Remember when Lew Bryson started The Session Beer Project in 2007? He originally set the cap for session beers at 5.5% ABV, then lowered it to 4.5%. And finding truly flavorful beers that met the standard was not particularly easy.

Now it seems as if 2.5% ABV is the new 4.5%. Such beers may be labeled “low alcohol.” “Building quality low-alcohol beer is a balancing act,” Josh Bernstein writes in The New York Times. Among others, Bernstein talked with Todd DiMatteo, brewer and co-founder at Good Word Brewing & Public House in Duluth, Georgia. He also mentioned Little Beer, a festival Good Word will host in April.

The first Little Beer, held last May, was the first and last festival I have attended since Covid arrived in the United States. The 2022 lineup is spectacular in a different way than the also spectacular lineup for Side Project Invitational the same day. I plan to write more about that later.

A bit of disclosure. DiMatteo and I are friends. I once hung out and helped brew a 3.5% ABV beer at Good Word that we called Lunar Gravity. (One Untappd contributor gave it 4 1/2 stars and wrote “Definitely good for a lager.”) Last week, among the reasons I was back in Georgia was because Ron Pattinson came to the U.S. to drink a beer DiMatteo brewed from a recipe Pattinson wanted to taste.

The beer is called No Wooden Shoes and is a 3.5% ABV Dutch-style Donkerbier. About four dozen Georgia brewers showed up at Good Word on Thursday to listen to Pattinson talk about low-gravity English beers. I sat beside him and answered a few questions about hops, but I know why they braved Atlanta traffic to get to Duluth.

On Wednesday, Pattinson and I visited a few Georgia breweries. The photo at the top was taken at Elsewhere Brewing and that’s brewer Josh Watterson with him in front of 12 horizontal tanks (six fermentation tanks, six serving vessels).

Now, back to regular programming.

COMPARE & CONTRAST
“Selling out” revisited. This is quite a sentence: “At its zenith, craft beer might have achieved something close to that kind of (beer-centric) social, civic saturation, but those days are in the rearview now.” Perhaps this overstates the import of craft beer in the decade of your choice and at the same time understates its ongoing impact within smaller communities.

Bell’s Brewery has 1,300 employees. What’s it going to be like to work there in five years and what will Eccentric Day be like? I’m willing to wait and see. What will it be like at New Belgium Brewing, which is now “integrating” with Bell’s? There is a standard to live up to (see the next section and Brian Callahan).

[Insert headline]. Try as I may I could not come up with a few words to summarize this story that doesn’t come off churlish. The Brewers Association independent craft brewer seal has caught plenty of flack since it was introduced in 2017, but it helped make “indie brewer” part of our vocabulary. I expect that the founders of Indie Brewing are good neighbors and don’t deserve a headline that reads, “Indie Brewing Is Dead.”

‘WOW, I THINK I COULD DO THIS’
He started as a volunteer, bottling beer. He was the company’s first employee owner. He finished happily working on the grounds crew. A very New Belgiumesque story.

A FORGOTTEN RUNT
An exploration of sour and our evolutionary past. Or why you wouldn’t give a tomato or lemon to a sheep.

BUSINESS PAGES
“It’s been years since a new beer ad reached pop culture status.” I can live with that.

Discarding gender roles. “There is no more important narrative in the last century of U.S. alcohol than the rise of women drinkers.”

Related: In The New Brewer (available in print and to Brewers Association members online) “Beer’s Tenacious Gender Gap” concludes “Someday we may look back and see this era as the time when our culture tools its first baby steps away from the whole idea of categorizing human traits as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine.’”

When Fuller’s was funky. Ah, yes, the 70s.

I’m confused. The subhead on this story states, “As baby boomers retire and buy less wine, producers need new ways to tempt a White Claw generation back from other alcoholic drinks.” But within there is this quote: “A brand’s social values are increasingly connected to a consumer’s decision to purchase particular products, including wine.” I would like to see the memo revealing White Claw’s social values.

HOP MAN
Why was I not given this option when answering census questions?

New (to me) census occupational category: Hop Man! In the 1910 California population census. ? cc @brewingarchives @StanHieronymus @LizGaribayChi pic.twitter.com/gX8DkuLw0T

— Jennifer Jordan (@ediblememory) February 10, 2022

New Pete Brown posts are rare (the last before Friday was June 4), but these 1,300-plus words were worth waiting for. They aren’t all his words. He has mined comments from thet “sewers that run below the lines of Daily Mail articles” and, well, maybe I should back up.

CAMRA has asked its members to fill out a questionnaire.

Brown explains, “After years of being criticised for only being relevant to white middle-aged men, CAMRA is asking how it might broaden its audience from that base. After decades of women reporting that they are patronised, ignored ridiculed, harassed or even assaulted at beer events, CAMRA is asking people for their experiences, to gauge how serious the problem is and, if necessary (spoiler alert: it is) to do something about it.

“Speaking as an overweight, bearded, middle-aged real ale drinker, I’d say this is long overdue, and is to be welcomed.”

Not by those he cites.

Easy to read. Hard truths.

GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY
The governor of Oregon ordered flags in the state be flown at half-staff to honor Austin Smith, a volunteer firefighter, who suffered critical injuries Thursday from an explosion while he was fighting a barn fire in his hometown of St. Paul, population 480. I know this because Friday multiple hop farms I follow on Twitter and Instagram sent their condolences. Smith, a sixth generation hop farmer, was manager of B&D Farms and also had plans to open a brewery.

The story I linked to does not mention hops or beer. Alan McLeod describes himself as “a beer community denier.” I don’t necessarily agree, but sometimes I would rather think about beer and community and their impact on each other than the fraternity of beer/brewing. This story is a reminder of what it means to serve a community.

NATIVE LAND
Each can of Native Land beer acknowledges the ancestral land the brewery that made the beer is located on. Here’s another reason that matters.

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LEDE OF THE WEEK

“Wherever there’s a row of railway arches, a brewery is inevitable.”

And so begins “Little Martha: a new stop in Bristol’s brewery quarter” from Boak & Bailey.

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MESSAGE IN A CAN
In this case one that contained Labatt Ice. “A phenomenon like craft beer, itself in constant evolution, is not the final arbiter of beer taste.”

NA
-Dry January in Germany.
-Dry January in Chicago.

ON HOLD
Flagship February.

STOP OVERTHINKING IT
The shape of your wine beer glass doesn’t really matter. Actually, it does, but not that much. And clean matters a lot more. The important message here is, “Stop overthinking it.”

QUESTION OF THE WEEK

I often wonder how I would view beer if I learned about beer today instead of 15 years ago

— Scotty (@Artifact_Scotty) February 3, 2022

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John Duffy recently re-reviewed Molloy’s Last Night coffee and cocoa imperial stout, a beer he didn’t much care for the first time around.

This time he writes, “Looking back now at the original review, it’s not a million miles different: the same elements were there but that sourness was pushed much higher, at least in my perception of the beer at the time. I would like to think that there was something bacterially askew with that can, but it could easily be down to the same beer hitting differently on a different day. Your mileage may vary; mine certainly does.”

(T)he same beer may hit differently on a different day. Not a shocking statement, and a reminder there is a flip side; that the beer that was great last week, last month, last summer suddenly isn’t.

THE WHEELS KEEP TURNING
Cottrell Brewing opened in Connecticut in 1996, the year the number of US breweries swelled past 1,000. Victory Brewing, Stone Brewing, Firestone Walker and several others that would grow well beyond micro-size also opened in 1996. Cottrell was small, but not that small, producing 4,000 barrels in 2019, the year before the pandemic. More than 90 percent of the breweries in the country are smaller.

The brewery will be closing soon, not because of the pandemic but because their landlord is kicking them out and the hassle of moving isn’t worth it. But the brand name is going to one company and the brewing equipment to another.

. . . AND TURNING
Stone Brewing co-founder Greg Koch writes an ode to Marin Brewing.

THE EXCEPTION
It’s been, what?, more than a decade since the Brewers Association rolled out the fact that most Americans live within 10 miles of a brewery. But if they live next to Katahdin Brew Works, it is a long way to the next brewery, like 100 miles.

TWEET LIKE A MONK
A team of college professors and students is helping St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Mass. — home of the only Trappist brewery in the United States — launch a social media marketing plan for Spencer beers. “To be candid,” says Father Isaac, who oversees the brewery, “the monastic lifestyle doesn’t attract a lot of people who are skilled at (social media).” (Nice photos; take a look.)

PROHIBITION
How American Authors Helped Push an Agenda of “Temperance.” About the drunkard, a new character in American writing.

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A post shared by Paul Castro (@gonzohunter)

IF YOU’RE GOING TO COME AT THE KING
What’s it take to become the King of Bud? Ten years and 10,000 beers.

BLACK HISTORY MONTH
– Grammy-nominated Southern hip-hop group Nappy Roots opens Atlantucky on Friday.

– Beer Kulture and Athletic Brewing partner for the return of soul sour.

– Chicago’s Black-owned breweries unite for 6-week residency in the West Loop.

– San Antonio beer fans outraged as Black-owned local brewery snubbed in MLK library exhibit.

There should be plenty more, but that’s a start.

HISTORY
– The growler. But don’t forget Charlie Otto.

-Ask for a “glass of beer” in Ireland and you will receive a half pint. Why?