Around this time last year I was already fairly confident that session beers were making large inroads into the mainstream (of craft beer drinkers) and I was already making predictions for the Next Big Thing: sweet beers.
Well, the sweet beer thing never materialized. Beers in the American Pale Ale profile still dominate the market, with a rising focus on single hop ales. More fringe styles are making their way to beer bar taps: guezes, kolsches, and especially sours—all styles already on the way out for the people that follow this stuff by a/vocation. But where are the low ABV beers?
Erik Loomis at LGM links to this post at WaPo’s All We Can Eat blog and notes:
I may have written about this type of thing before, but while there is definitely a place in the world for an 8 or 9% ABV beer, there is also plenty of room for very tasty brews with 4 and 5% ABV.
We here are DC agree and are a little more certain that we’ve written “this type of thing before.”
We’ve already started to see a trend back toward small beer; and most geek circles have a strong contingent of folk who adamantly demand sessionable ales. The trend toward lower ABVs is, I think, a regression to the mean of sorts after the “extreme beer” phenomenon. I don’t think that extreme beers are gone, or that they should be. Three Floyds and Dogfish Head are still out there, and you can count me in among their fans.
The beers WaPo’s Greg Kitsock notes are here or on their way are:
- Sam Adams Belgian Session
- New Belgian Shift
- DC Brau/Pratt Street Ale House Burial at Sea (Is this still around, and if so anyone know where I can grab a pint?)
- Lost Rhino Brewing Co. [Unnamed] Helles Lager
- Founders All Day IPA
Burial at Sea was a limited run-only beer, Session, Shift, and the unnamed beer aren’t out yet; and Founders is only marketed regionally (Chicago pals, feel free to ship me a bottle or two), so it’s hard to say how the market will open up for these beers, but I still suspect the reception will be favorable. Furthermore this gives me a lot of beers to put on my ticker list* for when I have $$$ again.
*With the exception of irregular participation at Untappd, I do not have a ticker list. (But if you want to, you can be my Untappd “friend” and see all the badges I’ve won!)
I’m sure we can find a way to get our grubby little hands on that Founders. It’s the one that stood out to me in the list you produced, so…Chicago it is!
I’m still really interested in the idea of making a beer similar to what Christian monks would have made back in the day. I should do some research on that. I’m assuming they’d be low abv beers although I guess they wouldn’t have to be.
DC, we are a brewery in planning http://www.facebook.com/fortnightbrewing in NC. Two of the partners are English and we miss flavourful low ABV and cask beers so much that both will be part of our starting line up. I hope it’s not too difficult to convince the bigger is better mentality that they are missing out on so much with a well crafted session beer.
Some info on us here http://www.nchomebrewing.com/opening-craft-nc-brewery-fortnight-brewing/
Thanks, Stuart.
Twitter: @Stuart_Arnold
I agree. I’ll always stand by the extreme beer folks (I like to think of them as the haute couture designers of the beer world) but I do enjoy an evening out solving the world’s problems with friends over pints of bitter. Good luck on the new venture!