the session

A few hours ago John tweeted his roundup for The Session #25: Lager Love is about half finished. Meanwhile he directs us to the reluctant scooper’s tome on the topic.

Why? Here’s one paragraph: “Let’s be honest: lager is shit. It’s a pitiful excuse for alcohol. Drunk from tins, drank by neds, sold in slabs, made in labs. It may have a rich history but it’s been forcibly abducted by the English and had up the chuffer. There are amoeboids avoiding osmosis with passing cells just in case it involves this fizzy pizz of stuff.”

This guy just got added to my feed reader.

Memo to Greg Koch: Here’s a fizzy yellow lager you can cuddle up to. Not all that yellow, I guess, and not necessarily that fizzy. But definitely a lager, a puny 3.7% abv beer in the Munich Helles tradition.

A beer I last enjoyed about six months ago, but I remember well enough to feature as my contribution to The Session #25: Lager Love. And since I won’t be around today to keep up with how this plays out on Twitter, I’ll give you a series of thoughts, all less than 140 characters.

– Surtaler Leichter Typ is light colored, although I don’t know I’d use the word yellow. But when your host asks you have to do your best to oblige.

– Private Landbrauerei Schönram in the German village of Schönram-Petting near Salzburg, Austria, brews the beer.

– It earned a silver medal as a European Light Lager in the European Beer Star competition.

– Yes, it’s a light version of the brewery’s best selling helles (65 percent of sales – a dang nice beer at 5.4% abv).

– You can drink this all night, well maybe 5 liters, and maybe blow .04 on a breathalyzer (the brewer and owner did this to make sure).

– A great beer to shift to after several “big” ones. Because you can still taste it. This isn’t water.

– Smooth (lagered for a silly amount of time), bready, grassy, lots of noble hops.

– Goes well with conversation.

– It says 3.4% on the label, it’s really 3.7% and it tastes twice as big as a 4.2% American light.

– I want this beer brewed close to my home. Not a beer meant to travel, so don’t try it more than 20 kilometers from the brewery.

– Twitter pretty much sucks when it comes to describing the pleasure of drinking this beer.

Dave has posted the roundup for Session #24.

He gives extra credit to those who shared their tripel (oops, I sort of flunked that one – we shared, but it wasn’t part of my post).

The Beer Nut has posted the topic for Session #25: Lager Love.

So for this Session, let’s get back to basics. I’m sure I’m not the only one whose early drinking career featured pale lager in abundance, so consider this a return to our roots as beer drinkers. Don’t even think about cheating the system: leave your doppelbocks and schwarzbiers out of this one: I want pilsners, light lagers, helleses and those ones that just say “beer” because, well, what else would it be?

A lively discussion has already broken out in comments about the announcement, causing me to seek a bit of clarification. I have no urge to return to my roots if we’re talking the insipid lagers available when I first met “quarter pitcher night.”

Or even, for instance, Warsteiner. (I used a wonderful quote from Josef Schneider of the Josef Schneider brewery in Essing, Germany, about Warsteiner in a story I wrote for All About Beer magazine. I will pass it along once the article is in print.)

So I asked about Czech pale lagers (you might call them pilsners, but the Czechs don’t unless they are from Pilsen) and received approval, for a simple reason, because they are “taken-for-granted, this-is-what-beer-means-here.”

I don’t even know if I’ll be able to post for the March 6 Session (I think we’ll be in Virginia; almost close enough to Philadelphia to consider checking out what looks like an insane Philly Beer Week ) and I certainly don’t know what I’ll be writing about. But when that roundup is posted I’m sure I will be clicking on every single link.