Easy-Drinking Craft Beer Gaining In Popularity

     By Mike Billy – Midwest Beer Blog

Originally published in The Times Newspaper

If you’ve looked closely at the labels on craft beer bottles and cans lately, you’ve probably noticed the words “session” and “sessionable” popping up as descriptors.

“Session beers,” the name for relatively low-alcohol craft beer offerings (usually weighing in at 5 percent alcohol by volume or lower), are becoming increasingly popular.

In fact, those easy drinking beers are going to be the main target of Tangled Roots Brewing Company, which is expected to open a tasting room in downtown Ottawa next month.

When I talked to the people behind the upcoming restaurant and brewery, they spoke a little about the beers they are going to produce. Assistant Brewer Louie Rizzo used the word “sessionable” to describe them.

Like I’ve written previously, this doesn’t exclude darker beers. There are plenty of dark beer styles, including oatmeal stouts and porters, that can fall on the lower end of the ABV scale.

Focusing on lower alcohol beers might seem like a departure from the last decade or so of craft beer trends. After all, “imperial” and “double” beers, which have a higher alcohol content, have been all the rage in the last decade or so. Craft brewers have upped the alcohol content of their beer to differentiate themselves from large scale American macrobreweries.

But more recently, American craft brewers have figured out that flavorful beers can be made at the lower alcohol end of the scale.

Take session IPAs, a lower alcohol cousin to traditional IPAs. This relatively new style has been gaining popularity over the last few years. Michigan-based Founders Brewing Company’s All Day IPA, for instance, was released in 2012 and now accounts for about half the the brewery’s total sales.

“We knew we had something extraordinary when we launched it, but I don’t think any of us really could have forecasted its success and momentum,” Mike Stevens, CEO of Founders, told mlive.com. “It’s really hitting an under-served market.”

For Tangled Roots, sessionable beers won’t just be session IPAs. They’ll have a variety of offerings including pale ales, kolschs, lagers, saisons and others. Of course, they’ll make some higher alcohol beers as well but that won’t be the focus.

Regular IPAs, which have a higher alcohol content than their sessionable counterparts, remain king in the craft beer world. The hopped up, bitter beers made up 8 percent of the craft beer market in 2008 and have spiked up to 27 percent in 2015, according to the Brewers Association.

But other, lighter styles also are enjoying a recent uptick in the craft beer world.

Take blonde, kolsch and golden ales, for instance. Sales of those three styles combined increased 60 percent this year, according the Association. Pilsners, which are light-bodied and refreshing lagers, are up 123 percent this year as of August.

“All of the styles referenced share a number of characteristics, primarily the ability to still pack flavor into lighter, more sessionable styles,” Brewers Association Chief Economist Brett Watson wrote in a blog post. “These styles are gaining in popularity amongst both brewers and beer lovers…”

Those styles typically have a lighter mouth feel and lower alcohol content than what has been popular since the onset of the craft beer revolution. That’s not a negative for these beers, as they still tend to be flavorful, at least the ones made by talented craft brewers.

But the lighter mouth feel and lower alcohol content could make them good transition beers for drinkers of Budweiser, Miller and Coors products.

Which just might be what Tangled Roots is going for.

As CEO Keith Pearse put it: “We’re going to be trying to get into what I call invitational craft, which is the easy drinking craft beer.”

Photo: Peter Anderson / flickr