Always Room For A Few More

Harpoon’s
head brewer, Al Marzi, had a session recently. “I was just
over in England for a wedding and had some great cask ales.
My wife was drinking a 3.8% bitter, I had a 4.5% ale, and
they tasted great. That’s session. If you’re going to sit
down in a pub and watch a game, you want to have a few beers
and not get blotto.” “Session beers,” an English brewer once
explained to me, “are all about having eight or ten pints
with your mates at the pub, and at the end of the night you
still have it together enough to go out for a curry and
navigate your way home.” American drinkers have not yet
shown enough interest in a 3.5% beer for brewers to make
many, but there are plenty of sub-5% beers out there for
those who want to sink a few.

That’s one of
the downsides of the current trend towards bigger, hoppier
beers: you can’t drink as many of them (or sell as many of
them). Hugh Sisson’s been in craft brewing in Baltimore for
over fifteen years, first at his family’s ground-breaking
brewpub, Sisson’s, and now at his production brewery,
Clipper City, where he just celebrated ten years in
business.

Like most of the
folks in the business, he’s definitely a consumer as well as
a producer, and some of his favorites are Clipper City’s big
beer line, the Heavy Seas brand. But he recognizes the
limits of big beers. “If I’m out and about, I want to drink
beer. If I have a Winter Storm [the Heavy Seas double
IPA] or Loose Cannon [barleywine], I have two .
. . and then I have to go home – which is a pain in the ass.
If we could get that kind of depth of flavor and complexity
in a 3.5% beer, I’d be there tomorrow.”

I remember
thinking the exact same thing ten years ago when I was at a
cask ale event in Philadelphia. A local importer had talked
the folks at Young’s in England to send over a live cask of
their Old Nick barleywine. At about 7%, Old Nick’s not a
real bruiser, as barleywines go, but it’s not something
you’d want to pound. Yet after the first wonderful half-pint
of bread-fresh estery-complex ale, all I could think was how
great it would be if they could make something this good at
3.5%, because then I could drink it all day.

David Geary
celebrated 2O years of brewing at D.L. Geary Brewing
(Portland, Maine) in 2OO6, and he’s done most of it with
session beer. I asked him what session beer meant to him. “I
guess it’s a beer that tastes good,” he said, “low enough in
alcohol that you don’t get faced, and doesn’t give you taste
fatigue – still tastes just as good on the fifth pint. But a
session beer, not a lawnmower beer that just drinks like
water. I think there has to be a certain amount of dryness,
and not so much residual sugar. I think of Geary’s Pale
Ale.”

He laughed.
“Well, of course, I do. It’s 4.7%, moderately hoppy, but
very crisp and dry. Our Porter, at 4.2%, could be one, but
people usually don’t see beers that dark as session beers.
It’s very smooth on the palate, though.”

That smoothness
on the palate leads to pint after pint “poundability”, of
course, but it’s got another allure for the craft brewer:
crossover. Although the category has experienced tremendous
growth, and it looks like 2OO6 was a double-digit year for
craft beers, there are still many more mainstream lager
drinkers than craft beer drinkers. If craft brewers are
going to capture any of those consumers, it’s almost sure
that they’ll cross over to a session beer, a smooth but
flavorful beer that’s maybe a bit darker than what they’ve
tried before.

And when they
decide to try something different, Ned LaFortune will be
sitting there with a smile on his face and a glass of his
Wachusett Brewing (Westminster, Massachusetts) beer, ready
and waiting. Wachusett’s best-selling Blueberry Ale is only
4.5%. “We’ve always striven to be the company that, if those
75% of Massachusetts beer drinkers decide they want to come
over from mainstream, they’ll choose us. There’s a huge
population that’s drinking mainstream beer, and we’re there
for them. Drinkability is our mantra.”

Extreme beers
are getting all the attention right now, getting coverage on
television and even the front page of the wall street
journal with their wild ingredients, huge hopping rates and
wine-like levels of alcohol. But LaFortune doesn’t want them
to be the beer that mainstreamers reach for when they decide
to try out this “craft-brewed” thing. “If their first craft
beer is an extreme double IPA, kiss them good-bye. We’ve
lost them. Our primary market is in bringing more people
over.”

Marzi sees
things pretty much the same way. “It depends on the crowd.
If you’re talking to a wine consumer, especially if they’re
a specialty varietal drinker, they’re buying for flavor and
they’ll be interested in an extreme beer. Regular craft brew
drinker? They’re probably not frightened away. But a
mainstream drinker? Probably not liking it.”

Todd Ashman made
a name for himself in the late 199Os at Flossmoor Station, a
south Chicago brewpub. Ashman was one of the pioneers of
barrel-aged beers, brews with huge flavor profiles derived
from a varied program of wood-aging. I talked to him
recently; he’s getting ready to open 5O/5O Brewing in
Truckee, California, where he’ll be brewing mostly
session-strength lagers. “I enjoyed doing that kind of
stuff,” he told me, “but when I left Flossmoor Station, I
got a fair amount of it out of my system.”

Some of the
reason big beers are out of Ashman’s system is that it’s
just not as much fun now. “It became more mainstream,” he
admitted. “People are buying them and drinking them, and if
it’s accepted, well, you’re not really pushing the envelope
so you’ve got to go on to something else. These [extreme
brewers] are trying to find the next great thing, The
doubling and ‘imperializing,’ the super-sizing of beers:
something’s going to catch on, but I’ve found that we’re
losing focus on what we’re trying to do here.”

Geary doesn’t
have a problem with extreme beers, even though he doesn’t
make any really big ones himself. “I think it’s good
overall, anything of that nature is good,” he said,
referring to the publicity such beers have garnered for the
industry, “though I don’t like the adoration, the
hagiographic reviews of these brewers as if they’re tuned
into the cosmic all.

“What I don’t
agree with is the notion that beer has to be extreme to be
good,” Geary said. “Newcastle Brown Ale, for example, it
gets everything right, it’s all in balance. It’s balanced,
it’s tasty, it has no flaws. Some of these extreme beers
fall victim to the idea that if some is good, a lot is
better. That’s the philosophy that brought us the Hummer. In
the end, beer has to be a beverage, something you want to
drink.”

“Do you need to
get your palate blasted, to fall off your barstool?” asked
LaFortune. “I make sure our Winter Ale doesn’t go over 6.5%.
We’re in a market where people want to have dinner with
three pints of beer. Three pints of 8% beer, 1O% beer, 12%
beer? You can’t do that! The Winter’s busting with flavor
and character, but it’s about drinkability.”

It’s not just
the flavor and the weight, either. Drinkable beers are more
affordable. Extreme beers cost more to make, they cost more
because of the risks involved in making and selling them,
they cost more because they are uncommon. Every brewer would
like to get more for their beer, wine-like prices, but the
market’s only slowly getting there.

“My old
neighbors, Three Floyds Brewing, garnered quite a bit of
attention with their Darklord [Imperial Stout],”
said Ashman. “That’s a syrupy motor-oil of a beer, but a
good one. But how many people really want to pay $2O for a
22oz. bottle of beer?”

There actually
are quite a few people, which is why Three Floyds sells out
every bottle of Darklord, but how often do they want to pay
it, and how many of them buy at your store? They’re a thin
layer across the country, much like the thin layer of
high-end wine purchasers that keep small estate vineyards in
business.

Brewers who make
session beers do get a benefit from those big beers with big
prices, of course. “When I think about prices in our market,
I smile and thank people like Sam Calagione at Dogfish
Head,” said LaFortune. “There are still too many people in
this business that are cutting prices too close. It’s no
good for any of us. So I love the margins big beers have
helped punch through. We’re big on getting paid for a hard
day’s work.”

Jim Koch is
often given credit for popularizing craft beer with the
national success of Samuel Adams Boston Lager. But he’s also
the man who started the whole extreme beer idea. “I think
the term started with Utopias,” he said. “Someone asked me,
‘What do you call it?’ We call it an extreme
beer.”

It was really
the Samuel Adams Triple Bock that started things.
“Everything out there was a continuation of existing brewing
practices: barleywines, doublebocks, Imperial stout,” Koch
said. “Everyone always assumed you couldn’t ferment past 12
or 13% ABV. Triple Bock broke the sound barrier. I started
working on that in 1993. TB sold for $12O a case in cobalt
blue bottles with sherry corks. It got people’s attention. A
$12O case of beer created shock and awe. But there really
wasn’t much else for three or four years.”

Koch sees the
need for balance in portfolios as well as in beers. “Some of
us drink beer every day,” he said. “For people like me,
Samuel Adams Boston Lager is the beer that’s in my
refrigerator. Utopias is in my liquor cabinet. I go to the
refrigerator a lot more than my liquor cabinet. We do both
extreme beers and session beers, and we need
both.”

But doesn’t
extreme beer dominate the news? Koch is honest about it.
“Extreme beers make up a lot of the news, sure. It doesn’t
mean they’re going to take over the world. When you think
about what’s news, brewing one more American IPA or porter
or stout is not news any more; changing the hops in an IPA
is no longer a great exercise in brewing
creativity.”

Making a session
beer that’s good every time and tastes great pint after pint
isn’t about creativity either; it’s about skill, experience
and a good palate. It’s about making the beer that signs the
checks for the extreme beer products. “Extreme beers are
curiosities,” said Geary. “Everything I’ve said about
session beer applies to craft beer in general. You better be
making a really good session beer if you want to survive in
this business.”

Al Marzi told me
that the folks at Harpoon were kicking around the idea of a
session beer to back up their big seller, the Harpoon IPA
(which, at 5.9%, he said, “is definitely not a session
beer”). “Something down around 4.2, 4.3%,” he said, but
wouldn’t say much more. With legal pressures continuing to
mount on impaired driving, such a move doesn’t just sound
smart, it sounds inevitable.

Geary thinks
session beers, flagships, are getting more respect. “Back in
the craze of the early 199Os, when everything was taking
off, you just couldn’t screw up. People got away from it,
various things happened and market kind of hit a wall. Then
the seeds that had been sown started to come to fruit, the
younger drinkers who started on craft beer and will always
be craft drinkers.

“That’s what
we’re seeing now,” he said,” the people who wouldn’t dream
of having a Bud Light. They may not have brand loyalty, but
they have a category loyalty that is very strong and will
never go away. Having been around for 2O years, we’re the
beneficiary of that trend. Every now and then, a new pretty
skirt will walk down the street, and everyone will try it
and then come back to the Old Dependable.”

It’s not really
a question of whether extreme beers or session beers are
“better”. Well-made examples of either category are both
good. But when extreme beers are getting all the headlines
and the limelight, it doesn’t hurt to give some credit and a
little love to Old Dependable. Anyone for some pinochle,
pretzels and pitchers?