It’s best to view the range of lower-ABV farmhouse ales being brewed today through a wide-angle lens. While often Belgian-inspired, there’s no single term to define them as a style.
Brewers variously might call them table beers, grisettes, petites saisons, and so on. The Brewers Association appears to acknowledge this squishiness, labeling a category of both the Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup competitions as “Session Beer or Belgian-Style Table Beer.”
Some are mixed-culture; some are not. Some have perceptible acidity or funk; others do not. But don’t worry: When you taste one in the wild, you’ll know.
You may have to be patient—these beers are rare, sometimes shy, birds. You won’t find them on many supermarket shelves or sports-bar menus, but they’re quietly persistent. The brewers who make them do so because they love them, not because they’re the fastest sellers. (Some have managed to find enough of a foothold to justify year-round production.) They’re also paradoxical: persnickety to design and ferment, easily thrown out of balance, yet easy-drinking and—unless you squint harder—relatively simple.
Mike Schallau, cofounder and head brewer of Chicago’s Is/Was, aims to hew closely to his ideal of making “small, spritely little beers.” Chief among them is Bourgeois Daydreams, a 3.2 percent ABV beer bottle-conditioned with Brettanomyces. It says “table beer” on the label, but Schallau says he considers it equally a saison. He’s brewed myriad fruited and nonfruited batches of Bourgeois Daydreams, and it’s a beer that he says continues to reveal itself to him in new ways. It’s beguiling—an unassuming beer whose low alcohol and high approachability mask the nuances and occasional challenges of its design and fermentation.
“All of the little tricks we have for yielding flavor, we use in this beer that’s only going to be 3.2 percent alcohol,” Schallau says. While Bourgeois Daydreams is straightforwardly refreshing and hoppy, it can also reveal nuanced primary and secondary fermentation characters. Schallau describes the beer as “coy”.
“More than any of our other beers, it’s a real shapeshifter,” he says.
Side Project owner Cory King uses uncannily similar language when describing a revelatory experience drinking Jester King’s Le Petit Prince, one of the earliest and most widely available Belgian-inspired table beers brewed in the United States. Those glasses of Le Petit Prince, drunk under the tyrannical Texas summer sun, were a catalyst for some of King’s own beers, including Side Project’s á la Table and Grisette—he’s been brewing both commercially for at least a decade.
“You know how these beers are; they change batch to batch,” King says of that formative afternoon with Le Petit Prince. “It sat there and looked at me.”
It’s easy to see why brewers are enamored with these low-ABV farmhouse beers: They’re a delicious challenge, demanding rapt attention to ingredients and process. Everything—the malt, hops, yeast, water, fermentation schedule, and packaging—must be executed just so to coax out these beers’ full potential. Yet their impact on the palate—when all is done perfectly—is merely a whisper of feathers on the snow, a rustle in the trees, a gentle whoosh of wings overhead.
Building Big to Finish Small
A key challenge for these low-ABV beers is building the malt bill in a way that creates a satisfying yet refreshingly dry beer; it should be complex yet fully attenuated. The ways that brewers accomplish this can vary drastically: Some use as many as six grains or more in their table beers, while others use only one.
At Seattle’s Good Society, brewer Phil Cammarano has used pilsner, wheat, and spelt in their First to Fall, a grisette of 4.9 percent ABV. More recently, he’s been leaving out the spelt, mostly for budgetary reasons. He says he appreciates how the wheat adds a perceived lemon flavor that can evoke a Lactobacillu-like tartness. First to Fall is not a mixed-culture beer—he pitches Wyeast 3726 Farmhouse Ale, then repitches it to one of the brewery’s saisons—but it competes in a category that typically includes them. Since 2020, it’s won two golds and a bronze at the Great American Beer Festival, plus another World Beer Cup gold in 2023.
“I thought all-pilsner might be too bready and too sweet, so the wheat gives it a simple, everyday character and a little haze, which I like in a farmhouse,” Cammarano says. “In judging and customer comments, people assume it’s a mixed-culture. You get a light breadiness and something like Lacto out of it in the background.”
The grain bill is more varied for Side Project’s á la Table. In fact, it’s one of the brewery’s most complex, using six different types of grain. King jokes that it’s “more complex than needed,” but most of those grains are there to try to bulk up the beer’s protein content and add fullness. He says this is a lesson he learned from witbiers—which should be dry and refreshing but also satisfyingly round—and he’s applied to other styles, including stouts.
“Let’s not make it sweeter,” he says. “Let’s not increase the final gravity. Let’s just make it richer.”
Schallau builds Bourgeois Daydream with about 60 percent pilsner malt, 25 percent spelt, with a remainder of triticale and chit malt to boost protein content. He says he believes the rusticity and multigrain flavor of those grains help trick the palate into thinking there’s more to this dry, low-ABV beer. In fact, he uses just 220 pounds of malt per 7.5-barrel batch—roughly 100 kilos per nine hectoliters—or less than a pound per gallon.
“There’s no sweetness left in this beer; it gets down to zero,” Schallau says. “But when you have that nutty, non-barley graininess, that can be perceived as being sweeter. And the perception of sweetness helps add the perception of fullness to a beer that’s super-dry.”
In Rapid City, South Dakota, Lost Cabin is the rare brewery that makes its table beer with solely pilsner malt. The 2021 GABF bronze-medal winner keeps the malt and hops (Warrior, Saaz, Styrian Goldings) simple; the beer’s unique yeast—more on that below—is the primary driver of flavor.
That complexity from such simple ingredients is why Lost Cabin COO and head brewer Tom Silbernagel says he appreciates this breed of beers.
“It’s like an onion—it’s got layers,” he says. “This is just four ingredients, so it comes down to different ways of using them. What bends my mind a little bit is how many options there are out there just from changing your process, your water, your temperatures.”
Fermentation Factor
As with their methods for building the grist, brewers also vary widely in their fermentation approaches to table beers, grisettes, and small saisons.
Some aim for the yeast’s character to shine above all else; others prefer that the fermentation character isn’t the primary flavor driver. Some employ a secondary fermentation with Brettanomyces, while others use a “clean” saison or farmhouse ale strain. All approaches find a place under this wide farmhouse tent.
At Is/Was, Bourgeois Daydreams gets a dose of Brettanomyces toward the end of primary fermentation. That pitch began as a Brett blend from Omega Yeast, but the brewery has since customized it to remove the funkier strains, such as Brettanomyces bruxellensis. Though this beer undergoes a secondary fermentation with Brett, Schallau says he doesn’t intend for that to be the beer’s primary sensory contributor. Instead, he hopes a fresh, bright hop character leads the way.
“In my mind, Brett is very much a secondary characteristic to what this beer is at its core,” he says. “It happens to have that, but it’s not driven by it. Most people might not even notice it.”
In contrast, Lost Cabin’s table beer is built entirely around its yeast. It began with a collaboration tripel brewed years ago with a local truffle company, Chubby Chipmunk; that led to discussion of the natural yeast that’s necessary for the continued survival of a semi-rare cacao bean called Fortunato No. 4. Silbernagel says he was intrigued, and he began making phone calls to companies in the yeast and chocolate realms.
Years later, White Labs isolated that yeast strain from cocoa beans found in the remote Marañón River Canyon in Peru, releasing it in 2018 as WLP546 Marañón Canyon Wild Cacao Yeast. Today, Lost Cabin uses that fruity, phenolic strain to ferment its table beer. However, it’s a relatively weak attenuator—White Labs lists it at 65 to 70 percent—so Silbernagel blends in some of Lost Cabin’s house yeast to get it drier. His relatively simple approach to the beer’s grain and hops is in service of letting the fermentation shine.
“It’s all about the yeast doing its thing,” Silbernagel says.
The table beer at Oxbow in Portland, Maine, is likewise a vessel for fermentation-derived flavor. Again & Again is the brewery’s 3.5 percent ABV table beer, fermented with the brewery’s house French saison strain, then conditioned with Brettanomyces bruxellensis var. Drei. Warm storage kicks off the secondary fermentation before they move the beer to cellar temperatures; bottles typically mature for three months until they’re ready for public release.
Anne Aviles, Oxbow’s mixed-fermentation and cellar manager, says that sensory evaluation during this conditioning period is a delicate dance. Sometimes Oxbow’s brewers are eager to release the beer when its Brett character is most assertive—but they also recognize that drinkers may appreciate a longer maturation, which creates more approachable notes of apricot, honeysuckle, and spring flowers. Cellar the beer too long, however, and the yeast eat through the malt character, leaving the beer too dry.
“It’s tough with such small beers, when you’re dealing with something as aggressive as Brett,” Aviles says. “That Brett can super take over, and there’s only so much beer for it to work through.” Let the beer condition unchecked, and it turns into something unappealing—akin, she says, to “seltzer Brett water.”
At Side Project, King and his team walk a similar tightrope. Once á la Table hits its desired pH and final gravity in oak foeders, the brewers begin tasting it weekly. Within a month, he says, the oak character can become overpowering, or the acidity can go from adding a pleasant roundness—reminiscent of malolactic character—to becoming distractingly sharp. He considers the oak presence to be an ingredient, as is the acidity derived from the brewery’s mixed culture. “I want this tiny, delicate, lemon meringue-y note,” King says. “We have tart, and we have sour. I want a little blip of tartness, like any good dish of food should have a dash of acid.”
Sublime Variation
Food is an apt metaphor for this family of beers. Like trained chefs and classic French cuisine, brewers come up with countless ways to interpret table beers and their cousins, borrowing influences from personal tastes and variable ingredients over the years.
What unites these interpretations isn’t their technical specifications but their philosophy: They should be approachable, quenching, slyly complex, and enchanting. The goal is straightforward, but the routes to get there are anything but.
“Again & Again is really simple, but it’s one of those beers that have such a mind of their own,” says Aviles at Oxbow. “As much as we can be the shepherds steering it to where we want to be, you have to be able to allow for certain deviations from that. Because it’s such a romantic way of making a beer.”