Philadelphia Weekly

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Photo by Fred Armitage

At 5-foot-7-inches and 135 lbs., Matthew Cohn is a small dude. But he’s far from a lightweight. So he couldn’t understand how he found himself one night a year ago yakking on a patch of grass in front of the art museum after drinking just four beers.

“I wasn’t planning to get drunk,” he slurred repeatedly to his friend who’d given him a lift home. “I don’t know how it happened.”

“I do,” retorted his friend. “You didn’t drink four beers. You drank four Tröegenators.”

At 8.2 percent alcohol by volume (ABV), Tröegs Brewing Company’s Tröegenator Double Bock packs a far stronger alcoholic punch than the Yuenglings (4.9 percent) and Miller Lites (4.2 percent) that your typical American guzzles while he yahoos with his buddies. But it’s not even close to the strongest brew on tap for Philly Beer Week. With a parade of craft beers that will weigh in at up to a jaw-dropping 25 percent ABV (Samuel Adams Utopias—the strongest beer in the world), most of Beer Week’s events could prove to be a powder keg for the uninitiated and unaware.

“With craft beer we tend to have products that are a little fuller in flavor and maybe body than some of your mass-market beers, and there’s a tendency for those to be a little higher in ABV,” says Dr. Tim Wadkins, director of quality assurance at Victory Brewing Company. “In order to make a fuller-flavored product you tend to add more malt … which creates more alcohol.”

Some craft brewers consider it almost a game of skill to cultivate the wildest, strongest beers conceivable.

“There are some high-alcohol European styles that have influenced American brewers, and a number of brewers have taken those and notched them up,” says Don Russell, aka Joe Sixpack, who writes a beer column for the Philadelphia Daily News and is a lead organizer of Beer Week.

In the tri-state area, there aren’t any laws governing ABV, and according to Russell, it hasn’t factored into Beer Week planning, either.

“The thing about Philly Beer Week is that anything goes,” he laughs. “I love when people come up with imaginative beer styles.”

So it’s up to participating bars and breweries to self-police.

“If it’s above 10 percent we normally limit people to two,” says Mike (Scoats) Scotese, owner of the Grey Lodge Pub.

“No beer is getting on [my taps] of considerable strength unless it’s a really, really good beer,” says Brendan Hartranft, who owns Memphis Taproom and Local 44. “I’m never going to put a beer on like Victory Golden Monkey (9.5 percent). I think it misses the mark of a good triple. People ask me for it all the time. Tough shit. People ask me for Budweiser too.”

Hartranft also displays the ABV of his beers, as does Scoats, who even hangs “Danger Will Robinson” signs on extra-potent taps. And both bar owners extol the virtues of “session beers,” the informal name given to brews that contain less than 4.5 percent ABV, give-or-take, which makes them consumable in heftier quantities during a drinking session.

The high-ABV norm “was a trend that a group of us were sick of as long as 10 years ago,” says Hartranft. “When I’m sitting next to a load who’s had three or four beers that quite frankly were just a shortcut to midnight, it’s just amateur hour.”

Professional beer scribe Lew Bryson is so enamored of the increasingly popular session beers that he’s worked to place two such events on Beer Week’s calendar and, proclaiming 2009 “The Year of the Session Beer,” has devoted an entire blog to the subject.

“It goes to a hole in American craft brewing,” he says. “The first time I really thought about it I was drinking Young’s Old Nick. It’s a little over 7 percent and I remember thinking, ‘I wish you were at 3 percent because I could drink you all afternoon.”

As craft brewers mature, they’re finding ways to make better session ales, which, being more subtle in character, challenge their skills more than bang-you-over-the-head genres.

“We’ve come to embrace it,” says Wadkins, of Victory, who notes that many session styles derive from England, Scotland and Ireland. “Take Guinness and our Donnybrook Irish Stout. They still have tons of flavor and they can still be very, very dark in color.”

But Russell, despite appreciating a quality session, says “bollocks” to his peers’ ever louder big-beer bashing.