Jay at the Brookston Beer Bulletin is hosting the next installment of The Session, and today he’s announced the topic for May: Mild ales. More specifically:

The theme will be “The Mysterious Misunderstood Mild” to coincide with CAMRA’s May promotion Mild Month. Saturday the 5th will also be National Mild Day on the other side of the pond. For those of us here in the colonies, we may have a harder time finding a mild to review. But several craft brewers do make one, even if they don’t always call it a mild. So you may have to do a little detective work to find one, but that should prove to be half the fun.

I like the choice, though as Jay said, acquiring a Mild will be interesting, since I don’t live in England. It occurs to me that I could brew a Mild this weekend and have just enough time in the bottle (a week or two, almost) to drink and review it. If I were to do that, I’d follow Al Korzonas’ "Wolverhampton Mild" recipe from his Homebrewing Vol. 1.

Don’t let the name fool you, Milds have a long and varied history in English brewing. For some style notes, BeerAdvocate lists two, Dark Mild and Pale Mild. The Dark Mild is the traditional version most people will be thinking of. Wikipedia’s article is also very good.

Looking forward to it!