It’s fun to be able to have beers with flavor that don’t knock you out, and I love the challenge of making low alcohol beers. Those have been our Session Beer Month standards through May, and we’ll have a few more new ones debuting at Session Fest: A Session IPA dry-hopped with coffee from our friends at High Wire Coffee and Jupiter, Robustito– a session-strength version of our Black Robusto Porter, and we’ll probably sneak out a Berliner Weisse.Īs a brewer, I love the renewed interest in low alcohol beers. It’s a fun little beer – a bit of that Trappist yeast character comes through, and some neat citrus notes. We also brewed Trappistito, a 4.1% Belgian-style Single that we tweaked up a little – orange blossom honey instead of candi sugar, and hopped exclusively with Mandarina Bavaria. The 06300 came in whole-cone form so we had to pull the hop back out to use them during knockout, and for dry-hopping we used our “Drambulator” to infuse the beer with the 06300, a hop that actually has some chocolate notes, so a great compliment to a dark beer. Hops are completely different, with Mosaic and EXP 06300 doing all the lifting for flavor and aroma. Omega Session, its opposite number, is brewed with the same malts, supplemented by some de-bittered black malt for color. As you’d imagine, the beer has a lot of bright citrus in the nose, backed up by a 3.8% body that features Golden Promise malt as its base, with a touch of malted oat for a little body. We got a little feisty with the hops for Alpha Session this year – heavy doses of Chinooks and Lemondrop hops, supplemented with some Equinox & Simcoe and a bit of Mandarina Bavaria. Alpha Session is a straight-up “Session IPA”… really an English Bitter with a firmer hand being used in the hopping, and Omega is something we dubbed an American Dark Mild (because Session Black IPA is a combination of words that makes no sense). Our standards for Session Beer month are Alpha and Omega Session. Fun technical challenges to make them well (nowhere to hide in a Session), and more fun to drink (and drink and drink…). “I think all of the brewers here at Drake’s get excited for Session Beer month – a whole month devoted to low-gravity beers with flavor. With our 3rd Annual NorCal Session Fest this Saturday at Jack London Square, we corralled Brewmaster & Industry Treasure John Gillooly and asked him to wax eloquently on Session Beers:
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