We completed the UK census last week. Online – nice and easy. This once-a-decade occurrence goes back a couple of hundred years, with its roots even further back in the Domesday Book. There are rumblings that it may be the last one, with manual entries by each household giving way to administrative data gathered by the government in other ways. This might make economic sense and be more efficient but I for one like participating in a societal ritual going back that far. It feels very civic rather than invasive, whereas combining and combing my data from different official sources feels less so.

As much as I love drinking Thornbridge's wonderful <0.5% Zero Five Pale Ale, sometimes a little variety is in order. So as a treat to myself I used a little birthday money to go crazy at drydrinker.com and buy the beers in the photo above. When combined with a few I picked up from the local Roath Bottle Shop, this means I now have twenty different “spacer beers” in stock. Twenty!

Lately I've been drinking plenty of low abv beers, fulfilling my prediction from just over 2 months ago – they're a sensible option in my current era of fractured sleep when I need to be a responsible handler of the wee one! So, time to give a verdict on which are my faves so far and some thoughts on which ones I might try next.

While I have plunged head-first into exploring <0.5% abv “spacer beers”, I haven't spent as much time in the territory between them and the low 3% realm of Milds, Light Ales, Ordinary Bitters and Berliner Weisses. Wikipedia tells me that 0.5-2.8% beers are “Small” or “Table” beers. The excellent beer historian Ron Pattinson reveals in Beer Advocate and in his Shut Up About Barclay Perkins blog that these were in fact two different tax categories in 18th Century Britain. The terms are starting to pop up again, used a little interchangeably by modern craft brewers but if you see them on a beer give it a try!

I may add a search bar at some point but for now, you can also navigate posts according to hashtags, grouped below in a way that makes sense to me and evolving as I post more. Expect a mixed bag. Some of the posts will feature the tagged topic as the central focus of the post, others will merely touch on it. If you'd prefer to scroll through a timeline of posts, head to my Archive.

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!