The Mystery of Sessionability
Great article recently posted about “session” beers:
The mystery of sessionability
Brewers will tell you that designing a beer to have “sessionability”, the indefinable something which keeps bringing the drinker back throughout the evening to refill their glass from the same fount, is one of the most difficult problems they can set themselves.
Simple one-off tasting sessions are unlikely to tell you if you have achieved your goal: it’s just like the “Pepsi Challenge”, where, in the battle of the colas, the sweeter drink wins in a head-to-head comparison, but over the distance the drier fluid wins. The only way to find out which new beers have sessionability, one brewer once told me, is to set a table up with a variety of free beers and ask the public to help themselves: the beer that is drunk the most, the beer that people come back to most often, will be the most sessionable.
To read the rest of this article, click here.
29 Oct 2009, 12:29 pm
Great posting! I am a big advocate of session beers and think that as great as the big extreme beers are its nice to have some smaller beers to enjoy several of over the course of an evening or during the game. Thankfully many brewers are starting to round out their offerings with some lower ABV offerings.
Keep up the good work.
Cheers!
Rick and everyone at Brewforia.com
29 Oct 2009, 2:09 pm
Just being low abv doesn’t make a session beer. I find it best described as, getting to the end of the 1st pint and saying, “where did that go? That was really good, I’m having another…” and repeating for several glasses.
Having said that a few high abv session beers would have the result of not being able to walk. (I have had a Belgian Golden Strong session beer)