Soul Tone launches Pennsylvania’s first mid-strength craft beers at 2.5% ABV

Soul Tone Beer entered Pennsylvania with a blunt proposition: cut the alcohol, not the beer. The new brand launched April 29 as what its backers called the state’s first mid-strength craft beer label, starting with two beers at 2.5% ABV, a West Coast-style IPA and a German-style pilsner.

The project is a collaboration between Sly Fox Brewing Company in Pottstown and Pivo Nova Brewing, a Lehigh Valley beverage innovation company owned by the Kester family. That pairing matters because Soul Tone is not trying to make a novelty light beer. It is aiming for a lower-ABV package that still carries the body, aroma and structure drinkers expect from a real craft pint.

Pivo Nova says it spent more than a decade developing a proprietary process to precisely control ABV while preserving drinkability and flavor. Greg Kester, who leads the development team, has framed the brand as a response to drinkers who want to scale back alcohol without giving up the experience of beer. The lineup choice reinforces that point. A hoppy West Coast IPA and a crisp German pilsner sit at opposite ends of the flavor spectrum, giving Soul Tone a chance to show the process works in both hop-forward and clean lager formats.

Sly Fox brings a long Pennsylvania pedigree to the launch. The brewery says the Giannopoulos family founded it in December 1995. It also opened the first craft beer canning line in the Mid-Atlantic in 2006, and its canned Pikeland Pilsner won gold at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival, becoming the first canned craft beer to take a GABF medal. That history gives Soul Tone a technical and packaging credibility rare for a brand built around a relatively unfamiliar strength target.

The market is ready for the experiment. Brewers Association-related reporting put non-alcohol beer sales up 26.8% in 2025 to $508.6 million, with case sales rising 23.5%. Industry research has also pointed to a gap below 4% ABV, noting that only 15.5% of surveyed breweries offered a beer under that mark. There is still no official U.S. low-alcohol definition, though 4% ABV is often used as a practical guide, while Australia’s mid-strength benchmark runs from 3.0% to 3.9%.

Soul Tone lands squarely in that open space at 2.5% ABV. For brewers, the launch is a useful signal: the next design challenge is not simply making beer weaker, but making it feel complete.