No One Knows What “Session” Means

A fantastic Twitter discussion went by yesterday with info I’d file under “things breweries know.” Revolution’s Doug Veliky kicked things off by observing that if you’re choosing between a beer that ends in .9% ABV vs .0% (4.9 vs. 5.0, for example), choose the larger one. Michael Graham from Austin Beerworks immediately supplied Texas data showing that the prevalence of round-number beers vastly outnumber those coming in at .9%. If your business is selling beer, you know these things.

The conversation led to low-ABV beers and how to deal with those, which inevitably led Torch and Crown’s Chris McClellan to comment on the best strength for session IPAs. Ah, session IPAs. This led us away from numbers and into language, and this we can file under “things Jeff knows.” And I know regular beer drinkers have no idea what “session” means.

I spend a lot of time talking to regular beer drinkers, the kind who have learned enough to navigate a taplist and get to the beer they want, but that’s it. They like beer, they drink it regularly, and their eyes glaze over the second I start talking about Nectaron hops or decoction mashing. At a pub, they look at me, ask “Which beer do I want?”, and that exhausts our discussion of the topic of beer. Later, I might ask what they thought of the beer, and they’ll stop in surprise, having not thought a second about it. “Oh, yeah, it’s great.” And then we’re back to the Red Sox or Joe Biden or whatever.

It is my strong belief that people inside the craft beer bubble vastly overestimate the public’s knowledge and interest level. The word “session” is a great example. It’s an English word, but not an American one. You have to understand British pub culture and then be able to apply the sense of the term to a low-ABV beer in a way the British never did (until they started brewing American-style IPAs). If we rewind the tape to that moment in the pub when I’m standing with a friend in front of the beer list, it’s often the case that they will see an unfamiliar word and idly ask what it means. When I launch into the explanation, I get maybe half a sentence. “Well, in the United Kingdom, drinking culture revolves around…” Nope, I’ve lost them.

“It means ‘low-alcohol.’” That’s what they want to know.

The query “What’s an altbier?” is meant to elicit “a malty brown ale,” not “In German, alt means old, and this refers to the 19th century style called bitterbier…” If they say, “Does that Dortmund Export mean it is a German beer?”, the answer is no. Or maybe, “No, it just means German lager, like a pilsner.”

As a rule of thumb, I’d guess people understand maybe a half-dozen beer terms, and all incompletely. Lager is shorthand for “regular beer.” It applies to domestic, green-bottle European, and Mexican beer. If someone orders a doppelbock and later learns it’s a lager, they will probably be confused. It’s nothing like Budweiser!

They know IPAs will have a particular flavor profile and have learned whether they like “hazy” or “west coast” for ordering purposes. It’s why consumers are untroubled by word-salad IPAs that drive beer nerds crazy (black India pale ale, India pale lager, cold IPA, etc.). They won’t in most cases know the flavors they like come from hops, or if they do, they won’t know whether they come from kettle additions or dry-hopping—and they won’t care, no matter how fascinating you find biotransformation. They absolutely won’t know what DDH means.

If IPA isn’t their favorite style, they’ll know the word for the beers that are. That might be a style (porter, pilsner), but it might also be a beer (Blue Moon, Guinness). Most people clue in to the salience of ABV pretty quickly. And people probably know which beers/styles they should avoid. Beyond that, assume they know nothing.

I was pretty sure about this long ago, but it really came into focus when I started leading tastings for Teamraderie. That service is pitched to working groups as a fun, team-building experience. Three quarters of the people will be regular beer people, a few will be non-beer people, and one guy will be a beer geek. (It is, alas, almost invariably a guy.) The regular-beer people have a great time and are always engaged to have someone finally unpack all this obscure language. I would encourage people in the industry to find venues like that to remind themselves what it’s like outside the bubble.

I get why they don’t know. American craft beer is insanely complex. Because breweries make every style on the planet, looking at a taplist is a bit like scrutinizing a foreign language. There’s a saison, a Vienna lager, a helles, a Baltic porter (a misnamed beer we should be calling Polish porter, not that that would help matters), an ESB, something called a DDH DIPA, and a wine-barrel-aged “mixed-ferm” wild ale. Really, mixed-ferm? Few beer geeks really understand that garble, I would guess.

If you’re in London and you see “bitter,” that makes sense. It’s a beer style invented in the UK that your grandpa drank. Helles is not a weird word to Germans and every Bavarian alive today grew up drinking it. But these are foreign styles—often foreign words people in the US aren’t sure how to pronounce.

Can you blame the average drinker for saying, “I’ll have the IPA”?

Over the weekend I had a pint of Dee Sniderweisse at Fort George. It was a darkish Bavarian wheat beer. I am almost certainly the only person who has ever ordered it to understand that it is a subtle wink to Schneider Weisse, a dark-ish Bavarian wheat beer. (Also I’m old enough to know who Dee Snider is.) I loved the beer and I love Fort George and I bet drinkers avoid that beer like the plague because what in the hell are you on about?

I don’t have any good advice about what we should do with this information. If a brewery makes a tmavy, what should they call it? Beats me. That gets back to the category of “stuff breweries know.” In some cases, the weird word might work, while in others a more generic term might move more product. It depends on the brewery, how far out in distribution the beer plans to go, and how the brewery names its other beers.

The one thing I would say, as an emissary from real beerlandia, is that if you do choose to put “session” on your label, just know that the customer will not understand that term in the way you do. The vast majority of regular beer drinkers just want a tasty pint and the shortest conceptual route it takes to get there.