The Session Beer Project
My friend Lew has a new mission. The Session Beer Project is an attempt to raise the public profile of lower-alcohol, yet still delicious beers. Why? Well, I’ll let him explain:
Time to get self-aware and plausibly deny things. We write about extreme beers for a very simple reason: they’re news. They’re new, they’re different, they’re eye-opening, and they’re far from the same-old-same-old.
We don’t generally write about “session beers” for much the same reasons. A new brown ale is “just another brown ale,” the 895th batch of a brewery’s pale ale – even though it’s selling like crazy – is no more newsworthy than the 894th batch was. Like I always say about Budweiser, everyone’s had it, everyone’s already got an opinion – where’s my angle?
Here’s a new angle. I always blamed this problem on editors. The editor doesn’t want to hear it, the editor doesn’t have room to print it, the editor is a bonehead. But I’m the editor here. If I want to talk about session beers, I can. If I want to talk about them a lot, and praise the ones that have been out on the market for years — and are therefore not ‘newsworthy — I can do that.
Granted, he’s a writer, and the rationale is journalistic in nature. But at the same time, Lew and I and others have been banging this drum in online fora and in public for the better part of a decade or more! So it’s high time to take it to the ol’InterWebs. He’s running his campaign from a new blog, Seen Through A Glass. I’m joining in his call to arms — note that this post is in a new category, The Session Beer Project. I won’t be blogging on it daily, but it will receive once-a-week treatment, as I mean to cover a few days of the week with thematic posts most of the time this year.
Here’s to session beer! Milds, pale ales, bitters, scottish ales, brown ales, all their lagerly kin, here’s to you guys! Let the mild revolution begin.
