Not your grandpa’s beer, but these young light lagers want to pass for it

Cara Nosek’s work as a graphic designer at Ska Brewing usually incorporates skulls, black-and-white checkerboards and comic book-inspired characters. Last year, her bosses brought her an entirely different assignment: Could she design a beer brand that looked like it came straight from some uncle’s refrigerator in the mid-1970s?

Creating packaging and graphics for the Durango, Colorado, brewery’s 3.8% alcohol-by-volume lager was the “complete opposite of typical Ska Brewing branding,” but Nosek was eager for the challenge. Today, West’s Easy Light Beer is sold across Colorado, packaged in green-and-white cans that look as if they were dug out of a time capsule. They feature classic barley motifs, muted colors, elegant script — and barely any mention of Ska Brewing.

“It needs to clearly read ‘beer,’ and not necessarily craft beer,” Nosek said.

West’s Easy Light Beer is a prime example of a growing trend: lagers with retro, Americana-inspired branding that harks back to the glory days of regional beer. In 2025, two light lager breweries, Garage Beer and Tivoli Brewing (maker of Outlaw Light Beer), cracked the list of top-20 largest craft breweries by volume for the first time. A few, like Utica Club, Narragansett and Texas Special, can draw on about a century of history, but many of these nostalgic-feeling brands were actually born in the last few years. They’re not yet teenagers, but hope to pass as grandpas.

They share common aesthetics: subdued silver and gold palettes, vintage-inspired typography, and Americana imagery such as eagles, mountains and stars. Even their names — Howdy Beer, Old Time Lager, Classic City Light — are meant to evoke some unspecified, halcyon past.

They’re also a corrective to what critics might call the fussiness of craft beer. Ska Brewing co-founder Dave Thibodeau says craft beer has developed a “stigma” for its complexity and that some drinkers believe it’s too varied in its styles, too extreme in its flavors and too expensive.

“Let’s bring it back to when things were cool and easy,” Thibodeau said. “We tried to design a package that looked like that message.”

For the beer industry, those glory days were the 1970s. During that decade, U.S. breweries increased production by roughly 40%, a rate they haven’t matched in any decade since. The period marked the peak of regional brands such as Pabst, Stroh’s, Heileman’s Old Style, Olympia and Schlitz — many of which no longer exist or do so at levels far below their high-water marks. Their beers might seem worlds away from the hop-heavy IPAs and fruit-flavored wheat beers that define craft beer for most Americans, but spiritually, some see a through line. Regional breweries were available only in a particular geographic area, employed local workers and became ingrained in the culture of a city or state.

“They really were the precursors to what became the craft [beer] scene later on,” said Brandon Skall, co-founder and CEO of Washington’s DC Brau.

That history was top of mind for Skall when his brewery launched Old Time Lager in 2022. Initially, the company was cagey about the fact that it was the brewery behind the beer. DC Brau established a trade name for this purpose, meaning it is “doing business as” Hopfheiser Brewing when it produces Old Time Lager. This guarded stance wasn’t for lack of pride — it takes significant skill to produce a crisp, straightforward light lager — but because DC Brau didn’t want drinkers to view Old Time as a craft beer.

“If we called it DC Brau Light Lager, it’s not going to sell, because I’ve learned that there’s automatically a bias against craft beer in a large part of the population,” Skall said.

The beer’s name and branding were intended to drive home that this was not craft beer, just … beer. On a crowded beer shelf, the cans’ clean red-and-white design and retro typeface calls to mind highly carbonated, uncomplicated lager, the type of liquid that 99% of people would refer to as “just beer.” Ideally, Skall wants drinkers to find Old Time Lager in grocery store coolers next to brands like Coors, Budweiser and Busch, and he hopes retailers will price it competitively with them.

If many of these new-retro lagers are priced close to national brands, and if they taste similar to those national brands, then what’s the draw? The value proposition requires a balancing act between being “local” without being “craft.” That’s the playbook for 10-year-old light lager brand Premium Northwest, brewed in Chehalis, Washington. Co-founders Warren Hellman and Toshi Kojima want to be a true Pacific Northwest brand at a time when classics like Olympia and Rainier are no longer brewed in the region.

“People have loved the fact that it’s this nostalgic artwork, this ‘what your grandpa probably would [have],’” Kojima said. He added, “They also appreciate that it’s actually made here in Washington.”

Yet all these appeals to history come with a potential downside. In its 2026 analysis of beer branding trends, Indianapolis-based firm CODO Design cautions that, while often effective, nostalgic branding risks losing the present: “If you only look backward, you’re surrendering the opportunity to define what’s next — and leaving that space open for a competitor.”

American craft beer has decades of experience navigating between the two poles of innovation and tradition. That should give breweries some confidence in designing this recent wave of retro lagers, which look old but feel somehow, simultaneously, quite new.