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

A glass half full of beer from Scratch Brewing in Southern Illinois

The Session logoPerhaps because my brain is pretty much fried every day by the latest shenanigans elsewhere, even after reading Boak & Bailey’s broader explanation of how we might approach the topic for the Session #144 the headline (“The best beer to drink at home right now”) was not leaving my brain. Best beer. At home. Right now. So the Tuesday afternoon the announcement posted I checked to see what my options were. At home.

We don’t cellar beer (other than Big Foot, a habit we started long before the brewery quit using twist off caps in 2008) in our house, but we do have small fridge that was intended, by the maker, to hold wine. Beers meant to stand up to time may linger in there for a while, but seldom long enough that when opened scream, “You should have drank me last month.”

In the fridge I found a bottle of Scratch 131 tucked between, like it was hiding, bottles from Primitive Beer here in Colorado and from Fort George Brewing in Oregon. Daria and I first drank the 131 at the brewery two days after Christmas of 2023. We brought three bottles home, opened one when spring arrived and another as fall neared because I knew it belonged on my Craft Beer & Brewing Best in 2024 list. For The Session, I decided to be sure it is still terrific. It is.

I have only one thing to add to what I wrote at the time. I should have included that the ingredients were foraged from the wooded land that surrounds the brewery.

“Fresh flower petals, dried petals. Fresh herbs, dried herbs. Fresh roots, toasted roots. Inhale to recall a fall hike through the woods surrounding the brewery, exhale for memories of a similar spring ramble. One-thirty-one—a reference to the number of ingredients included in the recipe — is a beer of all seasons, and an advertisement for retronasal pleasure.”

It happens to be Scratch’s 12th birthday tomorrow.

Makes me wish I had a fourth bottle of 131 to open. Fortunately, there is a happy ending. We’ll be back in the Midwest a few days next month, which means we’ll be at Scratch.

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Visit Boak & Bailey for more contributions to The Session.

Monday Feb. 24 beer links: Tiny, going low & sessionable

Thanks for the thumbs up from Todd last week about focusing only on pleasure. I’ll be doing that Friday when Boak & Bailey host The Session #144: The best beer you can drink at home right now. Meanwhile, a little chin scratching along with pleasure and not necessarily great news.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“I was born in the ’50s, raised in the ’60s and ’70s. Both sides of my family have always been pretty healthy. I’ve been smokin’ dope, drinkin’ beer, and wine, and whiskey, and tequila, and vodka, and smokin’ cigarettes my entire life. If somebody comes from the surgeon general and says that a few beers are gonna cause cancer, I’m gonna tell them to kiss my ass.”

                    — Rex Porter, Lakeview, Arkansas
From Americans are Rethinking How and Why They Drink

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THINK SMALL

Tiny beers through history Walk (well, read) through the process of developing a theory, and stay for the lovely illustrations. “All study of history is an inexact science, reflecting the current state of our knowledge and discovery.”

How Low Can You Go? This is the a good chunk of a longer post from Beer Crunchers; you’ll need a subscription to read it all. I don’t subscribe, but if I were in the business of making and/or selling beer I would certainly consider it. This post offers quite a bit at no charge, including a list of 15 reasons to drink 2.5% ABV beer, starting with “Because the last time you drank big beers you had to leave the family minivan at Top Golf.”

Remember The Session Beer Project? I do. It is fun to sift through the archives.

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HMMMM

On the American Craft Brewing Hall of Fame. Jeff Alworth writes about his “confusion about why the Hall of Fame exists.” When he posted a link on Bluesky to this post, Jeremy Danner commented, “Can you imagine how mind numbingly boring it would be to visit the beer HOF?” For the record, I provided nominations and I voted in the election. I nominated Joe Owades (cited within the post), not because of the role he played in developing light beer, but because he was a key advisor to the early giants of microbrewing (even if the beer was not made a small breweries; goodness those were confusing times) such as Boston Beer and Pete’s Wicked Ale.

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Monday Feb. 17 beer links: Always, and only, for pleasure

Ceiling at Baumgartner's Cheese Store Tavern, as seen from under a beer glass

The ceiling at Baumgartner’s Cheese store and Tavern in Monroe, Wisconsin, as seen from beside a glass of beer.

There was bad news for beer last week, and stories about the business and beer trends and all the usual stuff. You’ll find none of them here today. It is a holiday, Presidents’ Day (music courtesy of Loudon Wainwright III), so sticking to beer as one of life’s pleasures.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“I would have to say wild and sour ales are overrated. First, they take way too much time to make — imagine how much good beer could have been made in the interim? Second, they’re kind of gross. Who really wants to drink something that smells like a goat barn? And third, they cost way too much. Think of all the good beer you could have bought with that $20 you spent on one bottle.”

                    — Jeffrey Stuffings, Jester King Brewery co-founder
From We Asked 16 Beer Professionals: What’s the Most Overrated Beer Style?

This was a listicle with many redeeming qualities. Granted, some of them are business related, but on the whole they made me smile. Jester King brought two beers to the Weldwerks Invitational nine days ago. Spon 3-Year-Blend, which is wild and sour and the sort of beer Jester King is known for, might have been the best beer in a room full of amazing beers (see below). So maybe Stuffings winked when he finished these six sentences above. The other beer they brought? Nelson Bliss, a hazy IPA. It is 2025, after all. Take the time for some of the other answers, particularly from Heather McReynolds and Gary Rogers.

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LEDE OF THE WEEK

I can barely hear Chit speaking over the sound of the boat engine.

“I said, I used to drive, but this guy goes way faster!” Chit beams, his chiselled grin just visible in the moonlight reflecting off the Chao Phraya river as we traverse through the northern suburbs of Bangkok. It’s 10pm on a Sunday, we’re on a speedboat, and we’re not exactly sober.

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Monday, Feb. 10, beer links, peas and all

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KICKER OF THE WEEK

It was so good that it made Jess switch from Titanic Plum Porter. It was so good that she didn’t even resent the inevitable day after headache. It was so good that, even with the headache, she co-wrote a blog post about it.

From Two decades in pursuit of perfect pints of ESB

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PETE BROWN DOUBLEHEADER

Pete Brown, during one of his beer and music pairing events.– Tasting Notes: The Art and Science of Pairing Beer and Music. Pete Brown is busy promoting his next book, available in May or June, while he still writes it. The photo on the right was taken at a conference in South Africa in 2017, where I was talking about a) hops and b) brewing with local ingredients (they pay your way to South Africa, they keep you working). Brown was refining his pairing beer and music act. His presentation was a lot more fun than mine, and not only because it included drinking beer. He’s done plenty of research since and the book will include a “look at recent research that proves – yes, proves – that on top of all the contextual stuff, our brains have formed deep-seated relationships between what we taste and what we hear, and how changing background music can alter the flavour of your beer.” I’m looking forward to it, even if he doesn’t find a beer to pair with the music of John Moreland.

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Monday beer links: Including the real ‘The Cat Ate My Stash & Pissed On the Christmas Tree’ beer

Much of the best reading last week was on Friday, when The Session revival was pretty dang successful. Cheers to Alan McLeod for escorting the gathering into 2025. McLeod has gathered the links.

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LEDE OF THE WEEK

The signs, both literal and metaphorical, were not great.

The former Sackville Lounge, which had a reputation as a mix of Old Man Pub and dive-y spot to meet somewhat strange and unusual people, had been closed since Covid. But rather than re-opening under that name, with its delightful neon sign (still there, at present), it gained a new identity – and much opprobrium.

The new signage now proclaims the pub to be Biddy Mulligan’s Old Ale and Stout House (‘since 1914’), in the kind of font you’d normally find in plastic letters on a strip-mall Oirish Pub in, say, Arkansas.

From Weirdo Guide to Dublin Pubs: Biddy Mulligan’s

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Beer culture in France was drinking 250ml of a yellow liquid with bubbles in it. And then there’s Jean-François and Christian, coming with a warm flat beer, brown like manure.”

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