Ken Weaver, Author at Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

Beyond the Bottle: Been a Pleasure Exploring Beer with You

September 15, 2022 by Ken Weaver

Had to dig real deep into my inbox to figure out when I’d started doing this work. Adam Nason from BeerPulse, who I had worked with while running the RateBeer Weekly newsletter, had put me in touch with Kris Calef here at the Rare Beer Club, and things just went from there. I couldn’t find the exact month I’d first started sending in notes, but it would’ve been around December of 2012—almost ten years ago! That’s longer than I’ve done just about anything ever.

I stuck around with this job for a number of reasons. I really liked working with all the folks here—Kris, Lindsay, Brett, Kristina, Gina, and Tony. I’d always really enjoyed the beers and was impressed by how consistent the club’s tasting panel was at choosing good options; even though my tastes had shifted more to lagers and IPAs in recent years, it was fun to get to try world-class Belgian strong ales and barrel-aged imperial stouts—or whatever out-there RBC collab Kris and company had cooked up for the club. For a lot of our exclusive beers, I was one of the first people on the planet to get a taste of these new releases—sometimes before the actual brewers did! It’s a weird, wonderful job. And I’ve tried hard to do my best with it. Getting samples to land on time was the hardest part. Pretty sure we were never more than a few days late with notes in the past 9+ years. I’m proud of that, and wow, that was not easy.

Where am I headed? I opened up an online art store about a year ago (kenweaver.com/shop) focusing on watercolor-and-ink art inspired by Sonoma County. And I picked up a part-time job doing technical writing and editing work in the clean-energy industry. Going to miss this gig, you folks, and the people I’ve gotten to work with at Rare Beer Club. Say hi if you catch me at a beer or art event anytime in the future. Wish you all the best, and thanks for reading!

Beyond the Bottle: Dabbling in “Cold IPA”

August 15, 2022 by Ken Weaver

I’ve probably had a few beers labeled “Cold IPAs” over the past year or two, but sitting with my wife at HenHouse Brewing here in Petaluma and drinking their new Ales for ALS beer—a “Cold IPA” with Ahtanum, Citra, Ekuanot, and Loral hops—was the first time I’d stopped and asked myself what a Cold IPA actually was. I’m pretty sure I’d been thinking of the Brut IPAs and India Pale Lagers of the past, and wrote Cold IPAs off as “this too shall pass.”

So… after reading way too many articles on the topic, the best I can make sense of this is as follows: Cold IPAs tend to use adjuncts (corn, rice, etc.) in their malt bill but generally avoid caramel/crystal malts; they are firmly hopped like a West Coast IPA, usually with a lot of dry hopping; and they’re fermented with either lager yeast or a combo of ale and lager yeasts, at a slightly warmer temperature (for lager yeast) than usual to avoid sulfur production. I’m not convinced that there’s any real clear distinction between Cold IPAs and India Pale Lagers, as the arguments of “Cold IPAs are hoppier” and “Cold IPAs don’t have sulfur” overlook the reality that there were hoppy-ass and low-sulfur IPLs well before anyone smashed the words “cold” and “IPA” together… But I think maybe I’ve seen too many IPAs for one lifetime.

That all said… Beers aiming for this particular part of the flavor spectrum can be pretty darn tasty and focused in their intent: crispy, clear, distraction-free showcases of HOPS. And it’s kinda hard to argue with that. This curiously hopped HenHouse one was delicious.

Beyond the Bottle: Sippin’ Quads

July 15, 2022 by Ken Weaver

The loosely defined Belgian-born style category of quadrupels or Abts tends to indicate the breweries’ strongest core offerings: higher in ABV than a dubbel (but packed with similarly dark specialty-malt character), stronger too than blond tripels, and typically more restrained in core sweetness than the beers labeled Belgian dark strong ales. It’s all a bit fuzzy. Quads / Abts are complex beers, but surprisingly smooth and rather easily paired with food courtesy of their Belgian yeast strains, which dry out the result, keeping overt sweetness in check. The end results are usually packed with generous dark malt character, as well as yeast expressions of clove, pepper, and other spices. Examples including Rochefort 10, Westvleteren XII, and St. Bernardus 12 are all outstanding examples of high-ABV brewing—with good reason. In spite of quite potent ABV levels (usually 10%+ or well beyond) they’re very easy to dig into.

The Rare Beer Club’s featured a wide range of quad / Abt examples over the years, including some renditions that stray well off the beaten path of the malt + yeast focus this style would traditionally stick to. Most recently, we’ve tasted La Trappe’s Practise What You Preach (a quad brewed with Scottish heather honey and American hops), Brouwerij Maenhout’s Ferre (a paler, fruity quad that’s more orange-amber than the amber-brown or darker we’d expect), Two Brother’s QuadRadical! (a blended quad, incorporating rum-soaked fruits), and Strange Roots’ Ancient Vortex (a blend of quadrupel and sour Flanders red ale). If you haven’t tried the traditional examples, though, these are incredible beers to sip on: packed with dark fruits, vinous warmth, and often dense caramelization, even licorice notes. The very first three Abts / quads mentioned above can be tracked down with varying effort (Westvleteren’s stateside availability comes and goes), but you can also look out for Lost Abbey’s Judgment Day, La Trappe’s Quadrupel, Unibroue Terrible—or check around at your local breweries. American renditions can sometimes be less careful with the Belgian yeast’s role, but you’ll get the gist.

Beyond the Bottle: Sipping Berliner Weisse

June 16, 2022 by Ken Weaver

The origins of Berliner Weisse, like so many beer styles, is pretty fraught, but this tart, rather low-ABV style was once the most popular alcoholic beverage in Berlin—with around 700 breweries making it during its peak in the 19^th century (per Fritz Briem’s piece in The Oxford Companion to Beer). Made with wheat in addition to barley, fermented at least partially with lactic acid bacteria, these refreshing beers were often around 3% ABV and were traditionally served with a choice of raspberry or woodruff syrups—though those are a bit challenging to find in the U.S. these days. The majority of current-day examples here are consumed on their own, though many breweries lean heavier on acidity, ABV, or employ fruit in the beer itself.

The Rare Beer Club’s highlighted a number of German-style Berliner Weisse versions over the years (in addition to this month’s Lunar Interference from August Schell), including at least a couple other releases from Schell’s Noble Star Collection, such as Basin of Attraction (a dry-hopped take) and Solar Evolution (a mashup of the Berliner Weisse style and Flanders red ale). 1809 Berliner Style Weisse (created by Dr. Fritz Briem, who also wrote the Oxford Companion’s “Berliner Weisse” entry) and The Bruery’s Hottenroth are two of the examples you’re more likely to find out in the wild, and both capture the style profile pretty well. Bear Republic’s Tartare has been solid (but heavy-handed on the acidity), and Oregon’s de Garde Brewing has spent a good bit of time here—creating a variety of intriguing fruited examples.

Beyond the Bottle: Traditional Gruit Ales

May 19, 2022 by Ken Weaver

Gruits tend to be understood today as beers that use something other than hops to provide their bittering elements. But that sense of hops as an essential part of beer—alongside water, barley, and yeast, and sometimes a few other things—is a relatively recent one. In The Oxford Companion to Beer’s entry on gruits (written by the reliable Dick Cantwell, and referencing the key text “Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers” by Stephen Harrod Buhner), gruits are described as “a generic term referring to the herb mixtures used to flavor and preserve beer before the general use of hops took hold in the 15^th and 16^th centuries in Europe.” So, 500 years of hop dominance (ballpark) for a beverage that’s been around since (ballpark) at least 7,000 BCE.

Gruit mixtures varied depending upon what was locally available—but common inclusions were sweet gale/bog myrtle, yarrow, and wild rosemary, while all sorts of other ingredients could be included as well: ginger, caraway, juniper, cinnamon… even some hops. While the socio-economic influences that led to the shift away from these (sometimes psychotropic…) ingredients is way past what I could possibly fit into this column space, it’s pretty fascinating for anyone who’d like an herbaceous deep dive into weird beer history.

Gruits are still pretty uncommon on the whole, with some of my favorites over the past 10 years or so being Upright’s Special Herbs (which hasn’t been made in years) and Moonlight Brewing’s gruit-inspired seasonal Working for Tips (which uses fresh redwood branches instead of hops). A recent SF Chronicle cited the efforts of Moonlight, Woods Beer, and Mad Fritz here in the Bay Area as being a local resurgence of gruit—but a lot of the stuff mentioned is either super limited or been around for a while. Gruits are still pretty far out there in our hop-centic beer world today, but they can also offer a neat peak into our past.

Beyond the Bottle: Tea Beers

April 15, 2022 by Ken Weaver

One of Rare Beer Club’s two featured beers this month is Brasserie Dunham’s Concubine, a saison brewed with rice, Lemondrop hops, and matcha tea. For folks who’ve been with the club for a bit now, you might remember its predecessor, Pale Duck: Dunham’s dry-hopped and tea-infused saison that appeared in the club a few years back. (Pale Duck was itself based on one of Dunham’s early core offerings: Leo’s Early Breakfast IPA, which used guava and Earl Grey tea.) Digging through the RBC archives, some long-time members may also recall Jolly Pumpkin’s Bière de Goord and Fantôme’s Magic Ghost (both featuring green tea).

As for readily available tea beers… Your best bet might just be stumbling upon one at your local brewery. A whole bunch of folks have been dabbling with tea additions in recent years. Dogfish Head’s Sah’tea, made with foraged juniper berries and black tea, was one of the big tea-beer releases early on, but it’s more a memory at this point. Bottle Logic’s more recent Teacursion Tropical Tea IPA was based on its delicious Recursion IPA, with black tea. And Guinness’ Open Gate Brewery and Barrel House in Maryland recently released cans of Breakfast Tea Amber (made with Irish breakfast tea) for St. Patrick’s Day. Still, wee releases.

Try any tea beers besides this month’s feature? Got a local brewery experiment with some sort of tea addition? Let us know what’s good on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Outside Food Welcome

March 15, 2022 by Ken Weaver

While our travels around the Bay Area have obviously been dialed down the past few years, my wife and I and our good friends have been finding some really great brewery + outside-food options lately. A lot of breweries out here don’t serve food but do allow you to bring in orders from outside restaurants—and both the beer and food options can be phenomenal. Our low-key habit is to pick up Vietnamese food on the way to Moonlight Brewing, pairing hoppy lagers and English-style ales with spicy chicken wings and bahn mi. But when we’ve got time: we head to Temescal Brewing in Oakland, ultimately a beer (and food) paradise.

Temescal happens to be tucked into one of the tastiest spots of the Bay Area we’ve found (and they welcome outside food). Most recently, we’ve taken to ordering online at Burma Superstar, swinging by Temescal to grab a table and an initial round of beers, then two of us do the half-mile food-pickup loop while others chill. The walk there isn’t amazing but smells beautiful: Korean- and American-style BBQs, Thai soul food, ramen shops, fried chicken to-go, tofu houses out the wazoo… All of which pair quite easily with Temescal’s lineup, which (in addition to incredible IPAs and heftier options) features some really stellar sub-5% beers. Sipping crisp lagers and English-style pale ales with tea leaf salad and pork belly with pickled mustard greens… well, it’s our favorite brewery and outside-food combo we’ve found so far.

Have a favorite combo of your own? Do breweries near you even allow on-site food to be brought in? Have a brewery + favorite food truck? Want to just rave about Burmese food? Let us know how your local scene’s looking via @RareBeerClub on Twitter.