Session #120 announced: Brown beer

Host Joe Tindall has announced that the topic for The Session #120 is brown beer.

The colour brown has certain connotations, some of which I won’t dwell on. But used in reference to beer, it can signify a kind of depressing old fashioned-ness – to refer to a traditional bitter as ‘brown’ seems to suggest it belongs to a bygone corduroy-trousered era. As breweries who pride themselves on their modernity focus on beers that are either decidedly pale or unmistakably black, the unglamorous brown middle ground is consistently neglected.

So for Session 120, let’s buck the trend and contemplate brown beer. This might be brown ale, or the aforementioned English bitter; it could be a malty Belgian brune, a dubbel or a tart oud bruin; even a German dunkel might qualify.

So let’s get the famous George Gobel line out of the way. “Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?” And think brown for Feb. 3.