There’s a lot of action these days in the low to no alcohol beer category with new non-alcoholic brews seemingly popping up daily. So where does this leave the session beer?The term is another of those slightly subjective ones (the beer world is riddled with them) and appears to have different boundaries depending on where you are drinking. Generally speaking though, session beers are lower in abv.The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) has these definitions…Session-strength <4% ABVStandard-strength 4-6% ABVHigh-strength 6-9% ABVVery-high-strength >9% ABV… which makes me realise just how much beer these days is high strength or above, which itself...

It’s nice to think that we’re currently in a bit of a beer boom - at the epicentre of a swirling explosion of new styles and ingenious approaches to brewing. The truth, however, is that most of what we see today has actually been done before.Today’s beer, Valkyrie, is a nice case in point. This is a German style amber made by the American outfit Enegren, who specialise in Germanic lager-like brews.It’s a nice twist on the current theme for shifts to lighter styles, as its roots are found in the indigenous German altbier - which itself was very much...

We’ve been running with a bit of a Californian theme of late and so I thought we may as well keep rolling on, after all, California knows how to party!We looked at Anchor’s steam beer a few weeks back - one of the many examples of a beers made using a mash up of techniques. In this case, a fermentation using lager yeast, but at hot temperatures more commonly associated with ale yeast.As far as I can glean, today’s beer is a lager made as a lager, but, on another note, it offers a quick ABCDE on the topic of...

Having been to Cologne and drunk a fair amount of Kölsch and remembering it as more like a lager than an ale, I was a bit bamboozled when I saw today's beer; a California Kölsch with the descriptor “German style pale ale”. But, after reading up on things, I see where the confusion lies. At the end of the day, it’s basically both a lager and an ale! That’s right, this is gender fluidity in beer form (fluid fluidity perhaps?); top fermented with ale yeast and then cold conditioned like a lager. Kölsch straddles other boundaries too, having both a...

The award winning, world renowned Tripel Karmeliet sounds like a beer that has been around for ever, but it actually launched in 1996. That said, its roots extend much further back through time...It is brewed by the Bosteels Brewery which was started by Jean-Baptiste Bosteels in 1791, a date that precedes the kingdom of Belgium (to put things in context).The brewery has done well to keep going this long, fending off the ebb and flow of Belgian beer popularity, and has done so by adding new brands (such as Kwak in the mid 1980s) and by keeping things in the...