I’m late to the party on this because I missed the original announcement and there’s a lot going on right now, but recently Alan McLeod of A Good Beer Blog brought back The Session for 2025! The Session was is a monthly collaborative beer blogging effort that has beer writers sharing thoughts on a common topic or question, suggested by a host who subsequently compiles all the responses for our reading pleasure.
Alan announced its return early in January here (edited a bit of course):
An homage? Of course! Let’s be honest. The Session was the greatest invention in all of beer writing and also a gargantuan effort which ran from 2007 to 2018 led by Jay Brooks which earned him the eternal gratitude of us all.
…heed Jay’s words: “you can pretty much do whatever you feel is appropriate for you.” You be you. So, on 31 January 2025 please write a post of anything on the topic of…
What is the best thing to happen in good beer since 2018?
Look at me – being all positive! And exceedingly general. In my defense, I think this could be a great way to catch up if we get a decent level of response. Please post your thoughts – via blog, newsletter, social media… anything – on the last Friday in January and then email me the link.
2018 is the year that The Session dried up, although we did have a Quarantine Edition pop up in 2020 for one month. All told, The Session ran for 142 months (plus the special QE) so here we are in 2025 picking up where we left off. And Alan dropped a broad topic in our laps; you can read the roundup post here for everyone who managed to write something in time.
So, let’s consider:
What is the best thing to happen in good beer since 2018?
This isn’t the easiest thing to answer because the world is terrible right now and kind of has been since 2018, a period probably best summed up as “and now with an actual fascist regime installed in the U.S. government engaged in an active coup against democracy.”
So it can be hard to focus on the positive right now, but then again, that’s one of the best ways to resist all the bad stuff happening, so in a sense, answering this question and writing this post is an act of resistance. Resistance with a capital “R”. I like that.
I can’t point to a single “best” thing — it’s a bit too absolute for my taste and it’s a big stretch of time to consider — but here are two of my top positive things to happen.
The rise of non-alcoholic beers and other NA options:
I don’t know if I diverge from the average craft beer enthusiast in this area, but I think the evolution and proliferation of NA beer (and other so-called lifestyle beverages like hop water) is a good thing that should be celebrated and encouraged.
I’ve been reviewing non-alcoholic beers for the past few years now, and I’ve tasted first hand how good the available options have become. There are several different ways to produce NA beer, and many breweries have dialed in these processes, so that in most cases the days of sweet, worty, underfermented and overbittered “near beer” are well behind us.
Even if non-alcoholic beers and things like hop water aren’t your cup of tea, so to speak, this is still an important category that should be encouraged to grow. And it doesn’t matter why someone is drinking an NA beer (lifestyle choice, health reasons, etc.); just having the option available makes that brewery more accessible and inclusive to more people. And that’s a good thing.
Beers like this, and the breweries who make them:
Brewing and drinking this beer are acts of Resistance by themselves. It’s brewed by Future Primitive Brewing of Seattle, Washington, which in a nice bit of synergy, opened at the end of 2018, the last year that The Session was active.
Here’s a nice bit of prose accompanying the beer:
In an era of misinformation, malfeasance, malevolence, and milquetoast politics we are reminded that the deleterious flames of fascism do still flicker even in the light of day; sowing fear and contempt in order to feed its unworthy self. And who but us shall smother those flames with resilient persistence, leaving ashes cold, forgotten, and windblown; giving life anew to righteous compassion and joyful prosperity.
This isn’t the only Resistance/social justice beer Future Primitive has brewed; the brewery released Her Body Her Choice IPA and Their Body Their Choice IPA to raise funds for the National Abortion Fund. It has also brewed Black is Beautiful Imperial Stout, Queer Beer IPA, and others. You can find out a bit about those beers (and the Nazi Punks beer description I pasted above) from this 2022 Forbes article (yes, I know, it’s Forbes which sucks but it was linked from the brewery’s Instagram and the only article I could find. Keep your ad blockers turned on).
Let’s have more breweries brewing more beer like these, please.
