This month’s last-minute topic for The Session is provided by Alistair Reece of Fuggled, and we are tasked with waxing nostalgic about beer:

As the title of this post suggests, today I want you to put on your sepia tinted glasses and indulge in a little beer nostalgia, a bit of personal beer history you might say.

What kind of things would be suitable topics for today? Well, here’s some suggestions:

• Discontinued beers that you miss.
• Breweries you once loved that are no longer around.
• Beers that are simply not what they once were.
• Your early steps in the world of beer drinking, whether craft or just in general.

There you have it, get melancholy, drag up memories of good times gone by, and join us in this month’s Session.

I’ll touch on some of Alistair’s suggestions. First up — discontinued beers. Off the top of my head I can think of several hometown brews from Deschutes Brewery that have gone away that I rather miss: Chainbreaker White IPA, Cinder Cone Red, and Green Lakes (Organic) Amber Ale. And I suppose I could give an honorable mention to Cascade Golden Ale, one of the early recipes. These were all fine beers that had carved out niches within the brewery’s lineup and played an important role in its history. They are relatively recent, though, so I don’t know that I properly have nostalgia for them as such.

Bert Grant’s beers—now there’s some nostalgia! In particular I remember fondly the Apple Honey Ale, which I first had back in the 90s. And certainly don’t forget the IPA and the Porter, among others.

Loved breweries that are no longer around: I’ve written at length about the Birkebeiner Brewery of Spokane, Washington of the mid-90s (in a long-ago previous edition of The Session in fact). I still miss that place, and on some level I hold that brewery as a template for what I consider to be a quintessential American brewpub.

As for beers that are “not what they once were,” well, beers change all the time, due to recipe tweaks, ingredient availability, seasonal crop variations, equipment upgrades, and many other variables. So to me it’s tough to point at any given beer and expect it not to have changed—all beers are not what they once were! But if you really want to try to re-capture that particular beer experience, might I suggest homebrewing, and try recreating it yourself?

Good times.