Cream Ale: What It Is and 5 to Try

Cream ales are easy to drink and not so easy to define. That’s partly because they’re part ale and part lager: Brewers typically deploy ale and lager yeasts, brew it warm like an ale, and cold-ferment it like a lager. The result is light and refreshing, uncomplicated, and clean, with subtle fruitiness and a crisp edge to finish, and with slightly more bitterness than a typical American lager. A key note for the uninitiated: The “cream” refers to the beer’s silky mouthfeel, not the addition of any dairy product.

It’s the product of early German immigrant populations in the Northeast attempting to recreate the beers they loved back home in the Old World—think blondes and kolsches—with the ingredients at their disposal across the Atlantic. The different types of hops inspired them to add more adjuncts like rice and corn to round out flavor and feel.

Peter Licht describes cream ales as well as anyone. The award-winning brewmaster for San Jose, California-based Hermitage Brewing Company was born in the heart of the Northwest’s cream ale country (Rochester, New York, home to Genesee Brewing, the headquarters of Genesee Cream Ale) and crafted hundreds of thousands of gallons of cream ales while working for a range of breweries.

“Cream ales are more interesting than standard lager, but like standard lagers, the flavor impact is mild,” says Licht. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a beer that’s delicious and thirst-quenching and doesn’t make you ask too many questions.”

While Licht has been on the cream-ale caravan for a while, the wider beer-loving public (at least outside of the Northeast) has been flocking to it more recently. That’s partly a result of increasing lager popularity and more craft brewers experimenting with their own takes. As a result, the cream ale category at the Great American Beer Festival has seen an explosion in entries, from 87 in 2019 to 147 in 2021. 

“I attribute this entirely to market forces that have created intense interest in lager categories among craft brewers and their drinkers in recent years,” says Brewers Association competition director Chris Swersey. 

These are five cream ales to try, most of which have earned medals at the Great American Beer Festival.