The Session has taken many twists and turns since the first one in March of 2007, many of them delightful. But I never would have predicted 64 gatherings in that a) we’d still be doing this, b) we wouldn’t yet have focused on pale ale.

Looking back at Jay Brooks’ archive I see we’ve also somehow overlooked IPA. Oh, my.

And as this exchange indicates, a topic that begged to be discussed over a beer.

Alan McLeod: “There is no beer moment. There are moments. In life. In your life. Beer does not change the moment even when it is present within it. Don’t let the ad men fool you.”

Pete Brown: “If advertising were as powerful as Alan thinks it is, every last one of you would now be drinking Budweiser and Stella Artois, and nothing else. And you wouldn’t be as happy with beer as you obviously are. Talking about the context, the emotions and the companionship, does NOT mean you don’t care about what you drink – as many commenters have pointed out. It simply means that beer is one part of a healthy, joyful life – unless you’re someone who would just rather sit and analyze and deconstruct beer instead.”

I spent probably too much time at the just completed Craft Brewers Conference in conversations of deconstruction, but the single best one had nothing to do with beer. Just now reading the various Session posts I could only think, Alan’s right because it was simply a moment that would have been no different if I hadn’t had a beer in my hand. And I thought, Pete’s right because I did have a beer in my hand.

Now a James McMurtry lyric is dancing in my head: “I don’t want another drink, I only want that last one again.”

In this case that moment. I couldn’t tell you what I was drinking.

But I’d already decided that since I’d be surrounded by brewers and others involved in the beer industry during the Craft Brewers Conference I’d let attendees contribute.

I asked them to play a word association game. To warm up, we started with “soul of beer,” then moved on to “extreme beer,” and finished with “The beer moment.”

Chances are the results would be different if I simply walked up to people at the mall or a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game and said, “Beer moment,” or perhaps put it in question form, “Beer moment?”

What I learned and who I learned it from.

Tony Simmons, Pagosa Brewing
Soul of beer: craft beer
Extreme beer: trendy
Beer moment: epiphany

Patrick Rue, The Bruery
Yeast (which he made a three syllable word)
Different (Steven Pauwels of Boulevard Brewing provided some coaching while Rue considered this one and suggested passé.
Trying something new

Jean-Francois Gravel, Dieu du Ciel!
Yeast (no, really, he didn’t hear Rue’s answer)
Challenging
All the time

Carl Kins, World Beer Cup Judge from Belgium
Life’s blood
United States
24/7

Matt Van Wyk, Oakshire Brewing
Passion
Triple IPA
Experience

Melissa Cole, Let Me Tell You About Beer
Conviviality
Good when skilled
Seeing the people you love over beer

Brother Christian, Monastery of Christ in the Desert
Joy of life
Going to far
Any time

Brother Christian was at the conference because Christ in the Desert is shopping for a slightly larger pilot brewery. The monks have a small brewery on the monastery grounds. Monks’ Ales are brewed under contract nearby, and several monks travel there on brew day to lend a hand.

What is it?

Well, what is it to you? What does that phrase evoke for you?

That’s the most important thing here. Switch off and float downstream, what comes to mind? Don’t analyse it – what are the feelings, the emotions?

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot recently, because I’ve been talking about it to various people who are working hard to try to improve the image of beer in the UK. Because whether we articulate it or not, whether we drink vile, sunstruck Corona or barrel aged imperial stout brewed with weasel shit, it’s about the moment far more than the liquid itself. The only people who disagree with me on this are people I wouldn’t want to share a beer with.

The first Friday of May falls on the fourth (thus a headline on the announcement, “May the fourth be with you!”).

As far as navel gazing¹ goes, Friday’s Session was above average (again, your mileage may vary). As he concluded:

“Lots of commonalities and dissimilarities amongst beer bloggers and why we elect to write and post about beer.”

¹ See previous references to blogging and navel gazing.

The about/mission page pretty much explains why this blog exists. I’m not sure you should care what motivates me to serve that mission (on at least 4.57 posts out of 10), or in fact that want to share it.

So, as is often the case here, I’ll leave it to you to connect the dots between point A and point B.

A) During our Grand Adventure in 2008 I visited Alaskan Brewing. I saw the mash filter they were in the process of installing. I pitched the story to a few beer-related publications, but nobody was interested. I thought this was one of those stories somebody should write about, so when the filter was up and running I wrote about it here.

B) On June 4, 1968, I fell asleep listening to a Pittsburgh radio station broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale’s sixth consecutive shutout. I awoke to the news that Robert Kennedy had been shot later that night in Los Angeles. As I did six mornings a week that summer I headed to the offices of The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette.

I liked to get there by 5:30, so I could pull the paper off the teletype machines before the “wire editor” (his title) arrived. He tended to be way too slow sorting out the sports stories, because he’d probably rather have been working in the sports department just as much as I’d rather have been working in news. Plus he was an alcoholic and I didn’t much care for the phlegm that ended up on the paper he passed along.

On this day, though, I just wanted to be able to stand in front of the machine and watch it type out the news one letter at a time, before anybody else in town would read it. This was news, to me more real than watching television replays of the shooting itself, because it was “real time.”

Beer is not that important. I understand that. I constantly remind you of that. But there are times when I learn something interesting enough I can’t wait for that clattering machine to bang out the next sentence. This blog gives me a place to pass along those stories. Maybe I’m just a beer gossip.¹

¹ I just checked and the domain beergossip.com is taken, but thebeergossip.com is available.

Yes, the obvious answer should be: A designated driver.

But let’s get right to the navel gazing.¹

Your mission as a craft beverage blogger reading this post, should you choose to accept it, is to compose a post on the topic of “What Drives Beer Bloggers.” There are no rigid guidelines about how to write about this topic but we’d certainly love to hear about the history behind your blog, your purpose in creating it, its evolution, and/or what your goals in keeping it going.

The date is April 6. I might write about “10 things you might not know about Alan McLeod but I do because I read his blogs (plural).” Or maybe the 10 cleverest lines in the history of Appellation Beer. Except they’d all be comments, and what would that tell you about me?

More seriously, bloggers are an important part of a particular beer niche, one that sociologists will be studying for years to come. This should help them.

1 For the record, references to navel gazing may or may not be intended as snark. But it has become standard in some of the blogging places I hang out to use the phrase to remind ourselves to write about beer rather than, blush, ourselves.

I am really happy with all of the writing this month. I tried to keep the question vague on purpose, and many people took it quite literally, while others took a completely different spin. This seems like a pretty divisive subject, but nothing that couldn’t be settled over a few pints.

I agree. Some really interesting points made. This was definitely a “Let’s order another round and talk about this some more” topic. Although I could see a conversation here or there, mostly there, ending in, “Jane, you ignorant slut.”

Now we begin Year Six of The Session in Indiana. (Year Six, meaning we started five years ago. Pretty amazing. “What Goes Around… Comes Around” was atop the music charts.)

Hoosier Beer Geek Matt Robinson asks we consider this question over beer: What makes local beer better?

Of course I think this is a good idea. www.drinklocalbeer.com is one of those stray URLs I’ve given a home (don’t bother with the link, it brings you to the Appellation Beer front page). So to Matt’s marching orders:

We are hosting the March edition of the session. The topic I’ve been thinking about is local beer. The term is being used by just about every craft brewer in the country. What does it really mean though? Is it more of a marketing term or is there substance behind the moniker? This month I want to think about what makes local beer better? I’m not just talking about the beer itself, although it’s the focal point, but what makes local beer better? My connection to local beer is far from thinking that my beer is actually “local.” Maybe you don’t agree with me, and you can write about that. Bonus points for writing about your favorite local beer and the settings around it being local to you.

I just realized that last year for the March Session we visited Urban Chestnut Brewing in St. Louis. It wasn’t local then. We were still paying property taxes in New Mexico. Perhaps I should hum “What Goes Around… Comes Around.” If I only knew the tune. The fact is, though, there are two breweries closer to our house than UCB, and in addition three breweries opened in the months after UCB. Local has taken on new meaning in St. Louis.

Kendall Jones at Washington Beer Blog has chosen the topic for #60: Growlers Galore.

Tell us about your growler collection. Tell us why you love growlers or why you hate them. What is the most ridiculous growler you’ve ever seen? Tell us about your local growler filling station. Ever suffer a messy growler mishap? Anything related to growlers is acceptable.

There are some beautiful growlers out there, but I tend to think about what’s inside of them. That will likely be the focus of what I write about. I don’t know if I can tell you anything revealing as Jones did in introducing the topic: “I even have a special device installed in the back seat of my car to securely transport up to three growlers at a time.” I’m impressed.