“Never ask a woman if she’d like a drink. Ask her if she’ll share a half a Mild with you,” so my grandfather used to say. It was advice born of stinginess over romance and yet, perhaps he had a point. A beer weighing in at around 3.2% ABV probably would be the perfect drink for a first date, or for any occasion where the aim was to while away the hours without the risk of an embarrassing loss of self-control. Lunchtime meetings, dinner with the in-laws, the night before an interview – there are any number of possibilities where less might be more. And yet, many beer drinkers today probably wouldn’t choose to drink a beer of below 3.5% at any time.

The idea that beer below 4% is unusual is a relatively modern idea. Mild aside, throughout Europe, from the early Middle Ages through to the 18th century, ‘small beer’ – low in alcohol and often made from the second runnings of the mash – was commonly drunk in place of water all day long, including at breakfast time. Our ancestors clearly thought there was a place for a thirst-quenching beer that could be enjoyed all day long without leaving the drinker sleepy or lairy. Yet today, a beer of around 2% would probably be seen by some as an aberration. It begs the question: Why have we fallen out of love with lower alcohol beer? And will we ever rekindle the flame?

One country that has a steady relationship with low alcohol beer is Sweden, but it’s more of a marriage of convenience than a passionate affair. The State-run off-licence chain Systembolaget has a monopoly on all alcoholic drinks over 3.5% and, thanks to its deliberately obtuse opening hours, anyone caught short and beerless on a Friday or Saturday night, or on Sunday, has to turn to the low alcohol alternatives that can be bought in the supermarket. (Similar systems are in place in Finland, Norway and Iceland, although in Finland and Norway supermarkets are allowed to go to the dizzy heights of 4.7 and 4.75% respectively.) The result is probably the biggest range of beers under 3.5% in the world. If anyone can get their hands on a good low alcohol beer, therefore, it ought to be the Swedes. Yet with pet names such as ‘mormorsdricka’ (granny’s drink), ‘fegisar’ (cowards) and ‘folk piss’ (no translation needed), it seems fair to say that Swedes are not all exactly enamoured with their low alcohol beers, even if they do drink them in large quantities.

It seems fair to say that Swedes are not all exactly enamoured with their low alcohol beers, even if they do drink them in large quantities

Johan Kronquist is a Gothenburg-based beer writer and author of the blog beerandbeyond.se. Last summer he carried out and documented his own tasting of 22 of the low alcohol beers available at his local supermarket. Most were brews from small independent Swedish breweries, with one Dutch and a handful of Danish offerings thrown in the mix, ranging in alcohol from 2.2-3.5%, and in style from lager to bitter, porter and IPA. The results were bleak; not one scored higher than a 4/6, and nine limped in with a paltry 1/6 or 2/6. It gives pause for thought. What is it that makes brewing an appealing low alcohol beer so difficult?

Gregg Irwin, director and brewer at London’s Weird Beard brewery, is one of the few who have managed to pull off a popular ‘sub-3%’ beer. Their ‘Dark Hopfler’ is a dark milk ale, brewed from the second runnings of their 10% ‘Sadako’ Imperial Stout, making it a good old-fashioned small beer. Weighing in at just 2.5%, it manages to top ratebeer.com’s low alcohol category with 3.9/5. Irwin sums up the challenge of low alcohol brewing succinctly: low alcohol typically means less malt, and that means less taste and ‘body’ – something which can’t be compensated for by simply throwing in masses of hops. “The beers we want to brew tend to have lots of hop character and if you put lots of hop character into a very thin and quite weak beer, with no malt body, then it’s going to become very unbalanced and become slightly astringent,” he says. “Alcohol creates body as well. So [the challenge] is trying to create something that’s not just undrinkably bitter or unbalanced and to create at least enough malt backbone to make it palatable.”

Sure enough, the words ‘watery’, ‘thin’ and ‘unbalanced’ crop up more than once in Kronquist’s tasting notes, but there is another issue: alcohol itself also adds taste, body and ‘mouth feel’, and it can mask a multitude of sins – and perhaps even the hints of plastic, chlorine, burnt rubber, cigarette butts, chemicals, metal and perhaps even blood, which Kronquist describes as sneaking forth from seven of the beers in his sample. With a low alcohol beer, there is nowhere to hide. It takes a brave brewer to go below 3%.

Yet it is possible to brew a good pint at under 4% and Irwin explains some of the techniques which add flavour and body without alcohol. Dark Hopfler contains lactose, which gives sweetness and substance but is not easily digested by yeast and therefore doesn’t raise the alcohol. Long-chain sugars (polysaccharides), produced by raising the temperature of the mash tun, can be used similarly. Another possibility is to use grains that produce fewer fermentable sugars such as oats, caramel malt and, to some extent, wheat.

“I thought the whole craft beer thing was about flavour? If it’s about more booze, then vodka is really cheap”

The problem is that brewing can be as much of an art as a science, and things don’t always go according to plan. Weird Beard were originally aiming for Dark Hopfler to be around 3.5%. It just happened to come out much lower and, since it tasted good, they were happy to leave it at that. Another Weird Beard brew, ‘Little Things That Kill’ (3.9%), was selling extremely well until it became apparent that the ‘unfermentable’ sugars  were indeed fermenting, slowly and after bottling. “We thought we had an absolutely amazing recipe,” Irwin says wryly. “Right up until the point where we started getting complaints about exploding bottles.”

If experiments must be carried out and mistakes made, there needs to be an incentive to work at it. In Sweden, Johan Kronquist believes that the future is looking brighter for beer of 3.5% and below since craft breweries have begun investing significantly in the low alcohol market, “basically because they’ve started to realise now that there’s money in it”. He highlights two recently opened breweries which only produce supermarket-strength beer – Gamla Enskede brewery in Stockholm, and Skånehill Gård in southern Sweden, which only ever brews up to 2.25%.

For countries with less restrictive alcohol laws, however, the future is less certain. Gregg Irwin has no doubt that it is possible to make a good low alcohol beer – he singles out Siren’s ‘Half Mast’ (2.8%) and Magic Rock’s ‘Simpleton’ (3%) as two of the best. And he maintains that “pretty much most styles” could work at below 4%. But he doesn’t see the sub-4% beer market as something appealing to UK brewers any time soon. The problem is not the beer though, but the drinker. “I think traditional drinkers see a 2.5% beer and think it should be an awful lot cheaper than a 3.5% beer, whereas we’re actually putting a lot of raw materials in there to make the beer as good as it is at 2.5%, so we can’t really sell it at a much discounted price,” he says. “Some pubs which take a lot of our standard beer don’t take Dark Hopfler when it’s available because they struggle to sell it at the same price as standard beer.” In Sweden, they refer to it as the importance of ‘YPK’ – ‘yrsel (“dizziness”) per krona’.

Market surveys may insist that there is a growing demand for lower and non-alcoholic alternatives, but whether or not these predictions will bear fruit, or whether the reality will more closely follow Weird Beard’s experience is a moot point. In the UK, beers below 2.8% have, since 2011, benefited from a tax break which CAMRA claims could save the drinker 50p a pint if they choose a lower alcohol alternative. Yet lower alcohol beers have not exactly exploded into British pubs.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, they’re not even close. Arguably, nowhere is the stigma of lower alcohol bigger than in the US ‘craft beer’ market. A quick peek at the ‘Old Ale’ section of ratebeer.com gives a good idea of the lay of the land. Among the top ten, nothing comes in below 8% and two are over 16%.

It’s a trend that Lew Bryson, beer and whisky writer and founder of the Session Beer Project (sessionbeerproject.blogspot.se), views with dismay, so much so that he’s been on what he describes as a “crusade” for the past seven years to try and change attitudes. His motivation was partly selfish (“I’m 55 and the idea of sitting down and having four 8% beers is in no way appealing to me”), but he also sees the obsession with high alcohol beers as stifling the industry and failing to meet a very real demand for greater variety.

In one sense, he believes his evangelism has begun to pay off. Seven years ago he noticed that, in a bar with 20, 40, even 80 or 90 different beers on tap, there would typically be around three under 5%. Now, he says, ‘session’ beer is the big thing.

“It’s very much a monkey-see, monkey-do industry. If something succeeds, the other brewers all start making it. So we had double IPA, and black IPAs, and quickly it became the thing to have IPA on that label to make it sell, so people started calling any damn thing an IPA. And we’ve seen that now with ‘session’,” he says. “The fastest growing type of beer right now is something labelled as a ‘session IPA’. And I think it’s because people just don’t like getting hammered. Or, at least, not until they’ve been able to sit there for a while.”

There is, however, a significant caveat to this ‘low alcohol’ revival. Some brewers are marketing their beer as a ‘session’ ale with an ABV of over 5%. Bryson, meanwhile, didn’t dare to go under 4.5% for his own definition of ‘session’: “I took a look at what was on the market and quickly decided that I’d just start pushing for stuff under 4.5, because if I was going to go for 4.0 it was going to fall on deaf ears.” And while he says that he has noticed good-natured competition between some craft brewers as to who can go the lowest, he notes dryly that “for a lot of them how low they can go is 3.8”.

Can American brewers go lower? Bryson personally has an unshakeable faith in the possibilities of lower alcohol beer, saying he once had a very nice 1.9% ‘lunch-time stout’ in a brew pub in New York state. But he knows he’s in a minority when it comes to going below 3%. Why Americans are so adverse to low alcohol craft beer isn’t clear, but Bryson has suspicions rooted in familiar ground.

“I hate to say it, [but] a lot of the reaction I’ve heard has been: it’s not strong enough. [People] feel that they’re not getting their money’s worth. We don’t have the alcohol related tax levels, it’s one flat tax, regardless of strength, so if it’s six or seven dollars for a pint, they want it to be a full 7% beer,” he says. “But that leads me to ask: ‘Well, why are you drinking?’ I thought the whole craft beer thing was about flavour? If it’s about more booze, then vodka is really cheap.” He adds: “So many times I heard someone say: ‘Well I’ll just get a big beer and sip it and it will last me an hour and a half.’ And all I could think was: ‘If you don’t like the beer, just say so.’”

There does seem to be some progress in the rehabilitation of low alcohol beer into the mainstream. CAMRA tells us that Mild is on the way back, and maybe we will see a new wave of sub-3.5% Scandinavian ales slowly making their way across the North Sea. And perhaps European trends will influence the US market, if the beers are good enough. But for it to happen, it seems that there also needs to be a change in the mentality of beer drinkers.

For all the apparent sophistication and finesse of the new generation of ‘discerning’ craft beer and real ale lovers, is it all a bit of a blag? Perhaps we could one day learn to truly, lovingly embrace a full-flavoured stout at 2%. Or perhaps, if you scratch the surface of the most earnest IPA aficionado, all you find is an excitable teenager that wants to get drunk.

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