What Is The Lean By Design Standard?

At Old Nation Brewing Co., we believe great beer shouldn’t need a long explanation to make its case.

Lean by Design is pretty simple: take out the stuff you don’t want and keep the stuff you came for.

We’re talking about unnecessary carbs, residual sugar, and calories that don’t add much to the experience. At the same time, we want to preserve the things that make beer worth drinking in the first place: flavor, character, drinkability, and alcohol.

Lean sometimes means light, and sometimes it doesn’t. Lean is about making the beer itself more efficient. We want to drive the unnecessary stuff down while keeping the ABV where alcohol isn’t just a number on the label. It contributes to the way beer tastes, feels, and drinks. So if you’re going to have the calories, we’d rather have them coming from the thing you actually came for: the alcohol.

Less baggage. More beer.

How It’s Done

We don’t start with a marketing idea and build a beer around it; we start with the beer.

We’ve designed the lean beer process around one simple idea: remove what isn’t absolutely needed while preserving what is.

That means converting all of the starches in the grain into fermentable sugars, letting the yeast do what yeast does best, and leaving as little residual carbohydrate and sugar behind as possible.

It’s not about making a big beer and then watering it down until it hits the numbers we want. Because that makes compromises we don’t think you should have to make and results in beer that isn’t up to our standard. Instead, we design the beer differently from the beginning.

Less carbs. Less sugar. Fewer unnecessary calories. The ABV where the best representation of the style demands it, whether that’s higher or lower. And, most importantly, a beer that still tastes like a beer you’d choose, instead of one you’d settle for.

We don’t believe the choice has to be one between character and fewer calories. Our choice is making a good beer from the ground up, from grain to glass, and making it as lean as it can be.

It’s not a good beer compromised to be light. It’s beer designed to be lean.

How It Benefits You

At the end of the day, this isn’t really about brewing science. It’s about you and the beer in your hand.

You get a leaner craft beer that still tastes like craft beer, with ABV designed for the best taste, without all the unnecessary carbs and calories, and full flavor and character without watering the beer down to get there.

And we’re not suggesting that every beer should be lean. That would be a little ridiculous. We make a lot of different beers for a lot of different reasons.

We believe there’s a time and a place for every beer.

Sometimes that means a cold light lager on a hot afternoon. Sometimes it means sitting down with a beer that has enough flavor and character that you actually want to slow down and enjoy it. The point isn’t to find one beer that’s perfect for every situation. It’s to have the right beer for the moment.

Lean by Design gives you another choice.

We’re not here to tell you what to drink or when to drink it. You’re a grown-up. You can handle that part.

We’re here to make you a better craft beer for the moment.

Lean by Design. Because what’s left in the beer should be there for you to enjoy.