A good time for session beer
Agrowing number of drinkers are hoping craft breweries have made a New Year’s resolution to produce more sessionable beers.
‘‘Session’’ beers are those of lower strength which let us have a session on them instead of having to limit ourselves to one or two.
The bigger breweries have historically produced ‘‘mainstream’’ beers around 4%5%. To make themselves different, smaller operators have headed for higher strength.
Craft breweries use more barley for flavour (and to generate more alcohol) and hops, but surely they can now compete with the likes of like Speight’s gold medal ale, Lion Red and DB Draught.
An exception is the 3.7% Bookbinder session ale, the third beer Richard Emerson made in the mid1990s when he was starting out in Dunedin. (Incidentally, another original brew, 1812 — named after the last four digits or Emerson’s first telephone number — has disappeared. It has been replaced by a pale ale which comes in a tartan can.)
There are lowerstrength craft beers, but most by small breweries that do not yet command shelf space in bigger outlets. Local ones, for example, are Queenstown brewery Cargo’s 3.7% hopped sour ale and Searchlight’s 4.1% hazy.
There is no doubt that alcohol adds richness in the mouth and helps to accentuate flavour, but Tuatara’s 4.4% Pacific pale ale, for example, loses nothing in comparison with the rest of its ales in sixpacks, which range from mid5% to just over 6%.
And Monteith’s 4.9% Wayfarer pilsner, which replaced the 5% Bohemian pilsner, is a far nicer drop.
Next nonalcoholic
Guinness intends to introduce a nonalcoholic stout this year. The 0.0 draught took four years to develop and was tested on the British market in October. It was withdrawn within a month though because of microbiological contamination.
Burp
Lion has calculated that producing a 12pack of Steinlager produces 3.2kg of carbon emissions — equivalent to driving 13km in a Toyota Hilux or burning your barbecue on full flame for just over an hour.
Another hop
Hard on the heels of the release of the new nectaron hop in New Zealand is one developed in the United States. It is called talus and is said to produce pink grapefruit, citrus rind, tropical fruit and even sage characters.