Chicago brewers Ale Syndicate, who started selling beer in March 2013, introduced their Sunday Session ale on draft last spring, and I first tried it at the Mash Tun Fest in June. I didn’t know that’s what I was drinking at the time, because I was judging, but when the hurly-burly was done, I learned it’d been one of three finalists my judging partner and I had picked from among the 22 entries in the session-beer category, “Every Day Is Like Sunday.”
Ale Syndicate has maintained offices at the Green Exchange since November 2012, but because its brew house there remains under construction, it’s still contract brewing—Samuel Evans and head brewer Bryan Shimkos currently work at 5 Rabbit in Bedford Park and Excel Bottling in Breese (they’re also about to get under way at Big Chicago Brewing in Zion).
In June I also wrote that Sunday Session had “great body for a low-alcohol beer,” and now I know that “low-alcohol” means 4.8 percent. Fine-grained, frothy carbonation helps it feel creamy, though it’s hardly thick. I taste apricot as well as peach, plus tangerine and cedar and something very gently tart, like white grape or green apple. Grain and fruit dominate the flavor—despite the neon-sign obviousness of its hops, Sunday Session isn’t especially bitter. What bitterness I do pick up is subtle, herbal, and slightly peppery, a little like that purple-stemmed Thai basil you sometimes get with pho. It’s rounded off by full-bodied malts, which again remind me of milky cream of wheat with honey. Despite that flicker of sweetness, though, the beer finishes clean and dry.
And of course there are darker, uglier places to go once you start hunting for the word “sabbath.” Foundational second-wave Norwegian black-metal band Emperor released “Witches Sabbath” on the 1994 EP As the Shadows Rise.
