The conundrum of any craft beer bartender is the patron who walks in and asks, “What do you have similar to a Coors Light?” It’s akin to asking a booker at a punk rock venue if they have something in the vein of Milli Vanilli. The request is so asinine, so antithetical to everything that is craft beer that you bury the idea deep down, hoping to never see it again.
Then after a decade, maybe more, what’s old has become new again, but with a little different perspective. As younger generations drink less, and older generations figure out that “Mad Men” drunk is more alcoholism than lifestyle, there’s been a push for less boozy options.
Now, instead of a customer asking for something lighter, it’s a person from within the company who tried drinking a few of the tamest beers on the menu and still got floored.
Ska Brewing Co. President and Co-founder Dave Thibodeau said he then received an abnormal request from the shambly coworker:
“Can you guys make something a little lighter than Mexican Lager?”
“We were kind of like, uh, I don’t know if we want to, and I was like, ‘No!’” he said with a laugh.
However, he acquiesced, and the team got to work on Ska’s new West’s Easy Light Lager.
“Brewing a lighter beer without a lot of flavor is really hard. … If anything goes wrong, you can’t mask it,” he said. “There is no hoppy dark malt to mask any kind of mistake.”
That approach to beer has largely eluded craft brewers since the industry took off – mostly because brewers writ large ignored the plea – but the result is a tasty beer that comes with a pleasant catch.
With a pint available for a penny less than the national average cost of a gallon of gasoline at Ska’s tasting room, and 12-pack only options in the $12.99 range, East Light hits its intended price point to go with its intended branding.
“We didn’t want it to seem crafty,” he said. “We wanted to bring people into the fold that are disenchanted or thought craft was too pretentious.”
The “Gas Vs. Beer Index” is updated every Monday from the AAA website, and the price is adjusted. As of June 8, the cost of a pint of the new beer was $4.31. The deal is intended to run indefinitely, which Thibodeau acknowledged could backfire if the price declines dramatically.
The packaged options will only be available at outlets in the area, and the hope is that the pivot away from Ska’s typical comic book aesthetic, and proximity to other affordable beers, will help it catch on.
“It’s a departure from most of what we do,” he said. “It doesn’t look the same, it’s branded differently, it’s a different price point, it’s definitely a different flavor.”
“Gen Z doesn’t think what their dad thinks is cool, is cool, but if you can get all the way to grandpa then it’s retro coo. We wanted to go throwback with the design, a simpler time. That’s where the name comes from: Easy Light. Less tech, more affordable, less mayhem.”
So, how do you make something that’s accessible – i.e. affordable – to the masses but isn’t a tasteless, spineless domestic light beer?
“It’s a really hard beer to brew, and of course we had to make it at a price point where we weren’t losing a bunch of money on it,” Thibodeau said. “We worked on it for over a year before we came out with it just to get it where it was exactly what we wanted it to taste like and also, once again, affordable.”
As for the beer itself, it’s a crispy lager that, at 3.8% ABV, also is sessionable and something that’s not going to bring the same level of hangover should you choose to push it. And, that ABV actually comes out to less than another throwback that Coloradans might remember, a time when the only beer available to buy on Sundays was 3.2 beer.
“Actually, (Easy Light is) less because the 3.2 (beer) is by weight, which is actually 4 percent by volume,” he explained.
If Ska is looking for a sense of nostalgia, that fact drives it home for many. If you’ve ever had the displeasure of playing beer pong with an even lighter Coors Light, Easy Light will make you wish it was an option back in the day.
sbeckwith@durangoherald.com
