For this months instalment of the Session, I asked the world's beer bloggers to think a bit about Farmhouse Beer - what does it mean, and why do people care? Now the time is up, I've got some great responses, and a fascinating range of perspectives.
To Gary Gillman, "farmhouse beer" really just means saison or saison-inflected beers, and it's actually not something he's particularly into.
Other contributions talked about farmhouse breweries in a more literal sense. Al at Fuggled talked about a change in the law that's sparked a new wave of farm-based brewing in Virginia. Stan Hieronymous at Appellation Beer posted an excerpt from his book, Brewing Local - an in depth profile of Piney River brewing in the Ozark mountains of Missouri. Meanwhile Jon Abernathy discussed the historic farmhouse brewing traditions of Oregon, and pondered how a modern homebrewer might draw inspiration from older them.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Boak and Bailey considered English farmhouse brewing traditions, and how, if at all, they could relate to modern commercial brewing. Ed Wray snuck in a post that I suspect he was going to write anyway, but it's good stuff so we'll have it. It's a summary of a talk by Lars covering long-established farmhouse brewing traditions in Norway, Latvia and (briefly) Suffolk. Finally, for my own piece I wrote about a much newer brewery from Suffolk, and why a 21st Century style like New England IPA seems to me to be a plausible thing for a "farm brewery" to produce.
So that wraps it up for this session. Thanks to everyone who took part - it's been a pleasure and a privilege to have so many good beer writers acting on my whim. The next few hosting spots still seem to be open, and I'd encourage any blogger who wants to get involved to pick a topic and grab one as soon as possible!
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