Tag: session beer

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Blogging and writing Generalisations about beer culture opinion

What Is ‘Drinkability’?

Detail from c.1900 postcard: moustachioed man chugging beer.

That’s a thought-provoking and funny response to (we assume) this blog post by John Keeling of Fuller’s for Craft Beer London, in which he says:

[Beer] from kegs, cans and bottles has got a lot better over the last few years, they just don’t have that ultimate drinkability. That is cask ale’s trump card: if you’re having a few, there’s no doubt that cask ale is your best option. It’s better for flavour; a 3½ percent ale won’t work on keg but it can be superb on cask. For an occasion when you’re going to have four or five pints, cask is best.

‘Drinkability’ is one of those words that some people dislike, along with ‘refreshing’, ‘smooth’ and ‘creamy’, for reasons summed up in a post by American writer Bryan Roth last year:

Every beer, by virtue of being liquid, is smooth. But to declare a beer’s sensory characteristics simply as ‘smooth’ is no better than relying on its disgraceful cousin, ‘drinkability,’ which is essentially describing a beer as drinkable because it doesn’t kill you when you consume it… ‘Smooth’ is nothing more than word vomit, digested in the chasms of the brain, spewed from our mouths and flushed down our collective consciousness, only to reappear all around us, as if some form of contagious disease so easily passed from one person to the next.

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Designer beer, session beer and Chimay

Chimay beer in a glass.

Here are some bits and pieces we spotted around and about in the last few days.

1. We think we’ve worked out when Trappist beer first landed in the UK. A chain of off-licences called Arthur Rackham began importing Chimay (probably Rouge) in 1974, perhaps in the wake of the 1974 World Beer Festival at Olympia in London. It first showed up at the CAMRA Great British Beer Festival in 1979. Anyone know otherwise?

2. Here’s another definition of session beer for you to chew on, from Tim Webb and Joris Pattyn’s 10o Belgian Beers to Try Before You Die:

Surprisingly, it makes a great session beer. Just as you think its bitterness will be too much, it proves it can tempt you to one more.

Beer you want to drink a lot of rather than beer it’s easy to drink in quantity… that’s a thought.

3. We’d forgotten the term ‘designer beer‘ until we came across a 1991 Daily Mirror article on the then hot trend in ‘boozy fashion accessories’. Typical designer beers, it suggests, are Brahma (favoured by Andrew Ridgeley of Wham!), Dos Equis (David Bowie), Sapporo (Jason Donovan) and Peroni (Tina Turner). Chimay Blue also gets a mention, alongside a peach beer from Belgium which was supposed to have aphrodisiac qualities.

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Beer styles

The Session Curve

Our pints of mild on Saturday got us thinking about the experience of drinking a given beer over the course of a session which helped us understand what the term ‘session beer’ means to us.

So, this chart is an attempt to illustrate the pleasure we gain from a selection of beers over the course of an arbitrarily selected six drink session (about the upper end of what we ever drink — a ‘big one’ by our standards) indicated on the bottom axis.

The session beer curve illustrated in a chart.

It’s a bit of a jumble but:

  1. St Austell Black Prince, after about four pints, seems the finest beer in the world, after an underwhelming start, and we could keep drinking it forever.
  2. Fuller’s London Pride is rarely exciting but maintains its appeal throughout a session — another definition of balanced?
  3. St Austell Proper Job is a great beer — one we’re always delighted to find — but not one we like to drink more than about three pints of. It fails as a session beer because it is too intensely hoppy and just a touch too strong for us — the feeling that we ought to call it a day, the surprisingly wobbly walk to the bar, comes a little too soon.