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Tailgating, camping trips and wedding receptions are just some of the occasions when many Americans down a few beers in one sitting. For those who prefer high-alcohol microbrews and other craft beers, that can lead to trouble.

But a growing trend is offering another option: Session beers emphasize craft-beer taste with alcohol as low or lower than big-brand light beers.

Chris Lohring has been brewing craft beer professionally for more than two decades. In 2010, he founded Notch Brewing. The company's lineup includes a Czech pilsner, a Belgian saison, and an India Pale Ale. All of the brews are session beers – meaning their alcohol by volume, or A.B.V., is less than 5 percent.

"The only thing in the United States previous to session beer being available by smaller brewers was the light beers of the world, which are mass-marketed, flavorless beers," Lohring says. "You could call them a session beer, but to me, a session beer needs to have some flavor. It needs to entice you for that second pint."

Lohring likes to say, "One and done's no fun." That concept might sound familiar. In the 1960s and '70s, Schaefer Beer ran countless ads with the slogan, "The one beer to have when you're having more than one."

But when Lohring first started making craft session beers, other brewers told him he was crazy. Stronger brews, including Sierra Nevada's Torpedo Extra IPA with 7.2 percent alcohol, were getting all the ... well, buzz. But today, Lohring and Notch Brewing have plenty of company. That includes Founders Brewing in Grand Rapids, Mich., which introduced its first session beer in 2012.

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All Day IPA, from Founders Brewing, is sold in a 15-pack, instead of the traditional 12-pack. Founders Brewing Co. hide caption

itoggle caption Founders Brewing Co.

All Day IPA, from Founders Brewing, is sold in a 15-pack, instead of the traditional 12-pack.

Founders Brewing Co.

"We've had this great, broad stable of really well-respected, well-recognized beers and then later in the game, All Day IPA came, and that's the one that's risen to the top for us now," says Chase Kushak, chief operating officer for Founders.

All Day IPA is Founders' first session beer. It's sold in 15-packs instead of the traditional 12-pack. Kushak says Founders isn't promoting longer drinking sessions, but when they do come up, All Day IPA — with its 4.7 percent alcohol — is an alternative.

"Those situations where people were drinking throughout the day already existed. And so our goal was to take a very responsible approach to that," Kushak says.

The history of session beers is like an unfiltered microbrew – a little hazy. Most versions trace the term "session" to British legislation during World War I that cut pub hours to one lunchtime and one evening session. But others argue it's a more casual reference to a long stay at the bar. Wartime rationing also limited ingredients, making it harder to produce boozier brews.

But can today's low-alcohol offerings earn high marks for flavor? To answer that, I turned to Jason Alstrom, who has been reviewing beers for nearly 20 years. He's the co-founder of Beer Advocate, one of the top craft beer websites and magazines. On a warm November afternoon, I met him in Boston on the patio at Deep Ellum, a bar that serves session beers from around the world.

We ordered a Guineu Riner, a golden beer brewed in Barcelona. By any standard this a low-alcohol beer. Bud Light and Coors Light clock in at 4.2 percent. Gineu Riner has an alcohol by volume of just 2.5 percent.

"It's just packed with hops," Alstrom says after his first sip. "It's perfectly balanced, but it's really hard to think that it's 2.5 percent. Just an amazing beer."

The experts are convinced, but the customer is always right. And standing at the bar, Newton, Mass., resident Marcin Kunicki told me he recently had a memorable weekend — that he can actually remember — thanks to a session beer.

"We had a half keg of it amongst four guys. We played cards all day. It was a weekend away with the guys," Kunicki says. "And, you know, not to call ourselves alcoholics, but we drank all day."

Kunicki's friend Rob Ross was on that trip. Ross is a home brewer, so he has a hands-on appreciation for the art of making a flavorful, low-octane beer. But he also understands the main appeal.

"You can have a few of them and not be totally drunk," Ross says, laughing.

And whether you sip or swig, the best session beers will leave with you something to savor.

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Beer

Cho Hyun-ah, whose family runs Korean Air, caused a stir over the weekend after she demanded that a Korea-bound jetliner return to a gate at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, where it had been preparing to take off.

The reason? Seated in first class, Cho was angered that a junior steward served her macadamia nuts — in a bag instead of on a plate, and without asking first. When a senior steward struggled to cite the proper regulations, Cho had him kicked off the flight, forcing the plane holding some 250 passengers to return to the gate before they could depart for Incheon, South Korea.

Cho is the daughter of Korean Air Chairman and CEO Cho Yang-ho. Fallout from the incident has forced Cho, who's also known by the first name Heather, to resign her post as a vice president at the airline, where her duties included cabin service and in-flight sales.

"I will step down to take responsibility over the incident," Cho said Tuesday, according to the Korea Herald. "I also beg the forgiveness of those who may have been hurt by my actions, and offer my apologies to our customers."

But it's unclear whether Cho's resignation is from a single post or from the entire airline. Reuters reports that she "will remain a vice president with the South Korean flag carrier, the airline said late on Tuesday."

The airline did not assuage its critics when it insisted, at first, that the JFK incident was merely a case of maintaining standards.

"News of Cho's outburst spread quickly on social media," Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reports, "causing the carrier major embarrassment and confirming every suspicion Koreans entertain about the spoiled brats from big conglomerate families."

Many South Koreans are uneasy with the country's "chaebol" giants, The Financial Times says, referring to international conglomerates that are often operated under a family's centralized authority. The newspaper says relatives "often wield undue influence over management of group companies in spite of their small direct shareholdings."

The case also raised concerns about a possible breach in the airline's safety regulations, which place each plane under the pilot's responsibility. The Chosun Ilbo says a government regulatory agency's early report found that the chief steward reported the problem to the pilot, and that the pilot then orchestrated the return to a gate at JFK.

As aviation buffs will recall, Korean Air served as one of writer Malcolm Gladwell's examples of the dangers of hierarchical traditions in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success.

Airlines

South Korea

As part of Sierra Leone's broader effort to contain the deadly Ebola virus, the country opened a new ambulance dispatch center in September in the capital, Freetown. Along with a new Ebola hotline, the center is considered an important step forward in the war on Ebola.

But on the center's second day of operation, a series of errors put the life of an apparently healthy 14-year-old boy at risk.

The dispatch center is situated in a meeting room at the Cline Town hospital just north of downtown Freetown. Inside the room, a group of men and women are huddled around a table full of laptops. Safa Koruma, a technician, points at a message on a screen. It describes a possible Ebola patient, reported through the hotline, with the words "vomiting and very pale."

Koruma forwards this message — along with hundreds of others — to the nearest health official. A community health worker is then supposed to evaluate the patient and assess the likelihood of Ebola.

"Probable" Ebola cases end up on a large whiteboard on the other side of the meeting room. It's the master list for ambulance pickups.

Victoria Parkinson, of the Tony Blair African Governance Initiative, is one of the directors of the center. She points at a name on the board with the number five written next to it, indicating the number of cohabiting family members.

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"We want to get that [person] quickly, because there's many people in the home that could be infected by," she says.

One of Parkinson's colleagues, Ama Deepkabos, writes down an address and hands it to an ambulance driver. "It's 7 Hannah Street, 555 Junction. Do you understand?" she says, imitating the local Krio accent. "Go directly to the patient. No other stops!"

The driver nods and hustles out to the dirt parking lot, along with a nurse. I attempt to speak with the driver and nurse, but neither speaks good English. They step into a white Toyota SUV with the word "Ambulance" in large red letters, and pull out of the parking lot.

Sierra Leone is in the midst of a three-day national lockdown, intended to slow the spread of Ebola, so the roads are clear. The ambulance speeds across town and is waved through multiple police checkpoints.

After two wrong turns and several stops for directions, it eventually bounces down a long dirt road in Waterloo, a rural suburb 15 miles southeast of Freetown.

The driver and nurse spot the person they believe to be the patient: a 14-year-old boy in a blue T-shirt slouched on a white lawn chair.

They get out and put on glimmering white protective suits, surgical masks and rubber gloves. They walk over and escort the boy, who is able to walk on his own, into the back of the ambulance without touching him. They kick the door closed behind him.

The boy's guardian, Suleiman Espangura, is the principal of a nearby high school. He recently took the boy, Ngaima, into his custody because his family was moving to a rural part of Sierra Leone, and Ngaima wanted to stay at his current high school near Freetown.

"He likes to play football," Espangura says of the boy. "And he's very clever. We [teachers] like children who are clever."

Espangura says he's unclear why Ngaima is being taken away in an Ebola ambulance. He says the boy doesn't have any signs of Ebola — no fever, no vomiting, no diarrhea. He just has a headache and a slight loss of appetite.

But because Espangura had heard multiple public service announcements encouraging people to report any signs of illness, he contacted a health official and was told a community health worker would come to evaluate Ngaima. Instead, an Ebola ambulance showed up.

Espangura says the ambulance driver and nurse asked him if Ngaima was "the patient." Espangura said yes, thinking the men were here to evaluate him. Instead, they ushered the boy into the ambulance and whisked him away.

The ambulance rushes across town to a military hospital with an Ebola isolation unit set up outside — a series of white plastic tents with a blue tarp stretched around the perimeter.

The hospital guards, in military fatigues, tell the ambulance driver and nurse that Ngaima is not on their list of expected patients. A heated argument ensues. The driver insists that he is merely following instructions, and that this is the correct patient.

One of the guards eventually calls the head of the hospital, who consents to admitting Ngaima. The driver and nurse spray the back of the ambulance with chlorine and open the door to let him out. Ngaima steps out of the vehicle and disappears behind the blue tarp fence, into the Ebola ward.

A few minutes later, another Ebola ambulance arrives. The military guards are expecting this patient. But they say the beds beds are now completely full — Ngaima has taken the last one. The new patient is admitted anyway.

It's not clear exactly what went wrong here. But now, a 14-year-old boy with a headache is sitting inside an Ebola isolation center.

REPORTER'S NOTE: Peter Breslow, my producer, and I didn't realize what had happened until the following day, when we were reviewing recordings of the event. We noticed that the names given to the ambulance driver did not match the names of Ngaima or his guardian, Suleiman Espangura. We immediately contacted the ambulance dispatch center and Espangura to explain what we thought had happened. The ambulance dispatch center neither confirmed nor denied having made an error.

Ngaima was kept at the isolation unit for the next six days, despite being told that he would get his Ebola test results within 24 hours. Ngaima eventually tested negative for Ebola and was discharged. But it was possible that, between the time his blood was taken and the time he was discharged, he could have been infected by another patient.

Since we returned to the U.S. in late September, I have been unable to reach Espangura for further updates.

Sierra Leone

ebola

If you're able and eager to write an annual check for roughly $100,000, you might expect to be hearing soon from the Republican and Democratic national committees.

In another small step on behalf of big money in politics, Capitol Hill lawmakers agreed Tuesday afternoon on a small provision to be added to the omnibus spending bill, allowing the two party committees to raise money for their presidential nominating conventions. The limit per donor would be $97,200 a year, on top of each party committee's existing limit of $32,400 per year.

The provision is intended to ease money anxieties at the national party committees. Since 1976, the conventions have gotten public financing — $18.2 million for each side in 2012. It was little more than a pittance in the grand spectacle of the party conventions, yet party leaders howled last March when Congress eliminated that public financing. (Lawmakers said the money should go into pediatric medical research.)

The Federal Election Commission provided some comfort to the parties, letting them solicit cash for newly created convention accounts. But that was a stingy move compared to what Congress intends to do.

The $97,200-per-year year limit comes to $388,800 for a four-year presidential election cycle. If the new provision had been available in 2012, just 94 donors could have matched the public financing for both conventions. Or put another way – as the pro-regulation groups would – regular contributions and the new convention account would enable a donor and spouse to funnel more than $500,000 to a party each two-year congressional election cycle.

The new provision also allows the party committees to create building funds. As recently as the 1990s, both party committees had building funds, and there was little accountability for the cash in them. On Tuesday afternoon there was no word on how the building funds would be regulated, or what their contribution limits would be.

The changes in campaign finance law surfaced without fanfare during negotiations when either Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid or Minority Leader Mitch McConnell could have vetoed them.

Six groups that advocate tighter regulation of campaign cash blasted a terse letter to lawmakers: "Our organizations strongly urge you to oppose any campaign finance riders on the Omnibus Appropriations bill that will increase the opportunities to corrupt members of Congress."

Democratic National Committee

campaign finance

Republican National Committee

Democratic National Convention

Republican National Convention