It’s a word that evokes Victor Hugo’s Paris, and could pass as the name of a pre-Prohibition cocktail. To brewers, however, a grisette is more than a word. It’s a relatively old beer style with roots in the Belgian province of Hainaut, along the French border. Its defining characteristics are, like the beer itself, somewhat hazy, due to the fact that little information about grisettes survived into the present day. And while these “little gray” beers are grouped with saisons in the farmhouse ale family, they are thought to have been brewed for workers who labored in mines, not fields. In spite of a dearth of details, quite a few brewers have nonetheless taken to this obscure style, and have arrived at three general points of agreement: Grisettes should be lower alcohol ales made with malted wheat that lean into their hop character.

“Due to minimal written history on the style, recipe development leaves a lot to the brewer's imagination,” says Seth Morton, head brewer at Jackie O’s in Ohio. “The general architecture that we use is a small inclusion of wheat in the grist, hopped more heavily than saison, fermented without Lactobacillus, and aged in wine barrels.”

Jackie O’s first released Scrip, its dry, slightly tart interpretation of a grisette, in 2017, and has sold approximately 40 barrels of the mixed-fermentation beer for each of the past three years—a number that amounts to less than half a percent of the company’s annual output. But Jackie O’s continues to make the 4.5% ABV beer because it’s a style that is near and dear to the production team, and, according to Morton, “We felt a connection to the history of grisette. Southeastern Ohio has a long history of mining, and we wanted to pay tribute to that.”

Elsewhere in Ohio, Rhinegeist Brewery includes a 4.5% ABV grisette called Table Beer in its year-round lineup. Brewed with “a high percentage of wheat and ancient grains for body and complexity,” director of education Chris Shields actually cites Jackie O’s Elle, a foeder-aged saison, as a source of inspiration, along with a desire to offer something lower in alcohol. Table Beer spends six months in a foeder where it undergoes a secondary fermentation and picks up vanilla notes from the oak vessel as well as a degree of acidity from a mixed culture of wild yeast and souring bacteria.

“We only sell Table Beer in-house at the brewery,” Shields says. “For us it’s an introduction to our Outer Reaches [sour] program [and] we wanted to offer something special to anyone making the visit. It’s the perfect balance of approachable complexity.”

Low alcohol beers don’t have to sacrifice flavor or refreshment. And it’s this quality—an approachable complexity—along with a loose definition, that appeals to brewers and could potentially lead to a revival of grisette the way plucky American producers rekindled interest in German-style gose nearly a decade ago. Less of a strict style and more of a rough set of guidelines, grisette beers afford brewers a degree of flexibility that lets them experiment with different ingredients and processes. Not quite improv, but far from formulaic.