Well, that went well. A revival can be a dangerous thing. From Brady Bunch TV reunion specials to the second Trump administration, these things should be faced with a measure of doubt – but it’s clear that The Session version #143(!) performed well above my expectations with a great level of participation… well, at least greater than I anticipated. Pat yourselves on your backs. So, as one does when one hosts, here is the summary.
First, as is most deserved, the achivist-in-chief aka the glue throughout the entire history of The Session, Jay Brooks himself is to be noted from the top as he confirmed that this is not Season 2, episode 1 (nope, now way) but actually the 143rd edition (legitimacy affirmed!) and that he is taking his administrative duties one with his hallmark attentiveness as I learned via email:
I updated the Sessions page to include this and will be happy to keep updating it as we go. If you know who’ll be hosting going forward, let me know and I’ll plug them in. I’ll also happily host if you come to a month with no takers.
Fabulous – so you can go see the records here. And here below are the contributions, according to the means that I received notice. If I have missed a notification please let me know in the comments.
There were three BlueSky posts. First, former Fullers frontman John Keeling wrote “The best thing to happen in beer since 2018 , easy I retired” which makes sense for him, less so for others. And Maureen Ogle shared this:
Best thing in beer since 2018? Thousands of families are paying the mortgage by making beer for their communities. And not trying to become The Biggest Beermaker in the World. Ie, they’re making good beer without making a big fucking deal about its craftiness.
Barry M suggested that he was “wondering if the best thing to happen to beer since 2018 is that I stopped blogging about beer.” But then noted that his wonderful cider and fruit tree orcharding has taken over. Which is fabulous.
Next, those who gave a heads up in the comments. We had four notifications via comments left in the blog. The first was from a regularly featured and extremely active writer who often helps plump up the weekly roundup, Retired Martin:
Happy post-cheese/COVID booster 2025, Alan. And thanks as always for reading my blog. My only observation about good beer post about 2018 is that what I’d still call “craft beer bars” (the Record Cafe in Bradford or the Crow in Sheffield, for example), and I guess there’s a few hundred in the UK, will almost always feature a fruited sour from either Vault City or Pastore (from my hometown, oddly). And it won’t always be a high ABV sour; the last one I had was 2.5%, but it might be. Who (apart from me) is drinking these fruited sours at £5 a half ?
The other three comment leavers were Ding, Jay and Tom Bedell who snuck in just before the deadline no doubt celebrating his After Dark tendencies. Ding celebrated the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic “kickstarted my Belgian love affair once more” which is great. Jay shared how while he didn’t hate Hazy IPA, he is seeks out the returning diversity of styles and loves “walking into a bar and seeing they have a brown ale, or a mild, or even a dunkelweizen…” Tom, reporting from Vermont, shared more on one theme that appears to be developing:
…it may just be an impression, but it seems to me that that’s the other best thing to have happened to good beer in recent years: a return of interest in classic styles. A week or so ago I was happy to find a few bottles of Côte de Champlain from Zero Gravity Brewing in Burlington, Vermont. Zero Gravity has a solid, wide-ranging portfolio across styles, but it’s not adverse to specialties like this, a wonderful tribute to Orval.
And Boak and Bailey moved us in a similar direction, tradition as diversity:
Bristol is a city dominated by hazy pale ales. That’s what we’d call the defining local style. Even so, when we go out on our weekend crawls, we often find mild or porter at The Kings Head, The Barley Mow, or The Llandoger Trow. These beers aren’t everywhere – but they’re not nowhere, either. Slowly, steadily, they’ve come back into being.
OK, so now we move to heads up which came via email. Matty C rejected the hype and the sellouts and instead celebrated the boring:
I consider the weekend of that festival in September 2018 to be the end point of the modern British beer boom. Both Camden and Beavertown had now been sucked into the inevitable, bland tediousness demanded by their paymasters, their beer eventually becoming as inspiring as a two by four to the face. But I actually consider this to be a good thing. It marked the beginning of beer becoming boring again, and I was here for it.
Next, Laura Hadland wrote to tell me that she had written – and what she had written was this:
It’s a helluva question to answer off the cuff. I’m sat on the train on my way to Crewe to brew with the Ladies of Darkness for International Women’s Day. So I’m tempted to talk about the improvements we’ve made to DEI across the industry over the last few years. But you just have to pay attention to what people like Ruvani da Silva are writing to know that it might still be a little premature for a celebration.
Good points. So, then, Laura instead turned to NA beers and how “now it’s not that hard to find really good examples in almost any beer style that you prefer.”
Stan explored some of the inclusivity initiatives in the US craft scene with perhaps a bit more hope with a survey of initiatives along with this admission: “This is the part of the story I am not particularly comfortable with, because as an observer I don’t belong in it. I took the picture at the top because I crossed paths with Oliver at the Craft Brewers Conference in Las Vegas and asked him to wag his finger…” I would just note that it is the better finger to have wagged at oneself. And Jordan Buck also wrote an email to share his posting on Instagram:
It feels like there was a tacit admission at some point that maaaybe low-po, easy drinking beers don’t need to be penalty pints. Even in the face of shrinking taplist diversity, it’s getting hard to find a brewery that hasn’t carved out space for at least one thing that’s clean and cold-conditioned and of sensible strength.
I am not very IGGY so you can all tell me if that link worked, please. I also received and email that started “I am Steve “Pudgy” De Rose, of Chicago, IL., U.S.A.” – who maintains a fabulously Web 0.9 page – wrote to tell us that he posted his thoughts on Mastodon that “the best thing happening to good beer since 2018 is the wider availability of transportation applications which can enable the “good beer drinker” to visit more venues without having to operate a vehicle.” Nice.
Next we have the hash taggers. By the way, use #TheSession freely in these matters even though there may be some other applications. Take back the hadstag I say! On Twex, The Beer Nut alerted us that he had posted perhaps unexpectedly about something…
This is where I’d love to be waxing lyrical about the oft-predicted lager revival, but that was never delivered. Nor the West Coast resurgence, nor the black IPA comeback: these styles are still noteworthy when they appear at all. They’re not being revived; they just didn’t quite die. My ruminations in this direction did finally settle on a revival that has largely happened since 2018 and is very much positive, for my drinking tastes at least: lambic.
Talk about trad. Oh, he did. Other hashtaggers at the BlueSky include Phil Edwards who wrote about something called sour stout: “…that’s what’s new in beer since 2018! Or at least it was, for a couple of months five years ago…” Good points all. And Alistair Reece of Fuggled was hashing the tag which led me to his post which concluded:
This then is the best thing to happen to good beer since 2018, good lager has become a staple of the brewing scene, and long may it continue. And on that note, I am excited for my first beer of 2025 tomorrow…it will be a lager, that is for sure, something from Bierkeller in Columbia SC as we are headed down that way for a family get together. Even getting good beer at all in Columbia was a challenge when we moved over here, that they have a brewery smashing great lagers borders on the miraculous.
Jeff Alworth also gave a heads up to check out Beervana for his thoughts which canvassed a range of events and trends and settled on – the vitality of change itself:
In the decades since I started writing about it, it has never gotten boring or stale. Something new is always around the corner, and the subject is so vast it may involve the liquid in the container, the container itself (remember 22s??), the people who make it, or our understanding of the history or culture or politics that shaped and continues to shape it. If I live to a hundred, I will never have to worry about what to write next. Something will come along. I love that, too.
I agree with this entirely. When I started doing this scribbing in 2003, I thought the theme of beer would wear out in a few months. Fat chance. Ed Wray also got all hashtaggeriffic and shared the link to his post on the fact that he… he himself… himself… got to brew one vintage of Thomas Hardy Ale! And Gary Gillman wrote me via a/ an X Message to give me the heads up that he took time off from his taking time off in the south of France to write over at Beer et Seq. to praise the continuing improvement of technical standards which is a very good point – and leads me to my own thoughts.
Me, I think the best thing is home delivery. Since the blessings of the pandemic, I can get beer delivered to my door here in Ontario. Which means I get beer from breweries I can’t regularly visit and – perhaps more importantly – excellent beers that brewers brew in smaller batches. Which means I could get have deliveries from excellent folk like (the sadly now gone) Stone City* and Matron. At the moment, the stash is armed with a mix box from Godspeed. Fabulous. All so fabulous.
I think that is it. All most welcome everyone. By my count that’s twenty-one participants, a respectable start. Thanks all. I think this is a great thing. As is the tradition at least as I recall it, there will be a separate announcement of the theme for the next edition of The Session from the hosts in the very near future – who(m) I am delighted to say will be Boak and Bailey on Friday the 28th of February. Whoohooo! Stay tuned. As my personal heroes The Carpenters once sang, it’s yesterday once more.
*I completely forgot I wrote an alt edition of The Session in January 2019 and again in April 2020 with an alt numeration sequence. What a cheezy bastard. In the great tradition of the Avignon papacy, I posted an edition #143 and #144. They are not part of the same Marvel universe as far as I am concerned.