At the East Strand of Portrush there's a of mixture dark and white stones that have been rolled in the tides off the North Coast for countless years.

Since we opened our taproom we've had a chance to interact with you directly and hear what new beers you would like us to make. One style requested by a landslide is a low alcohol pale ale. We have some experience with this dating back to a collab we did with Modest called Tidal Streams.

It isn't hard to understand why craft beer drinkers would seek a lower alcohol pale ale. Because we all love the bold flavours in strong beers like Herring Pond or Aird, we tend to keep drinking them! If only there were a lighter alternative...

Our new session hazy pale ale, Pebbles, is at the upper end of the low/no category at 3.4%, but it's certainly lighter than both West Bay and Rathlin Gold, two of our best selling beers. This was an opportunity for us to revisit and refine the precise methods needed to create a small beer like this.

What's the big challenge we hear you ask? Well a strong beer has enough alcohol and residual sugars and proteins from the start of the process that it will never taste thin. In fact when you drink an 8% stout for example, you often feel like it's a 'meal in a glass'! And so the lower you go the thinner the beer will taste, and we run the risk of it tasting watery.

To counteract this we use a combination of techniques, right from the start of the brewing process. We select the grains used in order to create body and fullness - think our old friends oats and wheat. Next, we raise the mash temperature sky high. This has the effect of favouring the alpha amylase enzyme that converts the starch in the grain into long complex dextrin. These longer sugars are harder for standard brewer's yeast to ferment, which means they remain even after the fermentation has completed.

That might sound a bit technical - in simple terms if the mash temperature is hotter, the beer will be sweeter in the end.

Along with this technique we used a low attenuating yeast, which is not as vigorous at consuming everything as cleaner strains. It leaves more complex sugars for us to enjoy rather than the yeast!

All of this allows us to add enough hops that we get tropical aromas and flavours without much bitterness cutting through on the palate.

If you'd like to try Pebbles you can come to the brewery and grab a few cans, or get it from our webshop. It will be available in stockists next week.

And of course, if you're looking for things to do in Portrush this weekend, there's still some left in the keg at the Lacada Taproom!

P.S. If you get a glass of Pebbles please leave us some feedback.