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

Beyond the Bottle: The Seltzer Monster

August 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

Hard seltzer has been making a lot of noise this summer… This segment of bubbly alcoholic water has seen a 193% increase year-over-year in a recent Nielsen survey, and some industry analysts predict it’ll reach a $1-billion industry by the end of the year. U.S. Today (admittedly not the most immediate barometer for cutting-edge beverage trends…) named it “the boozy beverage of summer 2019.” Your mileage may vary… But White Claw memes abound, and I have spent a nontrivial part of my week sketching out seltzer monsters for Massive Potions.

It’s well outside the core Rare Beer Club wheelhouse—but it’s been kinda hard to ignore.

I did a roundup of hard seltzer for my column at All About Beer Magazine a few years back, to the degree that I’m pretty good with never having to drink another one. But I’ll presume that the segment has improved at least a little bit from those earliest days, and I’m curious to hear from Rare Beer Club members who’ve ventured to hard-seltzer land. Have you actually tried anything interesting in this space? Or is it all nostalgic sugar water, masquerading as a health-conscious option to pull in the light-beer crowd? Chime in on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: The Summer of Hoppy Sours

July 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

It’s harder to pinpoint beer trends these days, when anything not bolted down gets tossed in the fermenter. But the coalescence of kettle sours and hazy IPAs certainly have this summer looking like a peak moment for hoppy sours. I’ll limit my disparagement of kettle sours (got that out of my system last month!) and head right on into the folks that are doing combos of hoppy and tartness well. If you’re digging that August Schell Basin of Attraction—go forth.

New Belgium’s Le Terroir is one of the old-school examples that sent a lot of us down this road. It’s a dry-hopped sour ale that sees long-term aging in oak foeders, before getting dry-hopped with Amarillo and Strata, and I still remember tracking this one down in Boulder a decade back: tropical, grassy, beautifully handled throughout. Almanac Beer Co. out here in NorCal has done a bunch of “Hoppy Sour” releases, with recent takes including Strawberry Hopcake (featuring a mélange of fruits, plus Sabro, Citra and Cashmere hops) and Tropical Galaxy (a Brett-focused foeder beer with a hefty dry-hop of Galaxy). Cantillon’s Cuvee des Champions and Iris are dry-hopped classics—if you can find them. And Crooked Stave, De Garde, and Prairie have also each released a variety of hoppy + sour options as of late.

Got a hoppy-sour beer you’ve been digging? Chime in on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: The Lambic Life for Me

June 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

Over the past five years or so, give or take, kettle sours have served to shift how people think about “sour beers.” Ten years ago, sour beer would more likely have been a mixed-fermentation example: a Belgian lambic, maybe, or a non-Belgian riff on lambic, probably aged in oak, probably for months or years. The yeast and bacteria involved in these complex fermentations take their sweet time. But with the rise of quick- or kettle-souring techniques, in which a firm presence of lactic acid is created basically overnight (by various means, only some of which involve yogurt), brewers can churn out lemony-tart “sour beers” super fast.

Except… they usually aren’t like the beers that made this space interesting in the first place.

If you dig kettle sours: that’s great. As the beer world expands, there’s a beer for everyone at this point—and that part’s cool as hell. But it also means there is more stuff that’s gonna be well outside of one’s wheelhouse. I love hazies, and loathe milkshake IPAs. I was grateful to see the doubly-coarse abomination that was black IPA meet an early end. And I honestly do not get the ongoing presence of one-note kettle sours—which felt like a bad idea years ago.

Once I remove the kids from my lawn, and once that massive cartooning windfall comes in (still waiting), I plan to fill the garage with lambic. The upside of kettle sours, for me and my wife, and frankly the majority of our peeps out here, is we can now magically find lambic on the shelves of California (albeit at sub-magical prices). Some of my favorite beer experiences have been from sour beers that take years to develop and benefit from careful blending skills that aren’t on the back of a yogurt container. I hope kettle sours continue to improve; there are definitely some Berliner-esque weisses and pseudo-goses that come across well. But, for now, I want nothing to do with that 9% sour IPA with pluot puree. The lambic life for me.

Beyond the Bottle: Dry, Bitter, Belgian

May 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

In chatting with Garden Path’s Ron Extract about this month’s featured The Garden Paths Led to Flowered, he mentioned XX Bitter from Belgium’s Brouwerij De Ranke as being a point of inspiration for it. If you haven’t yet crossed paths with XX Bitter, it’s more bitter and expressive in its show of herbaceous, grassy hops than one would expect from a 6% blonde. And it’s also basically the perfect sort of beer for repeated pints: layered, not numbingly bitter, crisp with depth.

It was a bit easier to get hold of fresh XX Bitter and the similarly poised Taras Boulba (from Brasserie de La Senne) back when living in DC, as the fresh import options are a bit patchier these days in California. Our tasting crew in DC sought out these beers and any adjacent kin: Orval, De La Senne’s Zinnebir, Thiriez Extra (from France), Jolly Pumpkin’s Bam Biere… In basic terms: potent hops, but more traditionally noble/herbal/floral—plus supportive yeast.

Hoppy Belgian blonde… Belgian pale ale/IPA… Buncha overlapping terms for this general space. The Rare Beer Club has previously highlighted De Ranke’s XXX Bitter, an amped-up version of XX Bitter with 50% more hops. Up here in Sonoma County, some of the closer alternatives are session options like Redemption or, with a more neutral yeast, Aud Blond from Russian River—but still not quite that hop density + yeast combo of something like XX Bitter.

Have a dry, bitter, Belgian-inclined beer you’re digging? Chime in on Twitter via @rarebeerclub.

Beyond the Bottle: More Beers with Tea

April 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

One of the two featured craft beers in The Rare Beer Club this month is Brasserie Dunham’s Pale Duck, a dry-hopped and tea-infused saison that has Dan Cong oolong tea added just prior to botting. Eloi and company over at Brasserie Dunham wanted to develop a new beer with tea based on one of their core offerings, Leo’s Early Breakfast IPA: a collaboration with Anders Kissmeyer that includes guava and Earl Grey tea atop a more traditional IPA framework. At least one beer made with tea has been featured in the Rare Beer Club previously, as some of the club’s long-time members may recall Biere de Goord: Jolly Pumpkin’s green-tea saison.

Best Tea Beers

If you’re enjoying Pale Duck, or just curious about beers with tea to try, you’ll likely have a few options available nearby.

Sah’tea by Dogfish Head Brewery

Dogfish Head’s Sah’tea, which originally debuted back in 2009, was probably my first tea beer (as was true for a lot of folks), although it’s been bit since this one’s seen a bottling. Modeled after a Finnish beer from the 9^th century, the wort for Sah-tea is “caramelized over white-hot river rocks,” and uses foraged juniper berries and black tea.

Hopfentea by Perennial Artisanal Ales

A more frequent appearance, Perennial’s Hopfentea is a 4.2% Berliner Weisse-style ale steeped on a house-made tropical tea blend, including hibiscus, lemongrass, mango, and papaya.

Magic Ghost by Brasserie Fantôme

And Fantôme’s Magic Ghost specifically incorporates green tea in its funky and strong Belgian ale framework. (And now that I look it up… It was featured by The Rare Beer Club way back in 2011.)

Lots of breweries are experimenting with different types of tea as of late. Got a local beer option made with tea you’re digging? Let us know what’s good on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Revisiting Weizenbocks

March 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

It has been at least a few years since the Rare Beer Club featured a weizenbock as one of its featured selections. The most recent example I dug up was Meantime Brewing Co.’s Limited Edition Weizen Double Bock, which the club featured back in August 2014. This style, as is true for many of the more out-there traditional beer styles in the world, has tended to find more frequent expression outside its country of origin (although many of the tastiest classic examples of the weizenbock space still definitely come from Germany). But the fact that the club’s 2014 weizenbock example was from England—and this newest one from Les Trois Mousquetaires in Quebec—kinda echoes the general state of the weizenbock style overall.

The history of weizenbock generally traces its lineage back to Schneider Aventinus, which was introduced by famed weissbier producer Private Weissbierbrauerei G. Schneider & Sohn in Bavaria back in 1907. That said… writer K. Florian Klemp noted in the (since-defunct) All About Beer Magazine that bock used wheat way back in the pre-Reinheitsgebot 14^th century; in that frame, this combo of wheat + strong malty beer has at least been explored a bit before. For modern drinkers: I’ll say that these beers are some of my favorite to seek out, combining the fluffy, toasty contributions of wheat with that rich, malty focus of a bock or doppelbock.

If you’re digging the Les Trois Mousquetaires example, there’s a decent chance you’ll be able to find some other weizenbocks locally. Aventinus, Weihenstephaner’s Vitus, and Ayinger’s Weizenbock are worth checking out and on the more readily available side. My personal fav in this general space is probably The Livery’s Bourbon Barrel Aged Wheat Trippelbock from Michigan—which clearly takes everything up a few notches. Have a local weizenbock you’re digging, or a fav classic? Let the club know what’s tasting good on Twitter: @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Mango Beers

February 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

If a fruit exists, there’s a solid chance it’s been made into a beer by this point. But mango is one of those periphery fruits that, while used nowhere near as frequently as classic additions like, say, cherries and raspberries, still tends to feature consistently well in beers like tropical IPA. Hop varieties like Citra, Galaxy, Mosaic and Azacca can give mango notes to beer sans the addition of actual fruit, while providing easy anchor points when using actual mango.

There’s definitely more than one way to mango. Hundreds of mango varieties and cultivars exist, turning yellow to oxblood in color when ripe, and they’re cultivated all over the world (with around half of the world’s production coming from India). When my wife and I were teaching school down in Nicaragua for a few months, there were these massive mango trees outside the schoolhouse, and the kids knocked the fruit down with long sticks and ate every single one green. (YMMV when it comes to trying this out with varieties found stateside…)

For folks looking for more mango-y options, there are a bunch about. In additional to your local brewer’s seasonal options, Omnipollo’s Bianca Mango Lassi Gose has seen some solid distribution stateside, melding mango puree to a gose framework.

For a fruited IPA of more biblical proportions, keep an eye out for To Øl’s Garden of Eden, an IPA with additions of apricot, guava, mango, papaya, and passionfruit. It might even prevent scurvy.

Got a mango or fruit beer you’ve been digging? Let us know what’s tasting good on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.