Featured Selections Archives - Page 4 of 12 - Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

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.

The Lost Abbey Rare Beer Club Special Offer

July 13, 2018 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

We’re doing something a little different and unprecedented for this latest Rare Beer Club special offer. Tomme Arthur and the team at The Lost Abbey were recently tasting through the brewery’s archives to discover what was at its peak, and, given the long history between Tomme and the club—we’ve been loving his beer since the Pizza Port days—he reached out with some of the very best of The Lost Abbey’s rarest vintage beers. Five of the six offered score 100 points over on RateBeer (the other one’s a 98)—and this is ultimately one of the best collections we’ve ever been able to put together. A chance to taste Lost Abbey history.

NOTE: This the first time we’re offering 375mL bottles within the club! We want to be able to expand on the rare beers we’re able to offer our members going forward, and this seems like the best possible time to expand into smaller-format selections. Lost Abbey has less than 100 cases of each of these releases—for the 2017 Deliverance and 2018 Bat Out of Hell, for instance, there are less than 40 cases left—and once they’re gone, they’re gone. The final two beers offer up the great opportunity to try 2015 and 2018 Number of the Beast side-by-side.

To take part of this exciting offer, visit our Special Offer Page.

Rare Beer Club Naming Contest with Pints for Prostates and Rowley Farmhouse Ales

June 6, 2018 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

We need help naming a beer, and if you help us you can win a 6 month, 2-bottle membership to The Rare Beer Club®! Sounds fun right!?

This contest is our annual collaboration with Pints for Prostates, and this year Rick has secured Rowley Farmhouse Ales, located in Santa Fe, NM, to create their version of a Gotlandsdricka, the indigenous beer of Gotland, Sweden’s largest island. According to Founder and Head Brewer, John Rowley, “It’s our homage to Scandinavian farmhouse ales, which are lesser known, but have been brewed longer than the classic Belgian and French versions. Our take on this historic style contains a portion of birch smoked malt and was mashed and lautered over a false bottom of locally foraged juniper.” The beer will also contain locally foraged juniper berries, gathered from a favorite trail of John’s east of Santa Fe.

The limited-edition label will feature the Pints for Prostates logo, which includes the blue ribbon to remind people of the ongoing search for a cure to prostate cancer, a leading cause of death among American men. “The annual release of a special beer through The Rare Beer Club helps us to connect with guys and urge them to take charge of their health by getting screened for prostate cancer,” said Rick Lyke, a prostate cancer survivor who founded Pints for Prostates after successful prostate cancer surgery in April 2008.

Although the new beer will only be available to members of The Rare Beer Club, both members and non-members are invited to enter the contest and submit up to three names for the new beer. The contest officially begins on Wednesday, June 6^th, 2018. Entrants will have until 2 pm PDT on Wednesday, June 20^th, to submit up to three names.

To receive this special beer, and many more, join the Rare Beer Club online or call 800-625-8238. Be sure to start your membership by September 2018, or earlier, to receive this exclusive beer from Rowley Farmhouse Ales.

For more of the nitty gritty including contest rules and how to enter, visit our contest entry page.

Good luck!

Beyond the Bottle: The Yeast With a Thousand Facets

May 30, 2018 by Ken Weaver

One of the two featured beers this month—Logsdon’s Rakau Boy—includes the brewery’s house strain of Brettanomyces yeast. Logsdon’s founder, David Logsdon, was also a founder of Wyeast Laboratories when it opened back in 1985, and that entity’s since grown to become one of the country’s two main yeast suppliers. The house yeast character of Logsdon comes after multiple decades of exploring different variations of Brett and other common (and less-common) yeast types. Wyeast currently offers a few strains of Brett commercially, including B. bruxellensis, B. claussenii and B. lambicus: each of which can produce very different results, as flavor and aroma contributions vary considerably between different strains and applications.

One of the best resources I’ve found for those looking for a deeper dive into the world of Brettanomyces is the Milk the Funk wiki, and the main Brettanomyces page is a great place to begin therein. In addition to including a copy of the “Brett Aroma Wheel” from Dr. Linda Bisson and Lucy Joseph at UC–Davis—which includes over 60 core descriptors of flavors and aromas resulting from Brett strains, from fruity to solventy to spicy—this wiki page also has an impressively detailed account of the many different strains of Brett being offered from smaller, niche yeast companies that have been increasingly popping up as of late. Should you be looking to geek out on lesser-used Brett species like B. naardenensis, this is likely your jam.

For those looking for more new Brett-beer options: a Brasseries de la Senne and Monk’s Cafe collab called Major Tom—a strong saison, bottle-conditioned with Brett from De la Senne—is slated to get into distribution starting around June. And for true devotees of wild yeast, the seventh annual Carnivale Brettanomyces in Amsterdam begins its four-day run on June 21^st.

Rare Beer Special Offer: Põhjala Brewery

May 14, 2018 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

We’ve had this Estonian brewery on our radar for a few years now, as they’ve been gradually gaining a significant presence across Europe and knocking out collaborations with folks like Stillwater Artisanal, To Øl and De Struise. We’ve collected four of our absolute favorites out of the brewery’s lineup for this offer, each packaged in a carefully designed, 12-ounce bottle: two riffs on imperial Baltic porter, as well as two exceptional imperial stouts. These four are each ideal for sharing, as even the smallest—this Cognac-barrel-aged Baltic porter—lands at 11%+ ABV. Despite the overall strengths of the picks, we singled these individual beers out for being especially smooth examples—and showcasing some truly unique special additions.

For each of these four beers, a total of just over 50 cases was recently brought into the U.S., and we’ve been allocated the majority of each for this Rare Beer Club special offer. (All four of these will otherwise only be available in small quantities at a handful of select accounts.)

To learn more about the beers and to order, visit our Special Offer page.

Cheers!

Beyond the Bottle: As Old As Osborne

February 16, 2018 by Ken Weaver

The glossary of Martyn Cornell’s authoritative Amber Gold & Black is kind, especially for this particular reader, in its clear definition of old ale. Cornell puts it as follows: “a name given to any strong aged pale or brown beer.” Things vary, as they tend to. What constituted old ale often depended on one’s time and location, and Cornell unpacks some relations between old ales and other historical strong groups—Burton ales, stock ales, etc.—in the chapter “Barley Wine and Old Ale.” The chapter also highlights a scene from the book Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, wherein a certain Squire Hamley offers his visiting physician a glass of old ale, from a cask that he had been cellaring since the birth of his first son, Osborne.

“You must have a glass full,” he says. “It’s old ale, such as we don’t brew now-a-days. It’s as old as Osborne. We brewed it that autumn and we called it the young Squire’s ale.”

It’s worth noting Osborne was over 21 at this time, and that the physician “had to sip it very carefully as he ate his cold roast beef” due to the aged beer’s potency. It’s interesting to think just how long we have been able to create beers that can last for decades… At RateBeer.com, the old-ale style descriptions (presumably still overseen by the well-traveled Josh Oakes) note there are at least three or four styles coalescing under the ‘old ale’ umbrella. But I particularly dig the last sentence, which reflects my own skewed experience stateside: “For me, these are robustly malty beers, akin to a top-fermented version of a dopplebock.” And they often are.

Have you gotten to check out any old-ale releases? AleSmith, Kuhnhenn, The Bruery, North Coast and Harviestoun are all reliable spots to check for cellarable examples. Any hitting the spot? Sampled a beer as old as Osborne? Join the conversation on Twitter @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: The Unfamiliar Space of Bière Brut

January 17, 2018 by Ken Weaver

I swung by the Calicraft booth at the most recent Great American Beer Festival to catch up, knowing Reserve Series Rosé was on the Rare Beer Club schedule later in the year. Calicraft opened in the East Bay back in 2012, such that we just missed including them in our release of The Northern California Craft Beer Guide, which came out the same year. My earliest coverage of these folks focused on their flagship ‘sparkling ale’ as part of a roundup of bières brut and their related brethren in RateBeer Weekly. Calicraft’s dry, crisp sparkling ale (Buzzerkeley) uses Champagne yeast and robust carbonation in a way similar to Deus and the various Malheurs of this sort—the Champagne-like beers that Michael Jackson, in a slim chapter in Great Beers of Belgium, referred to as bières brut (carefully tuned to avoid the Champagne region’s wrath).

I’d like to tell you the world’s now awash in these creamy, effervescent, Champagne-inspired beers. But Calicraft’s remained one of the main U.S. players working with Champagne yeast, both in this month’s featured Reserve Series Rosé as well as throughout the brewery’s Barrel Project series and beyond, continuing their focus on wine yeasts. Malheurs and Deus remain two reliable go-tos for formal bière brut. And a handful of other brewers are finding success, too, including New Zealand’s Garage Project with Hops On Pointe, a “Champagne Pilsner”.

Have you tried a Champagne-inspired beer before? Is your local doing a bière brut or some sort of sparkling ale worth checking out? Join the conversation on Twitter @rarebeerclub.