By Jeff Evans, chair of The International Beer Challenge.

PILLARS LITE, 2.8%

The team at Pillars, the specialist lager brewery in east London whose impressive New Zealand Lager I reviewed in the last issue, keep turning out classy new beers. This time they’ve come up with a low-strength lager that is pale golden with a slight greenish hue. After a keen, fresh hop aroma, with sharp, herbal notes, the beer is light in body but still clean, crisp and tasty, with a soft sweetness from the malt and a tart herbal and lime-like sharpness from the hops. Overall, it’s a lively, bright lager that Americans might refer to as a “lawnmower” beer, perfect for quenching the thirst after an afternoon’s graft in the garden, delivering flavour and refreshment but without a heavy slug of alcohol. It’s impressive technically, too. To produce such a delicate beer where any fault would stand out like a sore thumb demands great brewing skill, so hats off to the team there.

WYE VALLEY SHINDIG, 4.1%

Two new cans have arrived from Herefordshire’s Wye Valley Brewery. One is a repackaging of the formerly bottled Dorothy Goodbody’s Glorious IPA (6%), which is powerful and estery- floral, but also features a nice combination of US and English hops, the other this new pale ale that is surprisingly robust and complex for its abv. Sparklingly golden in the glass, the beer delivers a fruit cocktail of an aroma, bursting with grapefruit, tangerine and elderflower, courtesy of the Bramling Cross and Emperor hops that go into the copper. There’s a light salty note upfront on the palate then loads of sharp, bittersweet fruit – grapefruit, tangerine and elderflower again – before a strong floral note takes over, leading into a dry, bitter, floral finish. A fun beer presented in a jazzy-looking can that will stand out on the shelf.

LOST & GROUNDED EXTRA NICE, 4%

This is the sort of beer that slips down so easily on a hot day that, before you know it, your glass is empty and you’re thirsting for another one. That’s how I’d sum up this slightly hazy beer from Bristol that is described as an “extra-dry lager” and has the appearance of white gold in the glass. Fresh, sharp lemon notes leap from the aroma, predicting a taste that is lemony tart and fairly dry, but also crisp and spritzy. Rice in the grist adds a Far Eastern touch, making the body leaner and less rich, but adding to the quaffability. Being unfiltered and unpasteurised, it has a lovely fresh character, too, and there’s also a charitable angle, with 5p per can being donated to the Stonewall Housing agency that provides advice and support for LGBTQ+ people in housing difficulty.

HARVEY’S SISTERS TABLE BEER, 3.4%

Not a new beer but a completely new identity for Harvey’s IPA. This deep-golden bitter is now being marketed as a table beer, reviving a term once used for lower-alcohol beers that were served alongside food, with the name Sisters chosen to honour all the women who have contributed to the Sussex brewery’s success over the decades. As you’d expect from a beer of low strength, it’s fairly dry, but a caramel-like malt smoothness ensures it never appears too thin. What really makes this beer, though, is the delightful hop character, which is lightly spicy and suggests soft stone fruits alongside some floral, earthy and grassy notes – the liquid equivalent of kicking through fallen autumn leaves in a damp English wood. With those hops lingering long in the finish, it’s a very moreish beer, too.