We are seeing a spate of beers coming from the big players, marketing themselves as mid strength beers in recent times, but it’s not something particularly new; Aussies have been throwing around the term middy for quite some time. Admittedly that’s also the name for a certain serving size but the term mid-strength has long been used for whatever that means.

One of the boys mentioned on the weekend when we were brewing, that he liked the idea of us putting down a mid-strength beer. We were brewing a 5.4% pale ale.

And while we had a great laugh at a that, there’s certainly some truth in his perspective. It’s interesting in itself that we, as craft beer drinkers, can consider beers that are pushing upwards of 4.5% abv, sessionable. Sure, that’s also an argument for another day, but when you consider that a large portion of craft beer is around that 7% mark and plenty pushing into double figures, you do begin to wonder where the median lies?

Perspective is most certainly a major difference between the craft brewers and the large breweries. While the craft brewers’ session beers have a higher abv than the big brewers’ mid-strength beer, the big Brewers’ small batch eclipses most craft beer batches.