If 2014 was the Summer of the Radler, shandy and other low-alcohol fruity beer concoctions, 2015 is most assuredly the Summer of the Session Beer. The fuse to this year’s obsession was lit in 2012, when Founders released its All Day IPA and drinkers went crazy for a beer that’s light and drinkable, but with a wallop of hoppy flavor.
All Day is now Founders’ top seller, and many large-scale craft brewers followed suit with sessions of their own. We rounded up 14 of them, including some from Chicago breweries, which provides a good cross section of what you’ll see on shelves around Chicago this summer. Then a tasting panel of four tried them all, with nary a buzz—"session" means you can drink these beers over the course of an afternoon without feeling it too much, thanks to a low ABV. While the lineup of sessions was pretty solid on the whole, there were five clear standouts, which you’ll want to seek out for your next summer party.
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Down to Earth comes from a San Francisco brewery that recently made its beers available in Chicago. It has a rich, thick body compared to the lighter sessions we tried, and it struck us as a great session ale for winter—or a long, foggy San Francisco summer. The packaging is cool, too.
Chicago's Ale Syndicate offers a beer that has a delicious, berry aroma and starts with a whipcrack of bright, citrus hops then backs off to reveal nice, fresh, toasty malts. As it warms, Sunday finishes very clean and dry and develops ginger and lemongrass Thai flavors. This one kept us coming back for more, legitimately surprising us with how much we liked it.
This beer from the California and Chicago brewery has a big thirst-quenching juiciness to the body that makes it eminently chuggable, and the flavor is crisp and knife-sharp with a touch of citrus. DayTime is satisfying, fun and just plain good.
Pinner is a big complex melange of herbal, piney, vegetal bitterness with some citrus and a clean finish. This Colorado beer is most firmly in the Goldilocks zone—not too sweet, not too bitter, not too heavy, not too light, but just right. It’s really enjoyable and adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
The Indiana brewery offers a beer with a fruit punch aroma and notes of creamy caramel malt and cream soda along with aggressive tropical hoppiness. It all adds up to one big happy bottle of session beer.
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