Featured Selections Archives - Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

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: Nelson Sauvin Hops

January 25, 2019 by Ken Weaver

Anchorage Brewing Co.’s Nelson Sauvin, one of the two Rare Beer Club featured beers this month, is brewed with 100% Nelson Sauvin hops—a particularly forward variety originating from New Zealand’s Plant & Food Research back in 2000. The variety comes from the New Zealand “Smooth Cone” hop, itself an offspring of old-school California Cluster.

Characteristics of Nelson Sauvin hops emphasize a focus on “fresh crushed gooseberries” (a common descriptor for New Zealand’s Sauvignon Blanc). The hops also can include tropical character along the lines of lychee, passion fruit, lime, mango… Nelson Sauvin was one of the major early impact hops, and it can bring exceptional potency and zest into a beer.

If you’re digging the Anchorage Nelson Sauvin, where its pungent qualities are set alongside the impact of Brettanomyces, there are at least a couple other examples highlighting these hops (with greater availability). Alpine Beer Co.’s Nelson IPA is one of the key options with larger distribution, while 8Wired’s HopWired IPA is packed with Nelson Sauvin alongside various other New Zealand varieties. Mikkeller’s also featured a variety of Nelson-Sauvin-y releases.

Have a local New Zealand-hop beer you’ve been digging? Something like Motueka more your thing? Let us know what’s been hitting the spot on Twitter at @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: More on Gotlandsdricka

September 28, 2018 by Ken Weaver

One of the two featured RBC beers this month is styled as a Gotlandsdricka, a particularly out-there style from Sweden one doesn’t see very often. It had me thinking of Finnish sahti, which shares the use of juniper, among other key details. Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing and Svante Ekelin’s entry in The Oxford Companion To Beer are both good spots to start digging in.

The featured beer from Rowley Farmhouse Ales overcomes two of the main challenges in brewing authentically minded Gotlandsdricka: they foraged boughs of juniper from around their local Sante Fe region (these traditionally get preboiled and/or used to make a filtering base during lautering), and they acquired birch-smoked malt through a friend who happens to do things like that in the Jemez wilderness, outside of Sante Fe. That addition of a birch-smoked malt provides, as Mosher puts it, “a faint wintergreen tang.” He includes a recipe for Gotlandsdricka that includes traditional adds like bog bean, blessed thistle, and bog myrtle.

These beers have a lot going on. The only example I can recall trying off the top of my head was the Jester King Gotlandsdricka, many many years ago. Närke Kulturbryggeri makes one of the other examples that sees any significant availability. Jopen in the Netherlands and Off Color in Chicago both have their own versions. Though Mosher and others mentioned that Gotlandsdricka was very possibly the everyday drink of the Vikings (mead was reserved for fancier occasions), they’d have a tough time finding a steady supply of it today.