It’s the last edition of The Session. Since March of 2007, The Session has been a group blogging project based on the premise that one person would “host” each month, suggesting a topic and then compiling everyone’s posts into a roundup so we could read about beer from a variety of viewpoints. Over the years the participation has waxed and waned, and mostly waned in recent years, which prompted Stan Hieronymus and Jay Brooks, the originators/caretakers, to call for a graceful ending.

This month, December 2018, is that final month.

Stan is our host for this final edition, which is fitting since he was the first host 11-plus years ago. Appropriately, Stan’s theme for this month is “One more for the road“:

When Jay Brooks and I exchanged emails about the topic this month I flippantly suggested “Funeral Beers” seemed appropriate. You can call it “Last Beers” if you’d rather not think about how your friends might toast you when you no longer are participating. Or “One more for the road” because that has a soundtrack.

Pick a beer for the end of a life, an end of a meal, an end of a day, an end of a relationship. So happy or sad, or something between. Write about the beer. Write about the aroma, the flavor, and write about what you feel when it is gone.

I have to admit that this is a bittersweet topic for me. Not only because I have been there since the beginning, but also because this year, for me, has been about change, and endings (and, yes, new beginnings). So I’ve been watching the approach of this month’s Session out of the corner of my eye, not really ready for it but knowing it was coming, with something of an air of creeping inevitability knowing it was ending. And for me, there is really only one way to approach this month’s final topic.

(I know, technically I could still write Session-like posts on the first Friday(ish) of each month, like I alluded to last month, but let’s be honest: it’s not the same.)

In March, I lost my father, and I memorialized him here. There are probably any number of beers I could choose for one more for the road for him, but in the end I decided that it needs to be Black Butte Porter from Deschutes Brewery. In April I wrote this memory:

He did like Black Butte Porter, which was probably one of the first microbrewed beers he ever tried. Yes, back in the “microbrew” days, and one of the things that impressed him about the new microbrews coming out—compared to the regular canned light lagers—was that you’d “feel great” the next day after drinking them. Translation: you wouldn’t be (as) hungover or feel the aftereffects. He was pragmatic that way.

As I think about it, Black Butte might have been one of the very first microbrews that Dad experienced, though it’s impossible to know for sure. But as Deschutes was the only brewery in town for years after it opened in 1988, that seems to me to be a logical inference. (The other possible contenders around that time, I suppose, would have been Widmer, BridgePort, Sierra Nevada, and the like — and yes, including Weinhard’s, which everybody considered just as upscale at the time.)

Black Butte Porter was also a favorite of a close friend of my father’s, old family friends they knew since before I was born. His name was John also (though spelled differently), and he died several years earlier. When we all (Dad included) helped spread some of his ashes, we drank and poured out a Black Butte for him.

It’s also a favorite of mine, and it was an “ending” beer (though by no means a final end) when I finished and submitted the manuscript for my book Bend Beer back in 2014; to commemorate the end of that stage, and to honor Bend’s first brewery, I toasted with a Black Butte at the Pub.

So Black Butte Porter is the one.

I’ve written about it before for past Sessions; the first time was way back in 2007 for our fourth edition of The Session, as part of a larger roundup of Deschutes’ beers. The most recent was Session #109 in 2016. You can read my tasting notes and some backstory to the beer in the newer post, but I still like what I wrote about BBP back in 2007, and will stick with that here:

The absolute first beer you should drink when you visit the Brewery is Black Butte Porter. This is Deschutes’ flagship and best-known beer, brewed since their founding in 1988. The bottled version is good, but the tap version is unmatched; inky black with ruby edges, creamy smooth, with rich notes of chocolate, coffee, charcoal, and rich dark malts, it has an acidic tang and balances sweet and dry without veering into harshly astringent. Its body is firm yet drinkable and refreshing, and it’s a wonderful session beer at 5.2% alcohol by volume.

More importantly, it’s a dark beer that is balanced and drinkable that will even appeal to longtime light macro lager drinkers like my Dad and his generation. Perhaps it was his gateway beer to the emerging world of microbrews and craft beer at the time, perhaps it’s just so well-brewed that it crosses those boundaries.

Regardless, it’s my “ending” beer, my one more for the road, that I’m seeing The Session (and more) off with. It’s a bittersweet ending, perhaps not unlike the flavor of the beer, but in the end I know it’s also the beer I will always come back to, a foundational beer to commemorate endings and celebrate new beginnings.