The Session January 2025: the best thing in beer since 2018

What’s the best thing to happen in beer since 2018? asks Alan McLeod, attempting to relaunch The Session. For us, it’s the genuine, meaningful resurrection of traditional beer styles.

For years, the predicted revival of mild, stout and porter felt like wishful thinking.

Sure, you could find those styles if you knew where to look, but you might equally go months between sightings.

The big multinational breweries weren’t interested in them at all.

And the large family and regional breweries saw them as part of their past – or perhaps a novelty to wheel out from time to time.

Fuller’s London Porter, for example, was a marvel, but finding a pint of it was always much harder than it ought to have been.

At some point, though, the new generation of craft brewers began to embrace these styles for real.

Perhaps because their founders and brewers started to get grey hairs and to mellow into small C conservatism.

What’s more, many of those brand new upstart breweries are now a decade or more old.

If they’ve survived successive rounds of closures and takeovers, they’re mature operations – and they’ve learned to brew good beer with more subtlety than big chuck-hops-at-it IPAs.

Think about Five Points, for example, whose most lauded beers these days (certainly by us, and we believe by others) are a best bitter and a porter.

Both are great examples of the style now, having had time to bed in.

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.

That they’re precisely the types of beer people assumed craft beer (pale, hazy, aggressively hoppy) would finally kill makes the phenomenon all the more fascinating.

As does the fact that, in the case of dark mild, it’s often the cheapest thing on the bar – just as it should be.

The Session was an important ritual in the old days of beer blogging. Everyone posted something on a topic nominated by a host and we took turns to host. But as beer blogs became Twitter accounts, and fresh topics dwindled, fewer and fewer people participated. Then it died. We’re glad to see it back. If nothing else, it’s a good writing exercise.