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

Beyond the Bottle: Winter Beers

December 15, 2021 by Ken Weaver

We recently fired up our house’s heater for the first time this season, which means we’re well into winter seasonals over here in Sonoma County. Sierra Nevada Celebration hit the shelves a couple weeks before I’m writing this, and that initial 12-pack of hoppy-amber goodness did not last long in our fridge whatsoever. My wife was pumped to see Anchor Christmas Ale hit shelves shortly therafter; that’s her go-to winter pickup, and a pretty consistently tasty spiced beer despite the annual recipe tweaks. For how regularly we’ve been pouring IPAs, pale ales, or hoppy lagers from our household’s kegerator—this time of year marks a welcome shift.

What have you been picking up as the weather gets cooler? Back when we lived on the east coast and had more immediate access to Belgian offerings, we’d often pick up St. Bernardus Christmas Ale, Corsendonk Christmas Ale, and—likely the one we’d both pick if we could only choose one—Brasserie Dupont’s incredible Avec les Bons Voeux. Do you have local winter seasonals that you look forward to every year? Old-school winter classics you can’t wait to see on shelves? Or are you just hanging tight somewhere tropical, sipping hazy IPA, blissfully unaware of the seasons? Let us know what’s good on Twitter @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Go-To Glassware

November 15, 2021 by Ken Weaver

I like geeking out on glassware. We used to fill RateBeer forum threads with detailed and honest-to-god-100%-interested discussions of shape, volume, glass thickness, the benefits and drawbacks of nucleation points, whether those varietal-specific wine glasses were 100% or only partly bullshit… Important matters such as these. Does beer really taste different if it lands on a different section of my tongue first? Is the concavity of that shape improving the aromatics? God I miss that free time. More recently, I designed a few of my own glasses for a project I was doing, including a multicolored pattern on a stemless wine glass. It ended up being my favorite glass for photos, because you could spin it to match your beer: greens and reds popped with stouts; IPAs amplified blues and pinks, and the whole thing kinda glowed.

Before the pandemic, I would’ve pegged my go-to glassware as the Riedel Veritas beer glass I’d picked up maybe five years back. Featherweight (like some older Duvel glasses, and less fragile, thankfully), super thin, beautiful details, just a pleasure to drink from… Now, we’re a little less fussy. We’ve usually got an IPA pouring on our house’s kegerator, and a handful of curvy, medium-size nonics have become the go-to: the English-style pub glasses that are one of the fixtures at local brewpubs. Our most recent are from Russian River’s Windsor spot.

Beyond the Bottle: Kegerator Life

October 15, 2021 by Ken Weaver

Shortly after the pandemic started last year, my wife brought up the purchase of a kegerator. She’d put together a spreadsheet, and—given how ubiquitous and expensive four-packs had gotten in the Bay Area, at least—that spreadsheet indicated that the payback time for a used kegerator would be pretty quick (especially given the prospect of having to bunker down for many months). We bought a two-tap used kegerator from a guy up in Healdsburg soon after my wife wooed me with data, and it’s proven to be one of our smartest beer purchases yet.

First, quick downsides: Kegerators obviously aren’t for everyone, and ideally the purchase of one would increase the quality of beer consumed rather than the quantity. Take good care of yourself, first and foremost, and recognize that the ability to pour any amount of beer at any time is probably one of those “With great power comes great responsibility” situations. That said… the upsides have been many. Beyond accumulated cost savings, we’ve never been able to have such consistently fresh beer—particularly with a lot of retail beers sitting on shelves, and/or stuff only being available for curbside pickup (i.e., no chance to look at date codes). We make fewer trips for beer acquisition, reducing our risk factors during a pandemic. And, given the shambled state of draft beer out here, a lot of our local breweries that didn’t offer kegs direct to consumers before have started to, significantly expanding local options. When we do buy cans and bottles now, it’s stuff we’re excited about rather than overpriced staples.

Have you taken the kegerator plunge yet? Been considering it? What’s your favorite part of kegerator life—or, what’s been keeping you from it? Hit us up on Twitter @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Acquired Tastes

September 15, 2021 by Ken Weaver

One of the most interesting parts of exploring beer is starting to enjoy things that you didn’t like before. Our friends recently popped some bottles of lambic to share at their house, and my wife Ali couldn’t help but recounting the time that I’d tried my first sour beer. We’d been living in DC, it was around 2005—and I was on a mission to try said “sour beer.” Such beers were a lot more scarce back then, and after assembling a target list of four or five of the well-rated sour examples over on RateBeer.com (where I’d been tasting through the various style categories), I managed to find my first sour beer: a $26 bottle of Cantillon Lou Pepe Kriek.

I only recently learned Cantillon’s Lou Pepe lineup of extra-impactful lambics took its name from a region of southwest France, where grandfathers are called Lou Pepe. Needless to say, I was not ready for grandpa lambic. I slowly drank it all because it was a $26 bottle of beer.

It’s harder for me to get to that same degree of unfamiliar flavor turf now, fifteen years on, a lot of it spent as a professional beer writer and reviewer. But it’s still fun to try and find that unexplored terrain… I recently picked up a Kölsch-style ale with Ceylon cinnamon and, uh, guava (from our local go-to HenHouse Brewing), which turned out shockingly good despite the disparate parts. And a friend shared an actually decent hard seltzer recently, from a local place called Ficks (made with real fruit juice). Who knew. What about you? What new drinks are you exploring? Working on any acquired tastes? Hit us up on Twitter @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Summer Beers

August 15, 2021 by Ken Weaver

The Rare Beer Club’s got two potent but summer-minded beers featured this month: an imperial witbier and an imperial pilsner. And it got me to thinking about summer beers in general. As Sonoma County’s opened up, we’ve been venturing out a bit more, including some trips out to Moonlight and Russian River. And the warmer months have been calling for some lighter beers (although a little Double Dry-Hopped Pliny the Elder in metal cups in Russian River’s Windsor beer garden wasn’t too bad either). Our regular summertime go-tos include Reality Czeck from Moonlight and Trumer Pils, both firmly hopped lagers brewed in NorCal. We’d also visited a beer garden in Sebastopol recently that thankfully had Brasserie De La Senne’s refreshingly bitter Taras Boulba on tap—which we find way less often on the West Coast.

Bell’s Oberon. Dry, citrusy lambic and oysters. Fresh canned pale ale on the beach. As of late: we’ve also been picking up more non-alcoholic options, like Lagunitas’ IPNA.

At least, that’s what I’ve been craving while the weather’s hot. Kegerator currently includes a nicely crisp 5.8%-ABV pale ale with Amarillo, Citra and Mosaic hops from our local folks at Cooperage Brewing Co. What have you been digging this summer? What’s the one summer-minded beer you wish you could get right now? Hit us up on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: The Drunken Botanist

July 15, 2021 by Ken Weaver

I’ve amassed a pretty decent library of beer- and alcohol-related books over the years as part of my work, but it’s rare to encounter one that fundamentally shifts how I think about beer. I finally got around to reading Amy Stewart’s The Drunken Botanist (had gotten it as a gift off my wish list a few years back), subtitled “The Plants that Create The World’s Great Drinks.” It approaches alcoholic drinks through the lens of botany, starting with the main sources of fermentable sugars—from agave to wheat—before heading into briefer sections that discuss the numerous herbs, spices, flowers, fruits, trees, nuts, seeds, vegetables, etc. that are used to infuse, mix, and garnish our drinks. Just about everything we imbibe starts out as a plant.

While not beer specific, The Drunken Botanist includes sections on barley, hops, and yeast, as well as so many of the special additions that contribute unique flavors and aromatics to beer. The book’s broken into easily manageable chunks—five pages focused on oak, for example; a few pages on lemon verbena; a single page for lesser-used things like tamarind—sprinkled with both botanical science and key historical tidbits, and it was ideal for picking up during lunch or whenever I had a spare half-hour. I learned about how fungi-infected rye might’ve influenced the Salem Witch Trials. How modern citrus trees likely trace their origins back to early versions of the pomelo, citron, and/or mandarin. And how basically all modern plums in the U.S. originate from the plant breeding of Sonoma County’s own Luther Burbank (my wife and I lived on the same block as the Luther Burbank Gardens for a number of years; it was also the first time I had allergies). Overall, the book succeeds in bringing to life the many historic and contemporary ties between the plant world and the alcoholic beverages we love.

Have you checked out The Drunken Botanist yet? Found other good beer-related books over the last year you think are worth digging into? Let us know on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Sorta Kinda Normal, Maybe?

June 16, 2021 by Ken Weaver

It feels weird to think we’re (hopefully) through the worst part of a pandemic. My wife and I managed to get our first dose of the Pfizer vaccine the very first day we became eligible here in California, and now we’re counting down the days after our second dose until the 95%-ish immunity kicks in. As of writing this, the CDC announced that fully vaccinated individuals could feel confident resuming normal activities again—even, dear god, indoor ones. Active cases here in Sonoma County have been hoving around 200 to 300, rather than the 7,000+ cases we’d seen during peaks in January. We’re this close to hitting our final reopening tier.

It feels like, fingers crossed, the end of a very long, dark tunnel. Our pod has ventured out to our local go-to spot (Moonlight Brewing Co.) a few times now—listening to live music and enjoying pints of their Reality Czeck lager and Bombay by Boat IPA, in well-spaced outdoor seating. Our ‘nephews’ played Legos and trounced us at card games. We ran into friends we hadn’t seen in forever. It all felt… so oddly normal. And the beer has never tasted so good.

How have things been shaping up in your area? If you’ve been vaccinated, how did that first beer out taste? What local places have you been missing that you’ve finally felt comfortable visiting again? Let us know on Twitter via the @RareBeerClub account. Also! Be sure to tip and treat your waitstaff well; they’ve been through a lot making these spaces available to us.