Beach Party Review: Lawson’s Finest Liquids’s IPA – Session at 3.4% ABV

A friend brought a few cans of this up to a lake house in the Green Mountains a couple of summers back, and it disappeared faster than anything else in the cooler. At 3.4% ABV, Lawson’s Finest Liquids’s Beach Party is one of a growing number of low-ABV and non-alcoholic beers that ordinary breweries are now keeping on their regular lineup, not just rolling out as a one-off. I went digging into that shift across more than 22,000 beers I tracked down (full breakdown here), and Lawson’s Finest Liquids was one of the names that stood out.

At a Glance

What it actually tastes like

Beach Party is lemony citrus, orange peel and a light tropical hop character riding on a genuinely light body, closer to a shandy in drinkability than a typical IPA. At 3.4% ABV, it is built to be sessionable first, which is exactly the point, this is not a beer trying to disguise how light it is.

It works well with grilled fish, a burger off the dock grill, or just floating on a lake with a can within reach.

Why this matters more than it looks like

Lawson’s Finest is best known for Sip of Sunshine, one of the most decorated IPAs in the country, so a 3.4% session release under the same name matters. That is the real story behind Beach Party, not that it exists, but that a brewery built on stronger, bigger beers is treating a 3.4% release as a permanent part of the lineup rather than a seasonal experiment.

Across the data I pulled, this pattern kept showing up. Roughly 93 percent of the low-ABV and non-alcoholic beers I found in that research came from breweries whose main business is not non-alcoholic drinks, not from dedicated NA specialists like Athletic Brewing. Lawson’s Finest Liquids is one of the clearer examples of that shift, an established name in VT keeping a 3.4% beer in year-round rotation next to its bigger, stronger releases.

How it compares to the rest of the category

I’d put Beach Party at 3.61 out of 5, which puts it solidly in the middle of the pack for ipa, session releases I looked at releases I’ve tried. It is not trying to be the most complex beer on the shelf, and it does not need to be. The goal with a release like this is consistency at a lower strength, and on that measure it delivers exactly what it promises every time.

My verdict

If you already know Lawson’s Finest Liquids for their bigger, hoppier or stronger releases, Beach Party is worth a detour the next time you are near Waitsfield, VT. It is not trying to compete with those beers on intensity, it is solving a different problem: something you can drink through a whole afternoon without slowing down. That is a harder needle to thread than it sounds, plenty of light beers taste like nothing at all, and this one does not.

The bigger picture is what makes Beach Party worth writing about at all. A brewery does not keep a 3.4% beer on its core, year-round lineup unless customers are actually asking for it and coming back. That is a real signal about where drinking habits are heading, not a marketing angle dreamed up in a boardroom.

Cannot find it near you? Try these instead

Beach Party has limited distribution outside its home region. If you cannot track it down, these are real, currently available beers in a similar style worth trying:

FAQs

Where is Lawson’s Finest Liquids’s Beach Party brewed?

Beach Party is brewed by Lawson’s Finest Liquids in Waitsfield, VT.

What is the ABV of Beach Party?

Beach Party is 3.4% ABV, classified as ipa, session.

Is Beach Party available nationwide?

No. Like most regional craft releases, Beach Party has limited distribution outside VT and nearby states. Check Lawson’s Finest Liquids’s own site or a beer-finder app before making a special trip.