Songfacts®:

• "One Beer" tells the story of how just a single Bud Light led to an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and a shotgun marriage. Though the twist of fate resulted in the shelving of life plans, there is the ultimate blessing of a happy family of three.
• The song is the final track on Hardy's debut album Hixtape Vol 1, which is loaded with guest artists. "One Beer" features vocal contributions from:
  
  Devin Dawson, with whom Hardy previously co-wrote Blake Shelton's 2018 hit single "God's Country."
  
  Lauren Alaina, whose past male-female duets include ones with Kane Brown ("What Ifs"), Jon Pardi ("Don't Blame It On Whiskey"), Chris Young ("Town Ain't Big Enough") and Dustin Lynch ("Thinking 'Bout You").
• Before releasing Hixtape Vol 1, Michael Hardy had stacked up a sizable collection of songwriting credits. They include contributing to hit songs by Morgan Wallen ("Up Down"), Blake Shelton ("God's Country"), Florida Georgia Line ("Simple"). For this cut he hooked up with frequent Carrie Underwood songsmith Hillary Lindsey and Jake Mitchell (Luke Bryan's "Born Here Live Here Die Here").
• Director Justin Clough shot the music video in Watertown, Tennessee. All three artists make appearances in the video, which follows the young parents raising their son.
• Hardy is fond of wordplay, and a key element in this song is a clever twist on a classic nursery rhyme. In the schoolyard chant "K-I-S-S-I-N-G," kids like to embarrass potential couples with the taunt:
  
  [Name] and [Name]
  sitting in a tree,
  K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
  First comes love,
  then comes marriage,
  then comes the baby
  in a baby carriage!
  
  Hardy rewrites the rhyme to reflect how fast the teen couple's lives change when they're faced with the grown-up responsibilities of raising a child. He sings:
  
  A boy and a girl and a three on the tree
  K-I-S-S-I-N-G
  First comes lust, then the shotgun marriage
  Six months later come a baby in a carriage
  
  In a 2020 Songfacts interview, Hardy recalled when the nursery rhyme idea sprang up in the writers' room: "I don't know who brought that up first, but I love doing weird stuff like that - that's my jam. So, as soon as somebody was like, 'K-I-S-S-I-N-G,' I remembered, 'Yeah, then there's more after that - there's like first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage,' so we looked it up to make sure I was right and we just ran with it."
• Hardy originally penned the song for another artist to record. Speaking with Radio.com's Coop, he said that he had no thought of recording it himself but after sending his demo to his publisher, Hardy's manager called him and said, "Dude, what the hell are you doing... Why did you not send this to me? This song is a hit!'"
  
  Once Hardy realized the song could be for him, he started thinking how he could present it. "I wanted to sing the verses and kind of be the storyteller," he said, "and I wanted a couple. I know that Lauren and Devin aren't a couple, but I wanted a male and female voice to sing the chorus to kind of represent the two people that the song is about."
  
  "It's the marriage between a dark situation and a light situation and you've got it right here," Hardy added