back to store

800.625.8238

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

The Rare Beer Club™ May Special Offer

May 16, 2014 by Kris Calef

Attention Rare Beer Club™ Members and Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club™ Members!

We at The Rare Beer Club™ and The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club™ have some of the most fun when lining up special offers for our members (and for ourselves—we’d be lying if we said we didn’t stash a few bottles of each of these beers away for our own enjoyment). We look high and low, and sample a lot of beer to hone in on the ones that get us the most excited, and that we think you, our loyal members, will enjoy sampling as well. This month we’re very pleased with the fruits of our search: four outstanding beers that are both delicious and unique!

1. May Special Offer 20141. De Ranke: XXX Bitter – This hoppy Belgian golden ale is like a boosted version of De Ranke’s excellent XX Bitter. Very dry and hugely drinkable, it boasts rounded malt toastiness, notes of white pepper, light cloves and hay, and one of the most fresh and generous mineral- and herb-focused hop characters we’ve ever tasted. 6% ABV.

2. Hofbrouwerijke: Flower Sour – Brewed with lavender, chamomile, heather, and dandelion, this smooth, inviting sour is much like a Flemish brown ale with a generous extraction of floral flavors and aromatics. The net effects include notes of black pepper, cinnamon, fresh ginger, and a refreshingly bright, lemony tart quality. 7% ABV.

3. Blaugies & Hill Farmstead: La Vermontoise – This spelt saison offers just incredible amounts of pepper and hay and toasty wheat qualities. Prickly carbonation adds ideal texture, while Amarillo hops appear in juicy, orangey fashion on the periphery. One of the best saisons we’ve had in a long time. 6% ABV.

4. MAD Beer: Salt – In some senses, this wild ale with salt conjures the commingling of a lambic and a gose. There’s an intricately developed citrusy tartness and funk, a nicely showcased salted plum quality, toasty wheat, and some touches of juicy hops along with the fruitier, tropical-y Brett. 4.5% ABV.

Flexible ordering allows you to order 2, 4, 6, 8, or 12 total bottles, combining any of the 5 featured beers in any way to get there so that you can easily try all five. Orders ship after our May 20th cut-off date.

Order online or at 800-625-8238 Mon-Fri 7 am – 5 pm Pacific. If your 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.

**If you wish to get any of these limited selections, please respond to this special offer by 12:00 PM PST on Tuesday, May 20th.**

Prost!
Kris

 

 

Posted in: Featured Selections, In the News, Interesting Beer Info, Notes from the Panel

Which Mad Beer to Run in Our Next Special Offer…

May 7, 2014 by Kris Calef

IMG_2169Mad Beer is a collaborative beer brand from Chef Jakob Mielcke and brewer Mikkel Borg Bjergso with the intent of creating a family of craft beers brewed specifically to be enjoyed with food.

Last Friday, we sat down and tried four from the line with the intent of picking a winner to include in our next Rare Beer Club™ special offer. We cracked open a bottle of Salt, Bitter, Umami and Sod, secretly hoping the Umami would be the clear winner as conceptually, it’s a pretty cool beer.

At the end of the day, they’re all pretty damn cool really, but we found Salt to be the most interesting of the lot. Its namesake is pretty prominent up front, but the beer takes you on a rollercoaster of flavors and moves into a more earthy, funky, and slightly sour middle pretty quickly. You get some stone fruit notes and nice bretty accents and a pronounced mineral characteristic throughout, the brett and the Ume plums flavors working very nicely together. The boys at Mad Beer suggest serving it with oysters, but feel it would compliment just about any kind of seafood nicely.

We’ll be offering it to members of The Rare Beer Club™ later this month in extremely limited quantities.

Prost!
Kris

Posted in: Featured Selections, In the News, Interesting Beer Info, Notes from the Panel

Brett’s November Featured Beers Top Pick

November 26, 2013 by Brett Olson

einstok toasted porterRich, smooth, and remarkably easy to drink, Einstök’s Toasted Porter is a nice discovery from Iceland, and makes my top pick this month from among our 12-oz selections. With the cooler weather that November brings, a porter is often a good choice – but when it’s one as well made as Einstök’s, it just really hits the spot.

This baby is one of the most densely black porters we’ve had in a while, and the nose draws you in further with dark roast notes with a bit of an ashy, smoky edge, plus toasted bread crust, toffee, hints of dark chocolate, scorched caramel, and an impression of Eastern spices.

Big chocolaty notes take center stage on the palate, bolstered by deep caramel, molasses, mild toffee, hints of coffee, a wisp of licorice, and slight impressions of dark fruit that pop through with warmth. There’s enough creamy roundness and residual sweetness to stand up to and temper the bitter, smoky, roasted malt character, as well as the Bavarian noble hops which lend spiciness. What a well-balanced, satisfying porter!

We hope you enjoy it!

Cheers!
Brett

P.S. – This is actually the first month that we’ve featured beers from Iceland: Einstök in our 12-oz Int’l and US & Int’l Variety clubs, and Ölvisholt in The Rare Beer Club. Beer was banned in the country until 1989, so it’s encouraging to see a developing craft beer industry there – I hope these beers are a sign of more good things to come!

Posted in: Featured Selections, Notes from the Panel

Status of The Bruery’s Six Geese a Layin’!

November 11, 2013 by Kris Calef

The-Bruery-6-Geese-A-LayingEach year, for the last five years, we’ve featured The Bruery’s current selection from their 12 Days of Christmas holiday vertical series and this year was to be no different…

As a new beer, it needed both Federal recipe and label approval and the ole government shutdown put everything in the queue in limbo, making Six Geese the second awesome beer intended to be featured in The Rare Beer Club™ to fall prey to the furlough. It gets worse.  The Bruery didn’t make enough of it for us to feature it in December or January and it’s a seasonal beer that’s really meant to be enjoyed.

Are you ready for some good news?  The approval finally came through last Thursday and we’re bringing in as much as we can get our hands on so that we can send a special offer to our members later today!  That’s right babies, there won’t be any holes in your holiday stockings this year to let this one slip through the cracks…And no holes in the 12 beer line up for those collecting the entire series in order to host a vertical tasting 2019!  We couldn’t let this beer pass you by.

Be sure to contact us at [email protected] or 800-625-8238 if you’re a member of The Rare Beer Club™ and don’t receive the offer for some reason (Think Spam Filters!)

Prost!
Kris

Posted in: Featured Selections, In the News, Notes from the Panel

Brett’s October Featured Beers Top Pick

October 23, 2013 by Brett Olson

Boulder-Hazed-&-InfusedAn unfiltered, amberish, American-style pale ale dry-hopped with a dynamic duo of Centennial and Crystal hops. Sounds good, right? It is!

Boulder’s Hazed & Infused gets my personal top pick this month from among our 12-oz products for its beautifully big, bright, floral and citrusy hop profile. Delivering pithy and zesty grapefruit notes, floral and herbal tones, and dashes of tropical fruit and apricot, Hazed & Infused satisfies one’s craving for hop flavor while keeping the bitterness restrained.

Through the technique of dry-hopping, in which hops are added directly to the fermenter, Boulder allows the fragrant aroma and flavor compounds to “infuse” the beer without adding extra bitterness. So, we end up with a hoppy pale ale that tastes great while being less aggressive on the palate than an IPA, and at just 5% ABV, more sessionable too.

If you know someone who says they don’t like hoppy beers because they find IPAs too abrasive, Hazed & Infused might just bring them around.

We hope you enjoy it!

Cheers!
Brett

Posted in: Featured Selections, Notes from the Panel

Government Shutdown Delays Delivery of Jolly Pumpkin RBC Exclusive, Los Vivos y Los Muertos

October 18, 2013 by Kris Calef

CAM00944-edited

I have to tell you, this has been a really challenging month as the shutdown of the federal TTB office which approves new beer recipes and labels has impacted a number of beers we had slotted for Q4.  The nature of the products featured in The Rare Beer Club™, which are often exclusive products brewed just for our members and new products to the US market, has made us much more susceptible to being affected by the government shutdown.

The fact that I just happened to be wearing my Jolly Pumpkin t-shirt on the day that we rated a potential replacement beer for their Los Vivos y Los Muertos, a pumpkin lime saison brewed exclusively for The Rare Beer Club™, was bittersweet to say the least.  We’re all pretty bummed that we had to delay bringing this special beer to our members, but after we tasted Malheur’s Zestig, labeled a Belgian strong golden ale (we all felt was more of a strong Belgian IPA), we began to feel a bit like there was in fact a silver lining to the predicament we were facing.

Man, did we ever get lucky finding a solid replacement for JP.  We called dozens of importers, distributors and breweries before stumbling across Zestig.  The fact that Malheur translates to “misfortune” seems a bit ironic as this is a brand new product from the brewery and only a little over a 100 cases have been sold in the US in very limited distribution.  It was indeed our good fortune that we were able to secure all but about 60 cases of what the importer has left on the floor for our members. So you could say it’s got a good “rareness” story…but how’s the beer?  One word:  Outstanding.  You’re gonna love it.  What an impressive beer.  We were all blown away and felt that in some strange way this was all meant to be as we now can bring our members both outstanding beers, both of which are virtually RBC exclusives.  We’ll have the full tasting notes for Zestig up on our site early next week if you’re interested.

One last parting thought. I want to reassure our members that we will in fact get Los Vivos y Los Muertos to you one way or another, either as a special offer or in a future month.  Thank you for your patience.

Prost!
Kris

Posted in: Featured Selections, In the News, Notes from the Panel

Government Shutdown Impacts Breweries and Potentially The Rare Beer Club

October 14, 2013 by Kris Calef

IO FrontIn case you’re wondering just how the government shutdown might directly impact you, here’s a pretty interesting read posted by Adam Nason over at BeerPulse that outlines the significant impact it’s already had on the brewing industry.  As many of our own Rare Beer Club featured beers are new to the US market or were created exclusively for the club, they require federal recipe and/or label approval and sadly this has put at risk two outstanding up and coming featured selections, Jolly Pumpkin’s Los Vivos y Los Muertos, a pumpkin lime saison slotted to go out this month and The Bruery’s Six Geese a Laying, the sixth release in their 12 days of Christmas holiday vertical offering.  Both beers await federal label approval and may have to be pushed to a later month.  Rest assured, we have several equally impressive beers slotted for future months that we’ll simply move up if we have to push those not approved.

To read more, visit www.BeerPulse.com.

Prost!
Kris

Posted in: Featured Selections, In the News

  • « Newer Entries
  • 1
  • …
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • Older Entries »
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter

Check out our Beer Clubs

  • U.S. Microbrewed Beer Club
  • U.S. and International Variety Club
  • Hop Heads Beer Club
  • International Beer Club
  • Rare Beer Club

Beer Lovers’ Pages

  • Beer Naming Contests
  • US Brewery Directory
  • Craft Beer Styles

Beer Topics

  • Beer Education
  • Beer Events
  • Beer Humor
  • Featured Selections
  • In the News
  • Interesting Beer Info
  • Member of the Month
  • Notes from the Panel
  • Recipes and Pairings
  • Uncategorized
Join our Beer Club or Give a Gift Membership

Recent Posts

  • All Gifts Considered’s Classy Gifts for Men
  • Cheers to 30 Years of Great Beers!
  • Top 10 Picks Reviews Not to Miss
  • DIY Craft Beer Advent Calendar
  • Rare Beer Club Special Offer – Les Trois Mousquetaires
Sign up for our rss feed

Archives

Beer Bloggers Conference

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