Here is a fact that will rearrange your understanding of the universe: Fairbanks, Alaska gets about 21 hours of daylight in midsummer and roughly four in the depths of winter. So when a brewery up there tells you a beer is "great for sunny summer days," you should probably listen, because they have thought about this significantly harder than you have.
Black Spruce Brewing Company has brought back Miller Hill Life, a Kolsch-Style Ale, starting this Friday, July 10. It exists to keep their North Star Premium Pilsner company, which was apparently getting lonely as the only light beer on the menu, a problem I did not know breweries had but now cannot stop thinking about.
At 4.8% ABV, Miller Hill Life is described as just a touch maltier than the pilsner, which in beer terms is the equivalent of someone being slightly more interesting than their identical twin. It is being sold as a lawnmower beer, that noble category of drink invented specifically so a person can do yard work, feel virtuous, and reward themselves without needing a lie down afterward. Light, quaffable, and built for the kind of long golden evening that Fairbanks apparently rations out like a strict parent handing over dessert.
You will be able to get it on tap or in cans starting Friday, and Black Spruce is not shy about pairing the release with actual entertainment, because Bob Ross Paint Night is happening at the same taproom this week, complete with watercolors and repeated viewings of the same episode of The Joy of Painting. There is something wonderfully unbothered about a brewery that treats a beer launch and a painting class as equally important events, and honestly, they might be right.
Black Spruce operates out in the deep interior of Alaska, a place where the temperature swings from minus forty in January to genuinely lovely in July, and where a brewery patio with turf and Adirondack chairs is not just a nice-to-have but something closer to a public service. A beer like Miller Hill Life, easy and unfussy, feels like exactly the right tool for the brief window when the sun refuses to leave and nobody in Fairbanks intends to waste a single minute of it.