Beer Events Archives - Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

Rare Beer Club Special Offer – Les Trois Mousquetaires

October 5, 2022 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

The Québécois good-beer scene is perhaps most renowned for breweries like Unibroue and Dieu du Ciel!, both of which see significant distribution throughout the U.S., but it’s small-scale operations like Les Trois Mousquetaires that remind us that it’s almost always better to visit. Located directly southeast of Montreal, about an hour north from the Vermont border, the brewery exports only a few occasional offerings, making their beers very difficult to find here south of the border. No doubt this is the reason they are far less well-known here than their fellow Quebec brewers, but we aim to help change that.

Les Trois Mousquetaires got its start back in 2004, shortly after its three founders (hence the Alexandre Dumas reference) had lost their jobs when a production plant was moved to Ontario. Using their experience as production engineers, they decided to purchase a small brewing operation on the north shore of Montreal. In 2008, brewer Alex Ganivet-Boileau took over the brewing responsibilities, and over the years the company has expanded its lineup from a pair of lagers to its current, expansive focus on German-style creations. Like the Greater Montreal region itself, the Les Trois Mousquetaires offerings capture a certain Old-World, European charm, but in a very bold and exciting way. We’ve been extremely big fans of this brewery for a number of years and we’re thrilled to secure limited quantities of not one but four superb examples of their brewing skill. Enjoy!

A list of the beers appears below, but we encourage you to visit the special offer page for full tasting notes and access to the order form.

Grande Cuvée Porter Baltique 2022 – Baltic Porter. 10% ABV.
Grande Cuvée Doppelbock 2022 – Doppelbock. 8.6% ABV.
Grande Cuvée Porter Baltique Édition Spéciale (Bourbon & Brandy Barrel Aged) 2021 – Baltic Porter aged in Bourbon & Brandy Barrels. 10.5% ABV.
Grande Cuvée Déjeuner Impérial 2021 – Imperial Stout aged in Bourbon barrels w/ maple staves and maple syrup, then cold-steeped w/ premium coffee. 11.5% ABV.

Flexible ordering allows you to order 4, 6, 8, 12, 18, or 24 total bottles, combining any of the six featured beers in any way to get there so that you can easily try them all.

ORDER ONLINE or at 800-625-8238 Mon – Fri, 7am – 4 pm Pacific. If your Rare Beer Club membership was a gift, you will be contacted by one of our team members for payment information if you submit your order online.

Learn More for full tasting notes, and to access the order form.

The order cut-off for this Special Offer is Tuesday, October 18th at 12:00 PM Pacific. Orders will begin shipping out about a week later.

Cheers!

Kris Calef
President, The Rare Beer Club^®

Nebraska Brewing Company Special Offer

June 10, 2021 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

For this Special Offer, we’re excited to have the opportunity to work once again with our friends over at Nebraska Brewing Company to offer our RBC members four of our favorite barrel-aged ales from their lineup. If you’ve never had the opportunity to sample any of their complexly layered Barrel Aged Reserve Series offerings, you’re in for a treat. Each beer is capable of additional cellaring, but they are drinking perfectly now.

A list of the beers appears below, but we encourage you to visit the special offer page for full tasting notes and access to the order form.

Please Note: All beers are 500-ml (16.9-oz) bottles.

Barrel Aged Reserve Series: Mélange à Trois – Belgian-Style Strong Blonde Ale aged in Chardonnay barrels. 10% ABV.
Barrel Aged Reserve Series: Fathead – Barleywine-Style Ale, aged 6 months in Whiskey barrels. 12.1% ABV.
Barrel Aged Reserve Series: Black Betty – Imperial Stout, aged 6 months in fresh Whiskey barrels. 10.6% ABV.
Barrel Aged Reserve Series: M.O.A.B. – Imperial Stout aged in Bourbon barrels. 13.7% ABV.

Flexible ordering allows you to order 4, 6, 8, 12, 18, 24, or 48 total bottles, combining any of the six featured beers in any way to get there so that you can easily try them all.

Learn More for full tasting notes, and to access the order form.

The order cut-off for this Special Offer is 12:00 PM Pacific on Thursday, June 18th. Orders will begin shipping out about a week later.

Cheers!

Kris Calef
President, The Rare Beer Club^®

Maui Brewing Company Special Offer

February 3, 2021 by Kristina Manning

As a follow-up to Maui Brewing Company’s Grandma’s Coffee Cake Imperial Porter which we featured recently as a Rare Beer Club exclusive, we’re pleased to have been able to work with the brewery to bring our members four additional limited-release, high-gravity beers. All four are perfect for this time of year, and we know you’ll love them as much as we did. Enjoy!

A list of the beers appears below, but we encourage you to visit the special offer page for full tasting notes and access to the order form.

Old Fashioned Barleywine – Barleywine aged in Bourbon Barrels w/ Bitters, Orange Zest, & Fresh Cherries. 9% ABV.
Wee Heavy Strong Ale – Wee Heavy / Strong Scottish-Style Ale. 11% ABV.
White Russian Golden Imperial Porter – Golden Imperial Porter w/ Maui-roasted Origin Coffee & freshly toasted coconut. 9% ABV.
Crème Brûlée Imperial Milk Stout – Imperial Milk Stout aged in Bourbon barrels w/ Caramel, Vanilla, & Lactose. 11.4% ABV.

Flexible ordering allows you to order 4, 6, 8, 12, 18, 24, or 48 total bottles, combining any of the six featured beers in any way to get there so that you can easily try them all.

Learn More for full tasting notes, and to access the order form.

The order cut-off for this Special Offer is 12:00 PM Pacific on Tuesday, February 16th. Orders will begin shipping out about a week later.

Cheers!

Kris Calef
President, The Rare Beer Club^®

Beyond the Bottle: Silver Streak x2

December 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

This will be the second of the Rare Beer Club’s anniversary beers to receive its name from a classic comedy, and it seemed like an ideal opportunity to pop an early bottle of Silver Streak for tasting notes and check out the movie itself. Silver Streak (1976) is partly buddy comedy between Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, and partly soft-thriller where everyone’s trying to kill Gene Wilder’s character—who proves that there is no limit to the number of times you can fall off a train. There are definitely parts of the movie that haven’t aged well, though it’s the first of four movies Pryor and Wilder did together, and is probably best in tandem with Stir Crazy (1980). Wilder’s character is next-level vanilla; Pryor brings most of the energy.

Not many beer parallels (there’s buckets of Champagne), although I couldn’t help but notice the love interest of Gene Wilder’s character, played by Jill Clayburgh, introduces herself by noting her character’s name is short for Hildegard. Saint Hildegard of Bingen is seriously one of the coolest people in history—and is generally credited for first recording the preservative qualities of hops!—along with establishing herself as an accomplished herbalist, a composer, scientist, writer, visionary, inventor of alphabets, church reformer, and lots of other things.

Best beer parallel I’ve got. The train scene at the end might be worth the price of admission. Got a classic comedy to recommend as a namesake for a future Rare Beer Club anniversary beer? Hit us up with your favorites on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: The Last Day of Christmas

October 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

The Rare Beer Club has long been a supporter of The Bruery’s 12 Days of Christmas series, offering each release to RBC members dating as far back as 2009 with Two Turtle Doves, a Belgian-style dark ale brewed with cocoa nibs and toasted pecans. I’ve been working as the club’s newsletter writer for the latter half of the run—from 7 Swans-A-Swimming in 2014 to the present—and each release has combined the concept of Belgian brewers doing stronger, occasionally spiced dark beers for the holiday season with the annually rotating prompt from that 12 Days of Christmas song. 2 Turtle Doves riffed on ‘turtle’ candy. 3 French Hens used French oak barrels. 5 Golden Rings went a bit out-there—11.5% golden ale, with spices and pineapple. 8 Maids-a-Milking was an imperial milk stout… but fermented with Belgian yeast.

This year’s release of 12 Drummers Drumming marks the final release of the series, after 11 years of annual Belgian-style holiday beers, starting with Partridge in a Pear Tree. It’s worth taking just a moment to consider the series in context: it’s one of the first major (let’s call it) higher-concept series of annual one-off releases riffing on a core theme I can recall in craft beer, following in the SoCal footsteps of stuff like Stone’s Vertical Epic Series (02.02.02 to 12.12.12). Both are impressively ambitious projects, each taking over a decade to complete, and it’s especially neat that The Bruery’s started theirs in 2008—the same year they opened.

So, what other large-scale brewery release series am I totally overlooking? (The Lost Abbey’s Ultimate Boxed Set from 2012 comes to mind, though those 12 one-off beers were released monthly…) Also: have you been cellaring any of the 12 Days of Christmas series to pop with this year’s final release? Let us know on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Rare Beer Club Naming Contest with Pints for Prostates and Atom Brewing Company

May 8, 2019 by Kris Calef

It’s been awhile since we crowd sourced a beer name for one of our exclusives so we thought this one was the perfect opportunity. As we’ve done in the past, if your name is selected, you’ll win a 6 month, 2-bottle membership to The Rare Beer Club®. I mean, really, how can you resist? This is a no-brainer. So head down to the beer fridge, pick out something that will inspire your creativity and bust out your legal pad and pencil baby!

Each year, for over 10 years now, we’ve teamed up with Rick Lyke over at Pints for Prostates and a US craft brewery to create a super cool Rare Beer Club exclusive beer to help promote the importance of prostate cancer screening in the beer community. We’re super pumped to be working with Jeff and Chris at Atom Brewing Company. They’re small and they’re good. A true farmhouse operation, from their custom oak fermenters to the cedar lined ceiling that allows wild microflora to flourish, Atom is creating exceptional small-batch, hand-crafted beers. I love that they’re packaging their beers still (uncarbonated). Not a lot of breweries doing that these days.

So when Jeff pitched an open-fermented, Imperial Farmhouse Stout incorporating sunflower seeds and cacao, aged in his custom oak fermenters using a house blend of wild yeast, I was like… “Hang on a sec Jeff. I need to consult my team on this one. Actually, I really don’t. This one’s going to go over just peachy man.”

Wait. Don’t power down just yet. Are you still there? There’s some stuff you gotta know first.

Entering the Beer Naming Contest

Although the new beer will only be available to members of The Rare Beer Club, both members and non-members are invited to enter the contest and submit up to three names for the new beer. The contest officially begins on Wednesday, May 8^th, 2019. Entrants will have until 2 pm PDT on Wednesday, May 22^nd, to submit up to three names. That gives you a week to think about each name! You can do this!

Finalists will be chosen by The Rare Beer Club and Atom Brewing Company on May 23^rd at which time contestants, club members, and the general public can vote for their favorite name. The winning entry will be announced on Friday, May 31^stand the contest winner will receive a 6-month, 2-bottle membership to The Rare Beer Club.

To receive this special beer, and many more, join the Rare Beer Club online or call 800-625-8238. Be sure to start your membership by September 2019, or earlier, to receive this exclusive beer from Atom Brewing Company.

Have fun!

Prost!
Kris

Last-Minute Craft Beer Gift Ideas

December 12, 2018 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

So you’ve got a beer lover on your holiday list that you’ve procrastinated buying the perfect present for. Now that it’s down to the wire, you can either risk shopping online and pay for expedited shipping or risk battling crazy shoppers, parking lots, and standing in mall lines.

We’ve got some last-minute holiday gift ideas as you can never go wrong the perfect gift of craft beer. The best part about these ideas is that they can easily be purchased online or over the phone in less than five minutes without ever needing to leave the house — no gift wrapping required!

Chances are, your beer fan might fall into one of the selections below.

The US craft beer lover or the Newbie to craft beer;

The U.S. Microbrewed Beer Club The Original Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club has focused on consistently delivering two things to our members: Quality and Variety.

For that Hop Head lover in your life;

The Hops Head Beer Club is the newest subscription box in the lineup. The club focuses on a variety of hoppy beer styles, including IPAs, Double IPAs, IPLs, and other well-hopped styles.

Wants a variety of beers in their box;

The U.S. and International Variety Beer Club for the beer lover that wants the most variety in their subscription box from both U.S. Craft Beers and International selections. Discovery of the world of beer.

The Explorer of beers crafted abroad;

The International Beer Club for those most interested primarily in exploring beers from time-honored international breweries.

The beer geek that searches for those limited Released beers that only a few can try;

The Rare Beer Club for those that are seeking the exclusives, limited releases, rare celebratory craft beers, some barrel aged and beers you can cellar. This is the ultimate club for them. These come in 750ml bottles, many of which are corked and caged.

For the ones that want to try a bit of everything;

Design Your Own Club™ offers you the flexibility to combine our expertly selected Beer, Wine, Cigar, Cheese, Chocolate, and Flower subscription clubs into one customizable membership.

The craft beer accessory lover;

Any order with three or more shipments includes a FREE bartender’s bottle opener. Check out what it looks like in the image at the top of this page.

The craft beer lover that wants to be in the know;

Celebrator Beer News magazine America’s premier craft beer news magazine subscription focusing on craft brewing.

For the DIY Lover;

Create your very own DIY Craft Beer Advent Calendar and give the gift of beer every day leading up till Christmas.

The brewery imbiber;

For those who like to travel to different U.S. breweries and bring something back with them, growlers are a great option and come in a variety of different styles and sizes.

The true craft beer connoisseur;

Just like wine, beer should be poured into the appropriate glassware. Give the gift of beer glasses to accompany any craft beer gift.