For our 143rd Session — and, importantly, our first since December of 2018 — is all about what’s been going on since then, in the seven years since we concluded the first … ahem … session of The Session. Getting the band back together is all thanks to Alan McLeod of A Better Beer Blog, who wanted to try resurrecting our monthly stab at all writing about a single topic once each month. Originally, we set aside the first Friday of the month, but Alan’s moved it to the last Friday of the month, which I’m admittedly happy about since I’m a word class procrastinator.

This began originally in 2007 and was started by Stan Hieronymus, who writes at his Appellation Blog. Each month, someone would agree to host, would come up with a topic, announcing the same about a month before, and then everyone would then write up their own take on said topic, and then the host would put together a round-up of everyone who participated. At some point, I took over coordinating the hosting from Stan, and kept a list of every Session on my blog. We kept it going for 142 months, from March 2007 until December 2018. That last year or so participation was way down and I was having a hard time finding bloggers willing to host, and so we reluctantly pulled the plug. The number of active beer blogs fell precipitously in the 11 years the Session was a going concern, and there just weren’t as many blogs around by 2018.

But that was then, this is now: 2025. A lot has happened in the last seven years. And now the Session is attempting a comeback. Alan McLeod is our first host of The Session 2.0. His topic is an attempt to bring us full circle from the end of 2018, with the following topic:

What is the best thing to happen in good beer since 2018?

So I was pleased to see Alan decided to bring back The Sessions. I was sad to see it go, but at the time it didn’t seem like there were enough of us to keep it going. C’est la vie, I thought. Times change. And in the years since then, the times they definitely kept on changing. My overall impression of those changes is not entirely positive, which is why I initially chose the title: the Seven-Year Bitch. But Alan’s theme is asking what is the “best” thing to happen to good beer, so staying positive is required, an instinct that rarely comes naturally to me, especially more recently. It also makes it a tad more difficult, sad to say. I could write a lot more about what has frustrated me, depressed me, and downright annoyed me. But I guess I’ll save that for another day.

One of the features of the past septennium is the proliferation of hazy or juicy IPAs. For better or worse (and I’d say worse — hey, I managed to work in a bitch!) they’ve become the face of craft beer, and they dominated tap handles in many, if not most, bars over the same period of time. I would argue that one of the reasons most of us old-timers became interested in ‘good beer’ was the idea of diversity. The idea that there are different beers for different times, moods, seasons, food, etc. There could be choices, not just the same beer in different labels, a.k.a. the illusion of choice that had been the beer landscape for us growing up. (Yeah, I know, still bitching, but wait for it….) It could be exciting to walk into a bar and survey what was available, especially when there was a wide range of choices. But when hazies gained a chokehold on the industry, that all changed. (And as another aside, I don’t completely hate Hazy IPAs. There are good ones. It’s much more complicated than that.) But it was disheartening to walk into a bar and find half the tap handles be IPAs, and at that mostly cloudy ones. The displacement of diversity removed a lot of great styles from many bars, and some have all but disappeared. What excites me these days is walking into a bar and seeing they have a brown ale, or a mild, or even a dunkelweizen. How often does that happen? Sadly, not as often as I’d like.

But at the same time, there was another, quieter revolution happening in the background, almost unnoticed. Breweries who only brewed ales started dabbling with lagers. Oh, sure there had always been a few craft lager breweries (Gordon Biersch, Boston Beer, etc.) but by and large ale was what most microbreweries made. We all know the reasons why this was the case: time, money and equipment. But as the industry grew, those limitations that had made lagers difficult to regularly brew changed. And a lot of breweries took up the challenge. Who was first? Who cares. Some of the ones that I remember in my neck of the woods as being revelatory include Firestone Walker’s Pivo Pils, Russian River’s STS Pils, Moonlight’s Czech Pils, and, of course Trumer Pils. And they’re still all great. But these days, so many breweries make a good craft lager that something is finally starting to challenge the IPA for dominance. It won’t happen overnight. Hell, it may never happen. But it’s good to have alternatives. In fact, I’d argue that’s the point. And I feel like we’ve lost sight of that. (Sorry, bitching again. Old habits die hard.)

I remember a few years ago getting some samples from Anderson Valley Brewing that included a bumper sticker that read: “Beer Flavored Beer. you’re Welcome.”

And while that had more to do with clearing up the cloudiness in beer, it definitely was on point in terms of what was happening to beer at the time. We were forgetting our roots, making beer (and seltzers) that didn’t taste like traditional beers, aimed at consumers who didn’t like or appreciate bitterness or … dare I say it … flavor, or even flavour.

And I understand that tastes change, they drift over time. It’s a story as old as time itself. I’m not just standing on my lawn yelling at the kids to get off of it. (Although I do enjoy that, too.) There’s an idea that our tastes not only shift, but do so in a circular way, a cycle. Someone posited a predictable pattern for this, laying it out on a pie chart of sorts. I wish I could remember where I saw that (maybe someone remembers and can point me its way?) but it makes sense. Over time, you get fatigued by the same sensation or flavor and naturally gravitate to something different, often perhaps its opposite, eventually tire of that and move on to the next thing, repeat, and at some point you arrive back at loving the type of beer that you started with. At any rate, that idea argues for more diversity if we’re all on shifting cycles of preferences and are more than likely not all at the same place on the wheel. Every bar — and most breweries — should have something for everybody’s tastes (within reason, of course, I know they’re a business that has to make money). But let’s circle back to lagers.

I think that beyond the advances in technology that allowed for smaller breweries to whip up a lager, it feels likely that it was something of a quiet backlash on the part of brewers (and some consumers) to want something old-fashioned in the face of all the modern, novelty, stunt beers that were getting all of the attention. And so they made a pilsner, a helles, a Kölsch, a Vienna lager, a schwarzbier, and on and on. And obviously people bought them, drank them, and came back, glass in hand. “Please sir, may I have another?” I know, because I’m one of them. So with all the noise surrounding the innovation and changes to the modern craft beer market, the best thing to happen to good beer since 2018 is without a doubt, the proliferation of really good craft lagers of every kind, and from nearly every quarter. You won’t hear me bitching about that.