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Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

A craft beer blog written by the experts of The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

Nebraska Brewing Company Special Offer

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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.

  1. Barrel Aged Reserve Series: Mélange à Trois –  Belgian-Style Strong Blonde Ale aged in Chardonnay barrels. 10% ABV.
  2. Barrel Aged Reserve Series: Fathead – Barleywine-Style Ale, aged 6 months in Whiskey barrels. 12.1% ABV.
  3. Barrel Aged Reserve Series: Black Betty – Imperial Stout, aged 6 months in fresh Whiskey barrels. 10.6% ABV.
  4. 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.

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 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

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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.

  1. Old Fashioned Barleywine – Barleywine aged in Bourbon Barrels w/ Bitters, Orange Zest, & Fresh Cherries. 9% ABV.
  2. Wee Heavy Strong Ale – Wee Heavy / Strong Scottish-Style Ale. 11% ABV.
  3. White Russian Golden Imperial Porter – Golden Imperial Porter w/ Maui-roasted Origin Coffee & freshly toasted coconut. 9% ABV.
  4. 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.

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 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®

Mikkeller Rare Beer Club Special Offer

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We’re excited to announce another Rare Beer Club® Special Offer!

We’re happy to have had the opportunity to work with the Mikkeller team to bring our members a selection of delicious and hard to find brews this month which exemplify Mikkeller’s creativity and skill. We sampled an array of beers to home in on six particularly engaging selections that we couldn’t put down, and that you won’t want to miss!

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. NOTE: All beers are 330-ml bottles, except for the 12″ Winale which is 375-ml.

If you’re new to the club: welcome! One of the best things about being a member is that, in addition to our normal monthly selections, you can take advantage of our periodic special offers on additional exciting and hard-to-find beers. Cheers!

  1. Beer Geek Flat White – Oatmeal Stout w/ Coffee & Lactose. 7.5% ABV. 330-ml.
  2. Beer Geek Limfjords Porter – Porter w/ Licorice & Coffee. 7.7% ABV. 330-ml.
  3. Beer Hop Breakfast – Black IPA w/ Coffee. 7.5% ABV. 330-ml.
  4. Mexas Ranger – Ale w/ Spices, Almond Milk, Cocoa, Chili, Black Beans, & Avocado Leaves. 6.6% ABV. 330-ml.
  5. Spontandryhop Citra – Dry Hop Citra Sour Ale. 5.5% ABV. 330-ml.
  6. 12″ Winale – Ale brewed w/ Wine Grape Juice & Champagne yeast. 8.1% ABV. 375-ml.

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.

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 12:00 PM Pacific on Monday, July 20th. Orders will begin shipping out about a week later.

Cheers!

 

 

Kris Calef
President, The Rare Beer Club®

Beyond the Bottle: Shoutout to the Beer Artists

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I’m really digging the label art featured on Sudwerk’s Microfauna, created by the brewery’s in-house label artist Gregory Shilling and featuring, I think, a tardigrade (aka ‘moss piglet’) double-fisting some beer cans, surrounded by microbial drinking buddies. It’s super weird, evocative, scientifically questionable… but I think it’s great, and it nails the overall surreal and world-building vibe that permeates so many beer labels and beer artworks these days.

I love this creative space. And, while we’re all bunkered down for the indeterminate future, now seems an ideal time to shout out some of the folks contributing a ton within the space of label design and beer-related artwork. First off, AJ Keirans with @16ozCanvas has been rounding up a bunch of us for podcasts and features, and his archive of podcasts very likely has your favorite artist in there somewhere, going into detail about process, influences, and inspiration. Em Sauter’s been creating daily educational beer drawings and comics over at @pintsandpanels. And Nicolas Fullmer (@beyondtheale) has been sharing his increasingly detailed beer illustrations on the regular—predominantly in his label designs for Monkish.

I’ve missed a ton of folks. In Cali: the labels of HenHouse, Cooperage, and Modern Times all come to mind. Who do you find inspiring in the world of beer art? Whose label artwork do you think deserves some attention? Let us know on Twitter at @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Old Ales

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One of the two featured beers this month is Lost Abbey’s Righteous Son, a barrel-aged old ale made exclusively for The Rare Beer Club. Old ales are a dark and maltier subset of beers tracing their origins back to England, and they typically emphasize a generosity of notes like caramel, toffee, nuttiness, and/or molasses (even a bit of roast)—essentially hitting some of the same malt spectrum as barleywine, though without the same intensity of hops or alcohol impact. The Rare Beer Club’s founder Michael Jackson wrote old ales “should be a warming beer of the type that is best drunk in half pints by a warm fire on a cold winter’s night.”

While the above provides a basic sense of expectation for beers labeled as “old ale” today—higher in alcohol, darker malts, modest hops, often some sherry-like oxidative notes—there’s a lot more nuance to what “old ale” referred to historically. Martyn Cornell’s article “So what is the difference between Barley Wine and Old Ale?” is a great resource for any deeper dive.

If you’re digging Lost Abbey’s Righteous Son (or old ales in general), tracking more of these down can sometimes be a bit of a hunt. English examples making it stateside are pretty few and far between, while many of the old-ale examples made stateside are more barley wine-y. Great Divide’s longstanding winter seasonal Hibernation Ale (brewed annually since 1995) is one promising option that’s easier to track down, and North Coast’s potent Old Stock Ale is made year round. Got old-ale recommendations? Hit us up on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Silver Streak x2

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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: Hallertau Blanc Hops

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The Hallertau Blanc hop, prominently employed in this month’s featured To Øl Chateau Øl, is a relatively new option for brewers, first commercially released in 2012. A daughter of the Cascade hop, Hallertau Blanc was created by the Hop Research Center Hüll in the Hallertau region of Bavaria, Germany. It was specifically made in response to the growth in America’s craft beer industry, and BSG Hops suggests using them as one might southern-hemisphere hops: in styles like wheat beers, beers with Brettanomyces, Belgian-style ales, and a mélange of IPA and similar. The hops are considered to be on the tropical side of things, with notes of pineapple, passion fruit, fresh lemongrass, gooseberry, and grapefruit.

Almanac Beer Co. has used Hallertau Blanc hops in a wide variety of releases over the years, including in their White Label (paired with California-grown Muscat Blanc grapes, for good measure), various “de Brettaville” releases, and their Flavor Wheel series. Hallertau Blanc is one of the key hops in BrewDog’s Hazy Jane (of the more readily available options), while Stillwater Extra Dry is dry-hopped with Hallertau Blanc, Citra, and Sterling hops. Mikkeller, Grimm, The Kernel, Modern Times, Other Half, and a bunch of other breweries have been experimenting with Hallertau Blanc across a mélange of styles… so keep an eye out. Have a local option with Hallertau Blanc you’re digging? Chime in on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club | 1-800-625-8238 (Outside USA call: 949-206-1904) | P.O. Box 1627, Lake Forest, CA 92609