How AVBC brews delicious, low calorie beer
Delicious, low-cal beer goes against the well-documented rules of the universe. You can’t have your cake and eat it too! Especially when that cake is actually beer! We figured something here was amiss, so we asked Brewmaster Fal to set us straight. He did just that.
Does Anderson Valley set out to make a low calorie beer?
No, we don’t try to make low calorie beers, we try to make delicious beers that folks want to have another of. The sessionability or drinkability of a beer is related to the alcohol content and the body of that beer. Lower alcohol content and body means a lighter feel and greater drinkability. That is our goal: delicious beers that you wanna have a few of.
Do you alter the brewing process or ingredients to lower to the calorie count?
Not at all, the process is very much the same whether the beer is 80 calories or 300. The way to change the calorie count is (mostly) by changing the percentage of alcohol in the beer, and that is done by changing the amount of sugars in the beer. Most of the sugars are fermented into alcohol. And alcohol is where most of your calories come from. Some calories come from other complex unfermented sugars, but in our beers we try to avoid too many unfermented sugars—even in our biggest beers like Huge Arker or the Salted Caramel Porter.
What’s been your experience with other low calorie beers? How are AVBC beers different?
In the past, low calorie brewers often tried to make them low-cal without losing too much of the alcohol content. It can be done that way, but it affects the flavor. If a brewer is just aiming to make a low calorie beer without much thought about flavor—well, those beers are usually not the kind of beers I want to drink. Every one of our beers are designed with having a second glass in mind. If we make a beer and at the end of the glass you don’t think—“I’d like another one of those”—then we missed our mark. We aim for great tasting beers that have high drinkability and repeatability.
But how does it taste? Can people still get the full flavor they expect from AVBC? No one likes watery or flavorless beer!
EXACTLY, if someone wants watery light beer there’s plenty of it out there. We always think about flavor first. We want people to love the beers and to come back to them because they enjoy them. That’s one reason we make such a wide range of beers; from the super sessionable Black Rice Ale (at only 3.8% ABV and 90 calories) to the HUGE Huge Arker (our 15.5% ABV Imperial Stout). If someone can’t find a beer in our line up that they like—well, then they probably just don’t like beer.
