The Untimely Death of The American Session Beer
Don’t ask me how this all started. V3SEUN2PUDNR
Whether it stemmed from Mark Dredge’s recent visit from the land of session bitters, or an opportune encounter with Craftsman’s 1903 Lager, or those nine long, light-lager months down in Central America – I really can’t say. But I often feel like I’m continually parting ways with the “extreme” craft beer scene.
Perhaps that’s overkill. Perhaps I’ve had just one too many accidental fusel bombs, one too many bad examples of barrel aging, one too many “Imperial Weizens”, or one too many encounters with Tactical Nuclear nonsense. Have I waited in too many lines for limited releases? Have 12% hop bombs actually made me bitter? Perhaps I am, at twenty-eight, becoming a curmudgeon.
Get off my lawn you crazy penguins!
Don’t get me wrong.
American craft beer drinkers have never before had so many choices (if anything, it’s an embarrassment of riches), craft brewers have never been taking so many creative leaps, and American craft beer as a whole is thriving in a poor economy. The Brewer’s Association recently reported that small and independent U.S. craft brewers saw their annual overall sales grow by more than 10% in 2009.
Life is good. Disregard curmudgeons. Drink up!
But let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment. It seems like every brewpub in the country as of late is making an imperial stout as well as a double IPA (or multiple incarnations of each). It’s become a challenge to pick out an American IPA under 7%. Many of the international session beers – German and Bohemian pilsners, premium lagers, bitters, saisons, hefeweizens, etc. – arrive in less-than-prime conditions or at less-than-sessionable prices. At the very least, the whole thing raises a couple key flags. Are we really moving away from drinkable beers?
So I started wondering a bit about ABV trends in the American craft beer industry. And what better place to start, than the Ratebeer database?
Joe T's Basement: Where the Magic Happens
An admin friend of mine was good enough to dig up the information I needed: binned ABV data for new beers added to the Ratebeer database over the last ten years. The data basically took each beer added, rounded its ABV to the nearest whole number (4.5% to 5.49% would be rounded to 5%, for example), and then categorized each listing by ABV and the year in which each beer was first added. From there, I was able to separate U.S. ABV data from non-U.S. ABV data.
The first thing I looked at was the overall percentage of new beers coming out with more than 5.5% ABV (this seemed to be the most reasonable distinction, given the format of the raw data, to make between session and non-session beers). The graph below shows the overall percentages of U.S. and non-U.S. beers being released each year with alcohol levels at or above 5.5%.
Percentage of New Beers at or above 5.5% ABV
Over the last ten years, about 30-40% of new international beers have had alcohol levels with 5.5%+ ABV, while the proportion of U.S. beers with this characteristic has steadily risen to nearly twice that. Today, more than 70% of new American beers are these bigger, bolder, less-sessionable beers.
One other thing that seemed rather illuminating to check out was the average ABVs. It’s possible, from the above graph, that the overall increase in alcohol in U.S. beers was actually very slight, just shifting a few percentage points past 5.5%. Average ABVs for new U.S. and non-U.S. beers are graphed below. (For those who find median values more convincing, this has similar features.)
Average % ABV of New Beers
(I’ve included linear trendlines in both plots, just for the sake of argument. I’m pretty sure one can eyeball the general trends of these graphs without them.)
In 2009, the average ABV of new U.S. beers rose beyond 7% for the first time. New non-U.S. beers, in comparison, have continued to hover around 5.5%. I should perhaps provide a moment of silence for all of this to sink in.
Twiddle your thumbs. Ruminate. Ponder away.
My fellow Hop Press writers have already written about higher-alcohol beers and the recent ABV race. None of this is going away anytime soon, and I’m honestly not sure if I would necessarily want it to. American craft beer is doing very well. American craft beer drinkers have never been happier. And there are still plenty of great session beers out there. But, honestly, it still kind of creeps me out.
I’m curious how other people will interpret the above trendlines. I’ve tended to tangentially allude to this in previous articles, but it’s somewhat concerning that many younger craft beer drinkers spend so much interest solely on these higher-octane, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink brews. It both does and doesn’t make sense. I mean, the core value system inherent to U.S. craft brewing was that it offered a more flavorful and more generous alternative to insipid BMC beers.
But we all know that there’s a difference between extreme beer and good beer. We’ve seen that quirkiness and creativity are not infrequently commingled with advertising. And many of the folks reading this can appreciate that we live in a country frequently defined by both its people’s seemingly boundless interest in innovation – but also in all things bigger, bolder, stronger, fattier, sweeter, and more obvious. Here’s to hoping we’re still headed down the path of innovation.
29 Comments to “The Untimely Death of The American Session Beer”
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Ken… this is really great stuff. Good to see someone going after actual evidence to support an argument, rather than just arguing louder and longer.
I’m in the same boat as you. While I enjoy some of the higher gravity stuff, a lot of it is just not good and far too many brewers are jumping on the bandwagon. It seems that many of them think if they just brew a 15% Imperial Stout, they will be able to hype it up and sell it at a huge profit. Unfortunately, they are usually right, but I for one have mostly checked out of seeking beers like this out.
Well done. And I always wondered what JoeT’s bsmt looked like.
Kudos for the research, Ken! I’ve had this conversation dozens of times without the empirical data to back it up. Many of my beer buddies feel the same way about the race for ABV.
One thing these extreme beers do is hide faults with massive amounts of Alcohol, hops, wood or whatever. It’s often more difficult to brew a well balanced session beer than to ramp up the ingredients to such high levels.
While I appreciate the brewers who brew excellent ‘extreme’ beers for their innovation and creativity, they seem to be in the minority. More and more of the extreme beers I taste are so incredibly out of balance, they border on undrinkable (or at the very least, not repeatable).
Perhaps 30% of the new ‘radical’ beer I taste warrants a second pint or bottle. Maybe I’m just getting too old.
great article… this thought dawned on me the other day when a homebrew’s ABV didn’t end up being as high as we had intended. after frantically rechecking the final gravity, and running the numbers again… i thought to myself… so what if the ABV isn’t off the chart? this beer tastes amazing.
Great article that I’m reading while watching the wort boil for my own session beer. These extreme beers have their place and I do enjoy trying them, but one is all you can have. Beer bars will often only carry these extreme beers over a brewery’s more “normal” offerings because it pulls in more of the beer geeks and gets them a reputation of a being a cool bar. The problem is, you can only order one or two of these beers if you have to drive home. The other problem is that breweries that are not producing any ultra-extreme beers are often over-looked or given poor reviews by beer geeks because of it, despite how good their beers may actually be. I’m hoping there will eventually be a movement in the opposite direction, but until that time, I’ll just keep brewing my own session beers.
I hate writing an entire paragraph and then forgetting to enter the CAPTCHA code and losing it all…
I pretty much agree with the article, in saying that this general trend towards higher alc% brews is not totally to my liking personally.
Perhaps there is truth in your idea that younger members of the craft beer scene are pointedly drawn towards those higher numbers and bigger flavours. I myself was guilty of following that trend in my early 20′s when I was revelling in the likes of Schneider Aventinus and Unibroue Maudite (both in the 8% range I believe) Or my first bottle of Aventinus Weizen-Eisbock and the idea of 12% just ‘blowing my mind’. Yet those beers are tame by todays standards. I like to think that in those days bigger beers were fewer, farther between, and of a higher consistent quality than the plethora of new offerings on the market today.
Just the other week I was reading posts (on Facebook in a topic started by BeerWars) where a fellow was complaining that he would not be drinking a certain beer anymore because 5% was too low an alc content to bother with.
*sigh*
We can just hope that as these new beer enthusists mature and grow in the beer scene, they will come to appreciate more of the subtleties and the craft involved in brewing such beers.
While scouring the internet beer news today I found:
“Two Brothers Brewing has launched a new series of beers. The first two of them arrived in stores this past week…
…Commercial description for Two Brothers Long Haul Session Ale: “An incredibly drinkable ale, light in body but full of flavor. Oaky notes blend with the complex balance of malt and hops. This is a beer you can enjoy for the long haul. 4.2% ABV. 27 IBUs.”
Hurray!
Though the first release in the ‘J’ series was a 6.9% IPA.
Good article, and a great addition to the general knowledge base – it’s really nice to be able to point to data that confirm what we’ve more or less assumed for years.
I wouldn’t mind some additional refinement at some point. We have data for number of entries, but not a great idea of the volume produced, which gives equal weight to copious, readily available offerings (like Speedway or Expedition) and comparatively rare small-batch brewpub creations (like Sly Fox’s massive rollout of 7% beers only differentiated by the hop profile). Seasonals and one-offs are also more likely to be bigger than smaller, and I don’t think anyone would deny that the last ten years has seen a rise in share of seasonals and one-offs relative to flagship and standard offerings.
I also wonder if many brewers keep an eye to shelf-life for bottlings. In our current, saturated market, some really good bitters and milds might sit on a shelf next to hundreds of other offerings for far too long.
Again, great work!
Great article
Bravo. The high alpha, mash up of multiple malts has gotten monotonous. In my opinion a lot of very average big heft beers are thought much too highly of.
I recently thought I was doing a good deed getting my Tecate drinking neighbor to drink craft beer. I am afraid that not only did I convert him to craft beer, I turned him into a strong ale monster. When I inform him to try a new beer if he sees it at the store, his first question is “how strong is it?” He doesn’t bother buying or drinking anything under 8 %. He claims drinking anything lower in abv as time consuming.
Great article, Ken. Keep doing God’s work and preaching the gospel of good beer. All shapes and sizes, as long as it’s good!
And keep the stats coming. We nerds love it.
Kudos for compiling data on the rush by American craft brewers to brew ever higher ABV beers. The trend to extreme craft beer appears to me to be a generational fad. Such beers are having their day in the marketplace but probably will down the road be a blip in the history of beer. I love to drink but hate getting drunk. Getting high fast is not the reason that I drink beer. You can’t drink these high ABV beers except in small quantities unless you wish to get hammered. Trying to match and drink monster ABV beer with food seldom works either. You have to come up with increasingly extreme food to pair with extreme beer. The whole process evolves into palate assaults which can occasionally be fun but nothing to be undertaken on a regular basis. Curmudgeon or sensible enthusiast for drinking quality beer? I’m into beer for the long haul not to blow my head off or attack my palate with the latest monster brews turned out by American craft brewers. If you have a local brewer who brews quality session beer support them. There are plenty of breweries out there brewing show pony monster beers to keep the extreme enthusiasts entertained.
@Trev – I just got hit by the same thing. I’m too lazy to write it all again.
Basically, Ken, Great article. Great research.
I disagree the session is dying. One tank of big crazy beer can be put into countless barrels and create numerous RateBeer listings while the Session beers will likely be brewed once, in a larger tank, and kegged and served as it. One listing.
Volume of session beers still dominate the craft beer industry as well as the beer industry as a whole. The problem is that reading/writing about session strength ales is rarely as interesting as reading/writing about extreme beers.
So raise a pint of 5% session strength ale to the vocal minority!
(And I did a copy all on my post this time before CAPTCHA gets me)
Nice Ken!
One thing struck my mind, could it be that many brewers make one-offs with high ABV, in small quantities and that the bulk of their output is more sessionable? If so, is it mostly us enthusiasts that drive the abv towards the roof?
I totally agree that correlating listings with actual sales volumes would give an even better sense of these trends, and I’ll keep a look out for better data. As far as recent sales figures:
From “2009 Top 15 New Beers, Total US Supers, IRI” (mid-year report, I believe):
Dollar Sales
MIKES HARD SEASONAL $2,775,754
LEINENKUGEL CLASSIC AMBER LAGER $2,177,699
**SIERRA NEVADA TORPEDO EXTRA IPA $1,457,590
WIDMER DRIFTER PALE ALE $1,116,507
MIKES HARD MANGO PUNCH $1,100,506
MIKES HARD POMEGRANATE PUNCH $809,875
GUINNESS 250 ANNIVERSARY STOUT $697,443
CM PARROTBAY STRAWBERRY DAIQUIRI $634,820
BACARDI SILVER LEMONADE $496,143
MIKES HARDER LEMONADE $424,390
MIKES HARDER CRANBERRY LEMONADE $406,976
MICHELOB IRISH RED ALE $335,389
**SAMUEL ADAMS IMPERIAL WHITE $242,157
BOULEVARD SINGLE WIDE IPA $219,840
**SAMUEL ADAMS IMPERIAL STOUT $180,265
From that list, SN Torpedo is 7.2%, Sam Adams Imperial White is 10.3%, and Sam Adams Imperial Stout is 9.2%. If you were to exclude the alco-pops, those higher ABV beers account for 30% of the beer sales on that list.
Not a small percentage.
While I totally agree that the upward creep in ABV is somewhat disillusioning, I can think of some significant reasons why there is an incentive for small breweries to brew high octane beers. I love session beers, but when I go into a bar, I’m not usually looking to buy 5 or 6 beers. I just couldn’t afford that on a regular basis. So, let’s say I want to drink a couple beers and maybe feel a little buzz because I had a long day at work. I’m not so sure I’m going to go for the 3.8% dry stout or mild ale, no matter how good it might be. I’ll be going for something in the 5.5-6.5% range most likely.
I think of session beers, true session beers, as capping out at 4% ABV. Then there are plenty of, well let’s call them “6-pack beers” that are 4.5-5.5% ABV. These are great beers and by today’s standards they might be called session beers in the USA. Most very small microbreweries have a flagship beer they sell by keg in this range. But they can’t get that into bottles without going big in their sales numbers. That takes a bigger brewery. They might be able to make money more easily if they sell “premium” bottles, like 22oz or 750ml bottles and charge a premium price for them. Plus, the market is already saturated by larger craft breweries like Sierra, Stone, New Belgium, and Sam Adams getting some really high quality 6-pack beers out there with a large distribution range. So it’s a hard market to get into and be competitive.
Brewpubs can do session ales, true light alcohol beers, but a lot of times they don’t go over so well due to people just wanting something stronger for the same price. They take up the same amount of tank space, pretty much the same time to ferment, and cost only slightly to make. But brewpubs could be pricing these beers lower, and if they build them into their pricing structure properly, they could find a real audience with these beers.
I don’t like the trend towards ridiculously alcoholic beers either, but there is a place for everything of course. If you talk to a lot of craft brewers they will tell you that session beers are will be making a comeback soon. There will always be a place for big beers and uber-hoppy beers, but as the collective American beer palate matures, it will search out lower alcohol beers that are high in flavor.
Not sure if rounding the specific ABVs is scientifically sound.
I agree with your sentiments for the most part.
I’m curious about whether the new beers added is the most accurate measurement, as opposed to the average beer. Clearly the market for specialty beers have increased, and people will tend to create these one-off, or seasonal brews that are not their typical or flagship offering, that tend to be higher in alcohol. Is the trend the same for the average beer?
Plus, what about beers that have changed ABV. Over the past couple decades english barleywines and german doppelbocks, and many other forms of european strong beer have gone down in alcohol, and (at least I’m told) watery imitations of their former selves. However, your curve for European beer is going up. Yes, there are higher alcohol new beers (i’m sure brewdog’s 2 40% alcohol beers are controlling this year’s release), but is that indicative of the entire market, or just new emerging beers?
Anyways, just my thoughts.
@Seanywonton
What you say makes a lot of sense. However, I think the issue is pricing. A lot of beers are similarly priced regardless of alcohol. However, high gravity high hop beers are (everything being equal) more expensive to make. I assume lower alcohol beers are used as money-makers to make up for lower-profit high alcohol beers. However, if the pricing reflected the alcohol (i.e., a 4% english brown ale for $4 and an 8% DIPA for $7 at bar prices), I think that people wouldn’t necessarily just go for the high-octane buzz, but would try to find the beer that suited them best.
Nicely done, Ken! And absolutely on target, as far as I am concerned. But I think that the “embarrassment of riches” bestowed upon us has allowed for this extreme trend to happen, and you will see the pendulum swing back eventually. Contrary to what many may say, you can only drink so many high octane beers before you start losing the “shiny” or it all. Once the flash is gone, the smoke is cleared, and we all come down to earth again what we want is good tasting beer, regardless of the ABV. There are some truly exceptional extreme beers. There are also some truly exceptional session beers. And there is plenty of crap in both camps.
I think it should be noted that it’s much harder to distribute subtle, low alcohol beers and have them consumed in their prime. I have all-to-often bought a 5% fresh hop pale ale or pilsner, and it was clearly old and not what it should taste like. This in turn affects reviews of the beer, decreasing score and dropping some interest of geeks.
All-in-all I try to drink local lower ABV beers (which I don’t have a problem finding here in NC) unless I know it has bottled on date or is new.
I know this isn’t really what you’re article is necessarily is about, but something I think is related and could provide some insight.
Very nice article, Ken! I enjoy your writing style just as much as the topic and definitely appreciate the research behind the ponderings. I’ve wondered more than once if I’m just really lame (I very well could be) to turn away from some of the higher ABV beers, or if others might find a point at which some of these beverages aren’t as “drinkable” as some of those with lower ABVs. It’s great to see another perspective on this topic, supported by well-researched information.
As mentioned earlier, a good compilation. I must point out, this is hardly an empirical study. Sales volume would add a lot more granularity to the total picture.
In addition, consider the following 2 factors:
1. A high percentage of RB members prefer stronger beers. That will slant the curve of which beers get entered. RB is not an all inclusive listing of every beer brewed in America.
2. Once a brewery has been open a while, their standard beers (those more likely to be sessionable) have already been entered. From there, the only new ones entered will be seasonals, which are much more likely to be high octane beers because that is the nature of a seasonal.
IMHO, if you want to provide any kind of definitive data, you need to talk to the folks at the Association of Brewers and see what they have collected. Perhaps simply cataloging the average ABV of GABF entries by years would be more revealing.
[...] happened? The market insisted on bigger beers and more hops. The pale ale became an IPA. The double IPA became available in sessionable packages and the bigger [...]
Back to the title of the article… Even on Rate Beer their is no category for Drinkability. Often times I see raters compare this to “watery”. Sure the beer tastes amazing, but if the liquid is thicker then sludge and hardly any carbonation, your probably less likely to drink two in a row.
It’s about time someone formally and empirically took note of this trend. Ratings are often–in my opinion–skewed in favor of high ABV beers. Imperial Stouts and Barley Wines seem to garner unnaturally high ratings without regard for balance and drinkability.
One of my favorite examples of this trend is a rating of Dog Fish Head’s Aprihop, which the reviewer noted was a “man’s fruit beer” because of its alcoholic punch. Are ‘regular’ fruit beers unmanly?
Any beer–again, in my opinion–should be rated according to how well it fits (or exceeds or creatively expands upon) its declared style. Finding a way to turn a respectable session beer into an alcoholic powerhouse shouldn’t garner said beer an unnaturally inflated rating.
[...] to be pushing the envelope. This is a summary from Ken Weaver’s original article entitled ‘The Untimely Death of the American Session Beer and I realise that its relevance is minimal in Australia at the moment, however, as with any market [...]
I’ve always thought Ratebeer’s biggest flaw was that it doesn’t include a rating for drinkability. By and large, drinkability (the volume of the beer you be most happy drinking) goes down as strength goes up. This also has the effect of scoring great British beers too low.
[...] Weaver’s “The Untimely Death of the American Session Beer”, and the comments that follow, is absolutely essential reading for anyone who likes beer, and is [...]