Celebrating “spacer” beers

For drinking between “normal” beers on a long session. For a week-night. For the Designated Driver. For cutting down. For starting early after the third #lockdown Zoom meeting of the day. For getting through pregnancy and breastfeeding. For all these reasons and more, the recent explosion in choice and quality of zero and <0.5% abv beers has been a boon and I love them!

Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of well-poised Imperial Barrel Aged Beasts, the occasional Triple IPA (harder to find in the UK than the SF Bay Area but not impossible!), even a 3.7% Young's Ordinary, 4% Crafty Devil Mikey Rayer All Dayer, or 3.5% Brains Dark (Mild)! However, as I've embraced my early forties, these low abv beers have found their way firmly into my regular drinking week.

It started as a bit of a challenge for me after my first encounter with a really drinkable <0.5% beer. I think it was a Big Drop Pale Ale or Stout. Soon I was sourcing them direct, enjoying the thrill of “will it be drinkable or will it taste like wort?”. Accepting the variable hit rate until I settled on a stable of options that I now vary between.

Here, dear reader, are my current favourites and a few honourable mentions:

Firm favourites

Honourable mentions

That took longer to write than I anticipated but hopefully it'll inspire one or two of you to take another look at these options – if only as an occasional break from the harder stuff!

All links are correct as of 27 May 2020 but may not be when you come to read them! Hunt the internet for these beers and their friends and enjoy!


Entry 2 of my participation in the “100 Days to Offload” challenge – find out more and join in!

2020-05-27 #100DaysToOffload #beer #SpacerBeer #lockdown