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The Session

Rounding up contributions to The Session #144: beers at home

Two front doors side by side, on slightly higher than the other, in pop art print style.

We hosted Session #144 last week and asked people to tell us about the best beer they could drink at home right now. Here’s what they came up with.

Al Reece at Fuggled goes for his home-brewed best bitter served through a ‘kegerator’: “If you have ever travelled much in the US, you will know that best bitter is rarer than the proverbial hen’s teeth, as are various other styles that I love…”

Alan McLeod at A Good Beer Blog dug into his stash and pulled out a can of Godspeed Světlý Ležák: “$3.55 a can plus shipping plus tax. Except this one came during the holiday sales tax holiday. Sweet. A credible beer. My beer of 2024.”

Alex Mennie at Mennie Drinks on Substack chose the general concept of ‘shower beer’: “Nowadays – renovating a flat – the shower beer is a sacred signifier that the day’s work is done. It’s normally a supermarket session IPA.”

Andreas Krennmair at Daft Eejit Brewing highlights what a great city Berlin is for those who drink at home, and names beers in a range of categories, including his own homebrew: “The number 1: Augustiner Lagerbier Hell. I mean… it’s Augustiner. Some people may find its slight sulphur note a bit divisive, but it’s a Berlin staple for a very good reason, in a place that previously was dominated by German Pils for decades.”

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The Session

The Session 144: What we’re drinking at home

A convenience store shelf loaded with colourful craft beer cans.

This month’s Session is about the best beers we can drink at home right now. Our answer is: whatever looks interesting at Pat’s News & Booze.

A year or so ago, we’d probably have said Pilsner Urquell – a pack of six 330ml cans from CO-OP (20 minute walk) or Sainsbury’s (25 minutes).

It always tasted fresh, if not as vibrant as on draught, or closer to source. But, sadly, it seems to have disappeared from both supermarkets.

There’s plenty of other drinkable beer in the various supermarkets near us but nothing much that gets us excited.

For that, or for the potential of that, we need to go to our nearest kind-of specialist off licence, Pat’s News & Booze, AKA Mr Exclusive Drinks.

Why “kind of”? Because Pat’s is not a typical craft beer shop.

It’s a high street convenience store with Doritos, a Slush Puppy machine, an extensive range of vapes, and a current promotion on something called ‘Buzzballz’.

There’s also a shelf filled with vacuum sealed party packs containing:

  • a can of exotic fizzy pop
  • a miniature of vodka
  • a lollipop

Not the kind of thing you see at one of those very classy, very earnest boutique bottle shops.

The beer selection is not purist, either. It includes strong Eastern European lagers and bog standard international brands.

But about half of the fridge space is given over to full-on craft beer, in colourful cans, from both local breweries and those across the UK.

It really is quite dazzling, and surprising the first time you see it in these unlikely surroundings.

Another little phrase above we need to unpack is “the potential of…”

You can’t rely on finding the same beers twice at Pat’s. It’s all about novelty and hype.

Our usual approach is to buy a few things that look promising, or that are new to us. That means that, inevitably, they’re sometimes bloody awful.

When we’re drinking at home, though, that adds a bit of extra spice, making up for the lack of atmosphere and the absence of cask-conditioned beer.

It gives us something to talk about and debate.

Every now and then, it also provides us with fuel for our weekly ‘Beers of the weekend’ posts on Patreon.

On our most recent visit, what really caught our eye was the selection of German beers on offer at three for £10. The range included Tegernsee, Flötzinger, and others we recognise from the Cave Direct list.

And there among the Pilsner, Helles and Dunkel was one of our favourite beers of all time: Schlenkerla Helles.

So, that’s our real answer to the question we set ourselves: the best beer we can drink at home right now is that magical, mysterious, lightly smoked lager from Bamberg, which has somehow made its way to suburban Bristol.

We’ll put together a round up of everyone else’s entries for The Session in the next few days. Let us know if you’ve posted something by emailing contact@boakandbailey.com, commenting somewhere we’ll see it, or messaging us on BlueSky.

Next month’s Session will be hosted by Matthew Curtis who will announce the topic shortly.

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The Session

The Session #144: The best beer you can drink at home right now

Jaipur and cheese on a table at our old house.

We’re hosting the next edition of The Session, where beer bloggers and posters around the world respond to the same prompt, on the same day. (Or thereabouts.)

For Session #144 that day is Friday 28 February 2025 and the prompt is:

What’s the best beer you can drink at home right now?

Not necessarily right now. You can go to the shops if you like.

But you shouldn’t have to get on a train or a flight. Or travel back in time.

If you like, you can choose a top 3, or top 5, or top 10.

What makes it a good beer to drink at home? Is it brewed to be packaged? Does it pair well with your home cooking? Does it pair well with drinking in your pyjamas?

If you don’t think there’s any such thing as a good beer to drink at home, that’s fine, too – talk about that!

Whatever your response to the prompt might be is absolutely grand.

It’s just a starting point, or trigger – not a set of rules to a game of which we are the umpires.

When you’ve written your post, wherever that may be, let us know by:

Remember, it doesn’t have to be an epic. Our post for Session #143 was 300 words.

Even a social media post is fine.

We just want people to feel as if they can join in, however much time or energy they might have.

Check out last month’s contributions for inspiration.

And let us know if you’d like to host. (Before we start tapping people up.)

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Beer styles The Session

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

A pump clip for Five Points Dark Mild in a Victorian pub.

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.

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beer reviews Belgium

Session #91: Our First Belgian

This is our contribution to the 91st beer blogging session hosted by Belgian Smaak.

Leffe Blonde

The fact is, we don’t know for sure. We can’t remember.

It might have been Hoegaarden, and there’s an outside chance it was Belle-Vue Kriek. There might even have been bottles of something at a student party — De Koninck? Palm? There was definitely Stella Artois, but we’re not sure that counts.

The first really clear memory we have is of draught Leffe Blond at the William IV on the Leyton-Walthamstow border c.2002. Having arrived at the trendy Belgo restaurants from 1992 onward (see Chapter 11 of Brew Britannia) this ‘premium special occasion beverage’ took a decade to filter out to the suburbs.

Back then, after the closure of the Sweet William microbrewery but before the arrival of Brodie’s, the William was just another East London pub with a slightly tense atmosphere, lots of empty seats, and a line-up of mass-market lagers.

We only ever went there to see a friend who lived nearby. She was then a heavier smoker than Humphrey Bogart in his prime and, somehow, always felt more grown-up and sophisticated than everyone else in the room. In 2002, what counted as sophistication was ordering a chalice of Leffe in a cockney boozer.

So we copied her.

It was fun drinking out of silly glases, and it really did taste different to anything else we’d had before, though we weren’t in the habit of taking notes back then. We recall finding it weighty and luscious, perhaps because, at 6.6%, it was stronger than anything else widely available on draught at the time. Its strength also made it feel naughty: “I should warn you…” the barmaid would say every time.

* * *

More than a decade on, Leffe is really not cool, and, unless we’re missing something, has rather retreated from the on-trade. (See also: Hoegaarden.) We can’t think when we last saw a Leffe tap in a pub. In 2002, we didn’t know (or especially care) that it was a sub-brand of a big multi-national, but, these days, that doesn’t help its cause:  it’s not the kind of thing ‘craft beer’ bars bother themselves with.

What is is, at least in bottled form, is cheap. We picked up 750ml, with cage, cork, foil and other trappings of poshness, at CO-OP in the centre of Penzance for £3.49, but it can often be found on sale for as little as £2.50. But is it good value?

There is a distinctive Belgian yeast character — a touch of banana, some bread, a sprinkle of peppery-spice — but very restrained. It no longer tastes all that exotic — not because it’s been ‘dumbed down’ but because a lot of beer has flowed over our palates since 2002. What once read as luscious now seems like the stickiness of barley sugar sweets, or as if a tot of orange squash has been added to the glass.

It feels, all in all, hurried, tacky, and plasticky.

Compare it to, say, Westmalle Tripel, or pay it too much attention, and it seems a dud. Think of it as a lager with a bit more going on, and it’s not bad, and certainly good enough company with dinner in front of the telly.