New Series in 2025 - Round and Round

We recently introduced the first of our 2025 new series in the form of “Hop Idol”, a series focused on showcasing modern, impactful hops. While this series focused on the new and brash, our second series is focused on just the opposite side of beers.

Our New Frontier, or “Shintenchi”, series has been our lager series since we introduce it a few years back. Around midway through 2024, we made the choice to retire this series. Why?? This series was a major step for us, and the reason why we called it “New Frontier” was simple. While we always had a respect and appreciation of the craft of lagers, we had said in our early years that we would never make one. And why the U-turn? I suppose it could be considered an element of “growing up”. To us, in a way, craft beer used to be all about “impact”. This largely came from what the modern craft beer scene was born out of. In America, for decades, beer meant fizzy, largely characterless macro lager produced by a major conglomerate. While this was simple and for many a drink for “chugging”, craft beer was meant to be the opposite. CharacterFUL, varied, and big on impact. Why would people pay 3 times the price for a lager when it wasn’t THAT different from the big boy stuff, we thought.

The big change for us happened as our palate started to tire of the super hoppy IPAs, or the super heavy imperial stouts. At that point, we found ourselves wanting to reach for a lager, but at the same time didn’t necessarily want it to be homogenous and mass-produced. We started to see the appeal of real, unfiltered, unpasteurised, well-crafted lager. And we more and more found ourselves admiring the artisanal nature of quality lagers as well. While you could get away with an imperfect IPA by throwing more hops at it, you can’t hide behind much in what should be a super clean and crisp style, with just the right balance of subtle hop nuance and malt crackeriness.

But as we looked forward to this year, we decided that New Frontier didn’t feel quite right, and for a couple of reasons. The first was that, after a few years of making lagers, could we really describe this as KBC’s “New Frontier”? No - we were going over ground that we had covered fairly well, and our actual frontier had shifted to new plains.

We also realised that the series was straddling, from a customer perspective, two different sides of lagers. Whilst many people now understand that “beer” is more than just macro lager, the reality that lagers are also massively varied is not so widely understood outside of fairly knowledgeable beer fans. Casual craft beer drinkers know what a stout is, and what an IPA is, and perhaps some other ale styles. But a lager? Surely that’s just fizzy yellow stuff, right?? The idea that lagers can too be heavy in body as well as light and crisp, that they can be dark and malty as well as yellow and thirst quenching, is something that is still unclear to many. And our New Frontier series covered what people understand to be lagers, as well as a couple of more niche outliers within there.

And this was difficult for people to get a quick sense of whether they want to pick up a can. While they could look at one of our IPA series and know it will quench their desire for hoppy goodness, the lagers we were making might be refreshing, or more of a slow-sipping malty beer to savour. And while we loved our Vienna Lager and our Dunkel, we realised that it was outside of expectation for some, and however good a beer is, if it isn’t what you were in the mood for, it’s highly likely that you won’t enjoy it as much as you should.

So we decided to split this up. For the first half of this year, at least, we want the freedom to make whatever more impactful lagers we want, and will do so through collaborations and under the KBC 2.0 monicker, but we also want to just make some damn great lagers that showcase the more subtle variances of this most ubiquitous of styles.

• And so we introduce to you Round and Round: a series that celebrates the everyday-ness of light lagers. Even within the sub-category of light lagers, there is actually a lot of subtle nuance and variety that we really appreciate. And what is more, when we stopped to think about it, light lagers represent, more than anything, what we might want to enjoy to represent an everyday pleasure, such as:
• The first drink after getting off work.
• Or the beer we want to enjoy when we get home after a busy day, whether slogging at work, or enjoying holidays to the max.
• Or what we go to drink when we are starting our dinner, but are also pretty thirsty as well.
• Or what we choose to raise a glass with when celebrating the little (or big) wins.

So that is what this series is about. We have chosen 4 styles of supremely drinkable lager, some lighter and more refreshing, some with a little more of a bitter bite, and some slightly fuller in character, to represent the wonderful everyday nature of the world’s most popular type of beer, and we have paired them with whichever of these 4 scenarios they work with best.

We used to sometimes say we don’t want to be the only beer you drink in a night. We love craft beer’s variety, and enjoy what other breweries make in contrast to our own. But we would love to get to a point where we are the first beer you choose to go to when seeing our name on a menu, and also the one you go back to later in the evening. This series is for that opener, your first beer, and perhaps your second as well.

To the great lagers of this world: Cheers! Kanpai! Prost! Na zdraví!!