Everything I drank in July.
15 new AF beers. One fantastic homebrew.
Another month. Another chunk of beers drunk.
You’ll find a full list of the month’s new brews at the end, including a handful which I urge you to seek out before they sell out. But, first, here are a few things from my little world of booze-free beer this month.
DIY AF.
How hard could it be?
In early July we set about brewing a hazy AF IPA; the base would be an authorised bootleg version of Day Off (the superb Baron x We Can Be Friends collab).
Sam at We Can Be Friends is head and shoulders above the rest of the field, so it’s particularly exciting for me (a former full fat craft beer boy) when he collabs with my old favourites: Verdant, Track, Beak, Gravity Well, Vault City, Rivington, DEYA, Overtone, Sureshot, Burning Sky, Makemake, Pomona Island, and -of course- Baron.
Charlie (Head Homebrewer) asked Jack (Head Brewer at Baron) for the recipe and, in classic don’t-ask-don’t-get fashion, he happily handed it over.
Less gatekeeping.
More boats lifted on a rising tide.
So, an order was placed, a Saturday Brewday agreed, and we got to ‘work’ in one of the many Kentish heatwaves of 2026.
We named this first brew dAFt lad, in honour of the great Bob Mortimer. And the result was a genuine surprise:
Exactly 0.5%
Bright and hazy
A hint of a head
Citrus
White Wine
Soft
(A whisper of chalky minerality?)
Yep. This was a little ripper straight out the gate.
I’m already looking forward to the next one…
The Huelification of AF.
I’m yet to grasp the need for ‘functional’ fibrous AFs like this one from BRULO, which claims to have 17% of my daily fibre intake.
More fibre than a bowl of porridge!
The world’s first high-fibre beer!
Who cares? Bartlett would care. Of course he would. With his silly watch and his thinly-veiled hatred towards self-actualised women. But if that’s your target market the game could not be more gone.
This beer is nothing but a stinky red flag that fails to pass my marketing-first, flavour-second sniff test. Hoist it aloft! Let the little world of AF bask in its faux magnificence.
To be clear: it’s a bang average beer in an expensive coat.
Brewed for LinkedIn engagement.
Still, I urge you to try it. Then we can have a conversation about 100 better options to drink instead.
It’s Fruit-Cut Lager / Lemon Radler Season.
Every brewery worth their isotonic enhancing sodium is churning out a zippy little radler in 2026.
This isn’t rocket science; adding a heap of lemonade will dilute a batch of below par low strength lager to the magic 0.5% threshold. And that citrus spritz will mask all manner of ills that would be unmissable in a straightforward, classic lager.
With so much of the AF space seemingly occupied by reformed cocaine sniffing tech bros who have either developed a conscience or simply seen the eight figure exit strategy nootropic beverage companies mythologically promise via dubious LinkedIn posts, it’s not a surprise lots of the private equity-backed ‘breweries’ are jumping on the fruited lager bandwagon in a bid to gobble up their slice of the AF hockey-stick growth market.
The problem is, many of these fruited lagers are not any good.
They don’t let the AF brewing process shine. And, as such, they dilute the immense progress and quality on offer in 2026.
When you walk into a pub/browse an online retailer, to see a swath of AF options all jostling for space on the shelf as jumped-up cans of pop makes a mockery of how good AF beer is.
I’ll concede these radler and radler-adjacent brews have their place when it’s 35ºC and you just need something quick and easy to quench your thirst. But this mini-boom will, in my mind, weaken the strength of AFs resolve in the mind’s of the full fat boozing everyman:
“I might as well just have a lemonade.”
And, annoyingly, more than half the time they’d be right.
More soon.
Perhaps with/without more grumbles.
Cheers!
And finally, here are all of July’s beers, in no particular order, with the very best in BOLD/orange:
Paranoia AF Rouge - Delirium Huyghe Brewery
All Good IPA - BRULO
Gay AF - Twice Brewed Brewing Co.
Darkness - Exeter Brewery
Force Majeure Tripel - Force Majeure
Bristol Lager Lite - New Bristol Brewery
WITCH - We Can Be Friends
La Trappe Epos - Bierbrouwerij De Koningshoeven
TÖKÖ PON - Piglove Brewing