Our marching orders for The Session No. 117 are pretty straightforward, to consider the future of beer and “capture ONE thing you think we will see MORE of with an explanation of the idea.”
I’m not all that great at making predictions, so I’m going with something I hope we see more of, and that is less. I’m pretty sure this will happen, but I’m just as certain that we going to see more in-your-face-big-flavor beers as well, full of plenty of hops or plenty of alcohol, or both.
Host Csaba Babak at Beer Means Business has announced that posts for The Session No. 117 should “capture ONE thing you think we will see MORE of with an explanation of the idea.”
This should be fun, if only to see if some participants write about what they would like more of in the future versus what we will see. I’ll simply be going with the former. But when I tweeted the announcement, Bryan Roth replied:
Betting lines on words/phrases mentioned among entries:
IPA – 2/1
“Sour beer” – 3/1
Buyout/sellout/acquisition – 4/1
We’ll find out Friday.
Host Derrick Peterman has announced the topic for The Session #116 is “Anything Gose,” and suggests you learn how to pronounce it.
I choose the Gose style in particular since it can be approached in so many different ways. Want to talk about the history of the Gose? How about how American breweries are taking this style and running wild with it with different spice and fruit additions? How else has the Gose manifested itself outside its German homeland? Is the Gose here to stay or will it go the way of the Black IPA, once the hot style but slowly becoming a largely irrelevant curiosity? (OK, that might not be your opinion of the Black IPA, but you get the idea.) Of course, we’re all on the look-out for a good Gose, so if there are any you particularly like, we’d love to hear about them.
If you want to learn more about the history of the style, I can recommend a good book.
Closing on seven years ago I posted a list of 10 really good beer books. As opposed to, say, the Ten Best Beer Books EVER! Of course, many readers missed the disclaimers (why there were no beer and food books and no technical/brewing/homebrewing books), so I know what I may be getting into by bringing it up and adding two books to that list for The Session No. 115 (“The role of beer books”).
The newcomers are The Beer Bible, by Jeff Alworth, and Triplebock: Three Beer Stories by Evan Rail. The latter is intential fiction (as opposed to the unintential beer fiction that far too often finds its way into print). There is some fiction in The Bedside Book of Beer on my original list, but more quality beer fiction sure would be nice. Yes, the former is a resource, a book you can pull off the shelf to find an answer that settles a bar bet. But it is also a book to read from start to finish, to be considered as a whole, because that’s the way Alworth presents the beers within it.
For those who don’t want the short version, here is the original list:
– The Beer Companion.
– Three Sheets to the Wind.
– Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer.
– Beer: The Story of the Pint.
– Travels with Barley: A Journey Through the Beer Culture in America.
– Tasting Beer: An Insider’s Guide to the World’s Greatest Drink.
– Origin and History of Beer and Brewing.
– The Book of Beer Knowledge.
– The Bedside Book of Beer.
– Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870-1920.
Or you can read more.
Host Joan Villar-i-Martí has announced that the topic for The Session #115 will be “Role of beer books.”
He writes, “Participants can talk about that first book that caught their attention, which brought them to get interested in beer; or maybe about books that helped developing their local beer scene. There’s also the – bad – role of books that regrettably misinform readers because their authors did not do their work properly. There are many different ways to tackle this topic.”
So read a new book or revisit an old friend and post on the topic Sept. 2.