Douglas W Hoyt wrote:
it's a good candidate for a decent session brew...


I feel sorry for anybody who sits down for the night with one
particular beer at one of these "sessions" I keep hearing about.

Well, if you're talking about feeling sorry for someone who drinks the
same beer all night, yeah, I feel that way, too.
Obviously, not everyone does- thus the popularity of the home draught
beer systems. (To me having to drink a keg, even a sixtel, of the same
beer for days/weeks, sounds like a session in hell...). At most I'll
have 2 bottles of the same beer in a day (out of a daily total 3 or 4).

As for the "session"- I don't think anyone really uses that word in the
US for an *event* ("tasting" is more common), but the US good beer
drinking sub-culture has adopted the British concept of a "session beer"
(low in alcohol, that can be consumed in large quantities during a
period of time at the pub).
I heard some suggest that the term "session" originally applied to
limited hours that pubs were open during the day.

Typical of the US's other "adoptions" of foreign beer concepts, we've
changed it, of courseg. Because good "under 4% abv" beers just don't
exist in the US, the alcohol level's been bumped up by many (I've seen
it as high as 6%- which is eye-opening for the UK readers since they
call Stella Atrois "wifebeater" because of it's "outrageously high"
alcohol content- a bit over 5% IIRC).

Lew Bryson adds some interesting other criteria in his recent blog
entry, which I think are important to a session beer-

"1. Alcohol under 5.5%.
2. Flavor in balance.
3. The beer doesn't overpower the conversation.
4. Reasonably priced "

http://lewbryson.blogspot.com/2007/0...1st-entry.html

One of my pet peeves is, even as the new Prohibitionists have grow in
strength in the US, both the alcohol level of many beers and serving sizes
have grown as well. Where once the common serving size in most bars was
a "glass" (6-8 oz. sham pilsner was common in my part of the country) or
a "mug" (10-12 oz), now the "shaker not-quite-a-pint" is standard but
some joints will offer a "large" 22 oz. weisse beer glass, as well. (I
suspect those larger sizes are more for the convenience of the bar,
tho'). If I do go into a bar with a good draft selection, I'd much
rather drink several small glasses of a variety of beers.

In the UK, even tho' we were told that "half pints" are for women, we'd
drink them in free houses and came to notice that the fellows with the
more manly imperial pints were still working on the same one while we
were finishing up our third or fourth "half".