– There was a limit of two entries per brewery. When in doubt, we simply allow a brewery’s marketing to define a beer’s style, and expect them to stick to the designation they’ve chosen. We did not accept standard pale ales, or even pale ales labeled as “session pale ale,” as we then would have had to accept all pale ales. ABV limit was set at 5% ABV as the highest acceptable level. – As explained above, this is exclusively a tasting of session IPAs, largely determined by how the breweries chose to label their products. There will never be a “perfect” tasting lineup, much as we continue to try. We apologize for a few significant omissions that we couldn’t acquire, either due to seasonality or market shortages. We always do our best to reach out to breweries we’re aware of that make exemplary versions of particular styles, but things always do slip through the cracks. Let’s get onto the tasting.Īs in most of our blind tastings at Paste, the vast majority of these session IPAs were sent directly to the office by the breweries that choose to participate, with additional beers acquired by us via locally available purchases and the occasional trade. – Session IPAs can also reflect other substyles of IPA brewing, such as single-hopped or SMASH (single malt and single hop) beers, or the still emerging northeast-style IPA (NE-IPA), which was well represented in this tasting. – Session IPAs also unsurprisingly tend to have a more explosive hop rate than APA, although the difference between early and late additions during the brewing process means they can be either more or less bitter than your average APA (such as Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) as a result. They also tend to make less use of crystal malt, which results in a paler average color, or SRM. – Compared to American pale ale (APA), session IPAs tend to have a lighter malt presence, and thus a balance that falls more overwhelmingly toward hops. The obvious question is then “What makes session IPA different from American pale ale?”, to which the answer is “not a terrible lot, except marketing.” However, if you really want to get a more codified answer: If you’re somehow still not familiar with the style we’ve been discussing, session IPAs are more or less what they sound like: India pale ales that have been shrunk down to more “sessionable” stature, typically with a sub-5% ABV. On the positive side, this perhaps implies that the breweries still left producing session IPAs are the ones that have proven adept at creating highly assertive, hop-forward, low-ABV beers. It became established during its boom period in 2013-2016, but the initial wave has since rolled back, leaving it as a viable but significantly less widespread style rather than a staple of every single brewery’s seasonal release schedule.

All of these factors eliminated some potential entries.īut beyond those considerations, what does this say about the style of session IPA in 2017? In a recent feature on Paste, our drinks editor Graham Averill wrote about that very question, opining that the heyday of session IPA has perhaps already come and gone. We even received a handful of regular American IPAs and some “summer ales” from breweries that clearly did not read the rules very closely. We instituted a hard 5% ABV cut-off, which eliminated a few 5.5% ABV “session IPAs” that seemed a bit too burly to truly qualify as “session.” We also disallowed any standard pale ales from being included, even if they were labeled as “session pale,” lest we have to include ALL pale ales-a tasting that we’ve already conducted in the past. Now, I should note that a few of the reasons for that number were factors of our particular requirements for this tasting. This time, I imagined that a style like session IPA might have no trouble exceeding 100, and we ended up with “merely” 52. A few months ago, I thought perhaps we’d get 50 barrel-aged imperial stouts, and we ended up tasting a truly absurd 144 of them. For the first time in perhaps 18 months, Paste sent out a call for a blind tasting, and we received significantly fewer entries than I was personally expecting, rather than more.

Wolf pup session ipa calories