My friend and colleague Lew Bryson is promoting a new holiday, to take place on April 7. Session Beer Day was created to bring awareness to the idea that low-alcohol beers can be every bit as flavorful as their more spirited cousins, beers of average or high alcohol. Lew’s Session Beer Project has been a pet project of his for a few years now, its purpose likewise is “to popularize and support the brewing and enjoyment of session beers.” You can read more about Session Beer Day on Lew’s blog Seen Through a Glass.
While there are no hard and fast rules as to what constitutes a “session beer,” for purposes of the holiday, the focus will be on beers that are 4.5% a.b.v. and below. If you’re a beer lover, on April 7, consider drinking only session beers and making a special point to ask for session beers at your favorite watering holes. Many places don’t even carry any beers that would fit the working definition and this holiday is an opportunity to educate places that aren’t stocking at least one session beer.
If you’re in a position at a bar, pub, brewery, restaurant, etc., consider offering session beer on April 7, perhaps even making a special promotion for the day (or week surrounding) Session Beer Day. You could even really step up and serve ONLY session beers and see how many you can find from your local brewers.
Here’s how Lew describes what to do on Session Beer Day:
If you work at a bar (or manage one, or own one), please consider throwing some under-4.5% beers on for April 7th, and making a special price or promotion for them. Tell folks it’s Session Beer Day, and encourage them to see how good lower alcohol beers can be. (Good day to get a “We Support” window sticker, too!) If you’re a brewer or wholesaler, encourage your accounts to pick up your under-4.5% beers for that day; it’s a great chance to promote those beers! If you’re a beer blogger/tweeter/writer, please consider spreading the word about Session Beer Day: use the hashtag #sessionday . And if you’re a session beer drinker…get out there and ask for it!
If you don’t recognize the significance of April 7, that was the day in 1933 when the Cullen-Harrison Bill, signed into law by FDR on March 23, took effect. Here, I’ll let Bob Skilnik take up the rest of the story:
Congressional events leading up to April 7, 1933 allowed only the resumption of sales for legal beer with an alcoholic strength of no more than 3.2% alcohol by weight (abw), weak by today’s standards. Congress had earlier passed the so-called Cullen-Harrison Bill which redefined what constituted a legally “intoxicating” beverage. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the bill on March 23, 1933. The bill’s passage took the teeth out of the bite of the Volstead Act of 1919 and raised the Prohibition-era legal limit of alcoholic drinks from .05% abw to 3.2% abw.
Bringing breweries back online on April 7, 1933 in states whose legislatures agreed to go “wet” again gave a tremendous shot in the arm of an economy in the throes of the Depression. In just forty-eight hours, $25,000,000 had been pumped into various beer-related trades as diverse as bottling manufacturers to the sawdust wholesalers whose product lay strewn on the floors of saloons. For the first day of nationwide beer sales, it was estimated that the federal tax for beer brought in $7,500,000 to the United States Treasury.
To learn more about this period of history, read Skilnik’s New Beer’s Eve, April 7, 1933. So it seems an appropriate day to celebrate session beers, the day when only session beers were available after thirteen years of no (legal) beer of any kind.
So now you know. April 7 will be celebrated as Session Beer Day. Won’t you you join us?
If you’re asking yourself if we can just declare any day a holiday, the answer is “yes.” If you’re a regular reader of the Bulletin, you know I’m a holiday geek and list many obscure holidays for every day of the year. Almost all of those are legitimate. Apart from “official” holidays which are voted on by Congress, anyone can declare any day a holiday. The trick is to get others to recognize it. So there are lots of small holidays. Some are self-serving holidays by industries to promote their products. Some are by non-profits hoping to build awareness for their cause. Some are wacky ideas by goofy people (like me) who just want to have some fun. Some are rooted in old traditions and others are just completely made up. Some succeed while others are relegated to the scrap heap of forgotten holidays. Many of the holidays we take for granted, such as Thanksgiving or Mother’s Day, were simply thought up by individuals hoping to promote a good idea and only gained wider acceptance over time. Thanksgiving has only been an annual event since 1863 and Mother’s Day, in its current form, wasn’t made an official holiday until 1914. So any holiday has a chance of becoming a big holiday with Hallmark cards and special traditions to celebrate it as long as enough people buy into it and observe it as a holiday. So Session Beer Day is a holiday if we say it’s holiday. It’s that simple. So this April 7th, make Session Beer Day a reality simply by drinking some session beers. Oh, and don’t forget to celebrate International Brewers Day on July 18.