Small Beer

There aren't any others that I'm aware of. One thing to keep in mind is it's not a style; it's a technique. And it is a somewhat archaic one at that.

Anchor brews their Small by taking a second running from the mash for their Old Foghorn barleywine. Without getting too much into brewing techniques, modern brewing techniques usually consist of draining the liquid from the mash (the soaking of the malt) while simultaneously adding additional liquid to etract more converted sugars from the mash. With that process, the grain is spent at the end.

Historically, it was more common to simply drain the liquid from the initial mash, make a beer from that, add more liquid and drain again, make a different beer from that, etc. It's one of the origins of the naming convention still seen in some Belgian beers of double, triple, etc.

That's what Anchor's doing with their Small: the first mash goes to Old Foghorn, and then they do a second running from the grain for the small.

Even the Belgians don't really follow this technique anymore, with some occasional exceptions. As modern brewing science evolved, it was discovered that it was more efficient (and therefore economical) to add a little extra liquid to exttract maximum sugars from the mash rather than doing separate runnings.

Anchor started doing so as a "what if," and it remains a specialty beer for them. And to this point, I'm not aware of any other American brewers who are doing that as well.

-Steve

For a short time, Anchor Small Beer was available in NJ and I really enjoyed the bottles I had and hated to see it disappear. I suppose that the method used to brew it automatically limits it (being based on Old Foghorn's production) and the price combined with it's low alcohol content (3.3%) probably made it less attractive to many BIG beer fans (the latter combination being what I also blame for the demise of imports of Berliner Kindl Weiss in the US), but I remember thinking, "I'd buy this stuff by the case in the summer if it was widely distributed...". I liked that it came in 22 oz. bottles (and that OF

*used* to come in 7 oz. bottles)- makes more sense than the "bombers" of 8-10% beers and imperial stouts and barleywines in 12 oz'ers.

For similar tasting beers, I'd look for English ales/bottled "regular" bitters or US versions of the same, that are relatively low in alcohol (which, in the US, means under 5% nowadays) and not very heavily hopped. Brooklyn's recently released a beer that meets that criteria, it's "Summer Ale", tho' I won't claim it's taste is similar to ASB.

(I'm surprised that the tasting at the brewery had the Small Beer as the "fifth or sixth"- should have been one of the first. What, did they do it chronologically ?).

I will note that the technique is still used by homebrewers. For example, Saturday I brewed a double batch of Foreign Extra Stout with a friend. After we had collected enough wort for the primary beer, the gravity of the runnings was still fairly high so we collected more wort and made a "small beer" (like a Brit-style dark mild). I also sometimes make a barleywine and use the second runnings for something like an Ordinary Bitter.