That The Session has persisted for 100 months seems pretty astonishing to me. It apparently has outlasted Wine Blogging Wednesday. Coincidentally, the 100th edition of Beer Advocate magazine recently shipped to subscribers and beer friendly establishments where it is available. It includes a timeline with highlights from years beginning in 2007 — at that time, the Brewers Association defined as craft beer accounted for 3.8 percent of the market and Ray Daniels was just starting the Cicerone program.
Host Reuben Gray’s choice for Session #100 — Resurrecting Lost Beer Styles — leans heavily on history, so it seems like a good one for marking a milestone. He writes:
There are many of them (lost styles) that have started to come back in to fashion since in the last 10 years due to the rise of craft beer around the world.
If you have a local beer style that died out and is starting to appear again then please let the world know. Not everyone will so just write about any that you have experienced. Some of the recent style resurrections I have come across in Ireland are Kentucky Common, Grodziskie, Gose1 and some others. Perhaps it’s a beer you have only come across in homebrew circles and is not even made commercially.
I’ve probably already written too much about Gose and Grodziskie and after visiting Louisville and Lexington last week I know too much about Kentucky Common. Here’s the brewery cat at Apocolypse Brew Works sleeping on brew logs Conrad Selle brought to share, and — pro tip — I’m the guy to avoid at the party in the days right after a productive research trip. You won’t have to buy the next book; you will have already heard it.
But while I was talking to brewers in Kentucky a nagging thought returned. These beers disappeared, or nearly disappeared, because not enough people were buying them. So why should they be commercially viable now?
*****
1 Gose, Grodziskie and Kentucky Common are among the beers described in Historical Beer (Category 27) in the 2015 BJCP Style Guidelines released last week.
Are any of them commercially viable now or are they loss leaders to get a the capabilities of a brewery noticed so that they can sell you the flagships or at least the regular line up in greater quantity? Not sure anyone is actually stocking up on gose.
Think Alan’s on to something there.
Having said that, some styles such as Berliner Weisse and Gose really could have popular appeal if they were packaged as ‘fun and funky’ rather than historic/dead. Magic Rock in the UK do a good job of this.
Cans – like Westbrook and Anderson Valley (two versions) – lean more toward fun and funky than historical.
People will drink anything.
Mind you, Ireland’s Wicklow Wolf brewery doesn’t have a session-strength stout or porter. It has filled that gap, perfectly acceptably, with a Kentucky Common. There’s no reason at all that the more accessible rare styles can’t find their market.
Which Kentucky Common? From Local Option? Against the Grain? I don’t particularly want to write about Common in June – because too many of my thoughts are still half-baked – but those two are not true to the beer as it was brewed at the height of its popularity. They are true to the myth that it was meant to be a sour beer. Sour is going to sell better, particularly if you are shipping half way around the world. But is it still Kentucky Common.
Their own Kentucky Common.
Interesting. I wonder if this reflects the influence of its presence in the new BJCP guidelines. No sour. Instead, love.
Stan, I am in CNY this weekend. Never had a KC. What names should I look for?
Best bet would be something brewed local and that is under the Rate Beer radar. You might spot Against the Grain Kamen Knuddeln or Local Option’s Kentucky Common (brewed at ATG). Both are sour (not officially historic) versions.
Not to sound like a ticker, but I want that one from Wicklow Wolf.
Sounds good. I think I need you to publish that book for me to understand your comment on sourness,
“These beers disappeared, or nearly disappeared, because not enough people were buying them. So why should they be commercially viable now?”
Same for saison and, for that matter, IPA. Times change; so do tastes and preferences.
So you are predicting that Kentucky Common will account, as it did 100 years ago, for 75% of the beer sold in Louisville?
Except both saisons and IPAs died then someone took their names and made another beer branded as the dead one.
Alan, you are stealing the lightning from my planned Session #100 post.
Now just a minute, buster! Them’s my idears for my 100th post!!!
Ah, late to the discussion.
No, I don’t think any style will constitute 75% of the sales in any market going forward. I think you’ll see that even in places like the Czech Republic. Beer has always been mutable, and this is one of the changes we’ll see. But that’s not what you asked–you asked why they would be commercially viable now. Commercial viability requires a lot less than a 75% market share.
The historical anomaly was the mass market lager age. That was the first time a single style dominated local markets town to town across an entire country. Never in the history of the earth has that happened, and there’s no reason to think it’s the norm. (You could say the same about any product that got mass-marketed, like cheese or wine or apples. And in all of those cases, the same thing–a move back toward variety–is happening inexorably.)
The question of whether modern saisons are a resurrection or a reincarnation is something different still. But that’s also the process that has gone on for millennia. Beers are made, they change and mutate, names migrate to different beers, and so on. Are saisons made in modern plants in the US today the same as historic saisons? Trick question: which saisons do you mean? There were tons of them.
Later, and reentering the discussion. I should have not been flip and tossed the 75% figure out there (Kentucky Common sales in Louisville in the mid-teens). And that was Alan’s reference to saison, not mine.
What I am wondering is what it means when a brewpub in Ireland brews a beer based on a description of what was called Kentucky Common, Kentucky Kommon and also Louisville Common between 100 years ago and 130 years ago. East of the Mississippi there were many other breweries making a beer they called “Common.” But Wahl & Henius did not describe them. Perhaps it would make more sense for that brewpub to brew its own “Common” – either based on what the beer in Louisville might have tasted like or some other Common.
Or call it a dark mild…
It’s not a brewpub, btw.
The answer very simply is, no one knows until an old style makes a hit. Have we forgotten the cranky, unlikely history of the wit style, now nationally distributed and taken for granted in the form of Blue Moon? Or even Guinness, in its heyday?
Gary