Do you ever deal with Journalist Twitter? It is possibly the very most self-important subgenre of social media, though Aggrieved-Teacher Facebook gives it a run for its money. (Not that they're in it for the money, which we believed the first 50,000 times they mentioned it this morning, which they had time to do because they get up SO EARLY, you see.) Journalists like to complain about every damn thing in the world and specifically about publicists.
I kinda like publicists, actually, which is one of the very many indications that I am not a real journalist. Another key piece of evidence is that I write about beer for a site that can only afford to pay me because athletes keep taking pictures of their dicks, which might not be the precise thing my parents had in mind when they cosigned all those loans, but we didn't come here to talk about me, we came here to talk about publicists and me.
I think publicists are cool because sometimes they send me free things: a couple beers here and there, a Thermos of coffee for some damn reason last month, and way too many bottle-opener keychains, because there's apparently this misconception that people who drink a ton of beers need to open them all at once. But they're also cool because they have some good ideas sometimes!
For example! A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from whomever Founders Brewing employs to email beer bloggers, and I did my usual deal of scanning to the bottom to see if they were offering any free beer. (Yup: Got two bottles of All Day, retail value $4, which is not nearly enough to sway my opinion, I promise.) And along the way, I noticed the pitch about how "session IPA is perfect for football season!" and rolled my eyes, because every marketer is always telling us that every product is perfect for every season. But then I realized this woman was right: Session IPA is perfect for watching football, because football, while beautiful, is also fucking interminable, and full-bore IPAs, while delicious, get you too drunk to sit through an entire day of beautiful, interminable football.
Beer folk—even the normal non-journalist ones—are skeptical of session IPAs for good reason. (Quick note, because I don't know who knows what: "Session beer" means lower-alcohol beer, usually in the four- to five-percent-ABV range, which is about Bud strength; India Pale Ale is the most popular category of craft beer, and most of them are in the 6.3- to infinity-ABV range.) "IPA" is such a powerful marketing acronym these days that it gets attached to all sorts of beers for no honest cause: Too many "white IPAs" are just over-hopped wheat beers, almost every "black IPA" I've tried is a mess, and there's every reason to suspect that "session IPAs" are just pale ales with sexier handles. And some are. But not Founders All Day. This shit is fantastic. (Again: It takes way more than $4 to sway me.)
It has classic IPA aromas and flavors. It smells like a softer—rather than watered-down—version of Founder's Centennial IPA, only with less caramel maltiness. The pronounced grapefruit kick on the end reinforces that this is not simply a pale ale by another name. I love pale ales, but I also love truth in advertising, and All Day is every inch an IPA despite its relatively low 4.7 ABV. It's predominantly citrusy, with maybe a touch more pine resin than strictly necessary on the finish, which is a neat trick that is probably impressive from a brewing perspective, but altogether superfluous: This regular-ass drinker has already long accepted that yes, this is indeed a lower-alcohol IPA that will keep you upright through the late game.
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Will Gordon loves life and tolerates dissent. He lives in Cambridge, Mass., and has visited all of the other New England states, including, come to think of it, Vermont. Find him on Twitter @WillGordonAgain.
Image by Jim Cooke.
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