Is there a nicer sound in the world than the crack of a can of lager opening? People talk about the beauty of a baby gurgling, but if they’re totally honest with themselves, it’s just not as good as that crisp crack and thunk, the impossibly fresh-sounding gasp of the can exhaling slightly as it depressurises.
I love a beer, but if I’m totally honest, I get almost as much from that moment of opening a tin as I do from drinking its contents. It’s a ritual, a line being drawn under the day: nobody better expect me to achieve anything now, because I’m simply not going to! It’s my time.
However, that word “almost” is fairly load-bearing. Even the most hardcore advocates of 0 per cent lager would agree it isn’t quite the same. An alcohol-free lager is cold, crisp and refreshing, but doesn’t quite scratch that itch.
Like a lot of middle-aged men, my relationship with The Drink is a complicated one. I rarely get properly drunk now, because my ageing organs can’t handle it and the next day is hell on Earth – I sleep badly, then can’t focus on getting any work done, and feel guilty and horrible – but having a couple of cheeky ones is something I enjoy enormously.
Mid-strength beer has an ABV around half to two thirds that of a regular drinkThe idea of a happy medium, real beers with real alcohol that won’t disrupt your sleep or give you a hangover, is very appealing – and this is where mid-strength beer comes in.
Mid-strength beer has an ABV around half to two-thirds that of a regular drink. If I’m totally honest, my first reaction to that as an idea was a two-word phrase where the second word is “off” – I wanted something a bit more magical than just drinking less alcohol.
But given the appeal of avoiding hangovers it seemed worth a go.
“People want to enjoy it all — raise a glass the night before, but not suffer for it the following day,” says James Grundy, co-founder of Small Beer, who make a range of beer types with between 2.1 and 2.6% ABV, brewed for longer than most regular beers to balance out the lower percentage with more flavour.
“Sometimes it takes people a moment to wrap their heads around the idea, but once they realise that they can enjoy [it] without it impacting them later that day, their sleep that night or the following day, the penny quickly drops.
“The way people think about drinking – and what it means to have a good time – has changed,” says Ross Cleaver, who co-founded Thousand Cups, a 1.2% drink. “Beer used to lean heavily into the idea that more is more, but now more people care about how they feel the next day, how alcohol affects their health, and whether it actually adds to the night.”
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Thousand Cups was created in response to one of its co-founders suffering from an alcohol flush reaction – also known as Asian flush due to being most common in East Asian people — and the other struggling with gluten. The development of a gluten-free, low-booze beer meant not having to cut nights short.
One of the main reasons we get hangovers is that alcohol is a diuretic, causing fluid loss and dehydration by making you wee a lot. However, at a lower alcohol level, below about 2.8%, this doesn’t happen.
At the same time, the liver processes alcohol into acetaldehyde. “This is primarily what ‘poisons’ our body and causes a lot of the issues that we experience with drinking,” says food and drink consultant and author Bryan Quoc Le. “The same amount of alcohol in more liquid (say, two cans of 2.5% beer versus one can of 5%) allows your body to process it more slowly and steadily.”
While the makers of both beers insist you shouldn’t drive after drinking any at all, getting drunk on Thousand Cups would involve, for most people, putting an absurd amount of liquid into your body. “Most people would feel uncomfortably full long before that,” says Cleaver.
My personal experiment
Based on my rigorous scientific analysis of drinking quite a lot of tins over the last couple of weeks, there’s a positive and a negative way of seeing these drinks.
The glass-half-full way of viewing weaker beers is that you get to spend more time drinking more drinks with fewer adverse effects. The glass-half-empty one is that you’re spending more money for less of the active ingredient.
But again, in reality the active ingredient isn’t so much the alcohol as the feeling of giving yourself a little treat. If you’re relaxing with a couple of tins, a few percentage points make minimal difference: it’s the act of taking a load off that is doing most of the work.
Mid and low-strength beer means fewer hangovers and dramatically fewer caloriesWould Happy Gilmore 2 have been less rubbish if the three beers I drank during it were stronger? No, it sucks, but made for a perfectly pleasant evening and I slept as though I hadn’t drunk at all.
These bring you all the way up to about the “four nice beers with three nice pals” level, which at my advancing years is about where I should be a drawing a line.
And you can’t binge these: it’s too much liquid. You’d never drink six cans of Sprite, you’d feel terrible. I drank six cans of weak beer on a Wednesday evening – because it was there – and felt like I was going to belch myself inside out.
Then, to conduct it properly I also tried some robust full-strength pints on one evening – let’s call it the control test – and felt notably much worse. The next day was a write-off, made all the worse for feeling completely avoidable.
Despite my initial misgivings, mid- and low-strength beer just makes a lot of sense: fewer hangovers, dramatically fewer calories and less work for my struggling, infirm body, all for basically the same reward.
This stuff’s the future: no fuzziness the next morning, and essentially the same experience socially as if drinking full-strength lager. As these lower-booze drinks get more of a foothold in the beer market, they’re definitely going to find a home in my fridge.
Not all the time though. You’ve got to do these things in moderation.
Crack open the cans…
Small Beer Lager
2.1% abv, 73 kcal, 330ml
£14.25 for 6 (£4.09 per pint)
Vegan-friendly
Ideal accompaniment: An underwhelming Netflix comedy where everyone seems like they were just in it for the money but you’ve had a long week and don’t mind.
Small Beer IPA
2.3% abv, 83 kcal, 330ml
£14.25 for 6 (£4.09 per pint)
Vegan-friendly and gluten-free
Ideal accompaniment: An in-depth chat about property prices in good school catchment areas.
Small Beer Hazy
THE FAVOURITE (although I’d still prefer a Kronenbourg)
2.6% abv, 84 kcal, 330ml
£14.25 for 6 (£4.09 per pint)
Vegan-friendly
Ideal accompaniment: An impressively seasoned veggie skewer served off your neighbour’s strikingly expensive grill.
Thousand Cups Original
1.2% abv, 40 kcal, 330ml
£26.99 for 12 (£3.87 per pint)
Vegan-friendly and gluten-free
Ideal accompaniment: An incredibly intense 3am chat with a friend who you’re going to have to help get home because they’ve lost their keys, phone and mind.
Thousand Cups Lime
1.2% abv, 40 kcal, 330ml
£26.99 for 12 (£3.87 per pint)
Vegan-friendly and gluten-free
Ideal accompaniment: An ambitious dinner you’ve never made before and somehow took three times longer than anticipated but was delicious.
Kronenbourg 1664
4.6% abv, 210 kcal, 568ml
£6.19 for 4 (£1.55 per pint)
Neither vegan-friendly nor gluten-free
Ideal accompaniment: Several more of the same, and a family-sized bag of crisps all to yourself.
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