPA.

 

The point is of course that there are many very well and long established British IPAs which do not fit a lot of peoples views about what constitutes an IPA.But they were there long before the style got rediscovered in the US and can't be dismissed as "not true to style" You can't undo what's already happened.
Yes, there's all the difference in the world between say Flowers IPA at 3.6% and an 8% modern IPA. Beer lies on a spectrum, in this case the Pale Ale spectrum and different forms lie in different positions along it.But the dividing lines are moving all the time.
Never mind, in a year or so IPA will be passe anyway.