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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

Beyond the Bottle: The Sum of its Parts

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The barrel-aged, blended version of The Lost Abbey’s Serpent’s Stout featured this month is the latest blended beer to be included in The Rare Beer Club, though it’s of course nowhere near the first. Diving deep into the RBC archives—there’s over a decade’s worth of previous beer inclusions at www.beermonthclub.com/past-selections.htm—yielded a surprising breadth of blended features, even one from the very first year in the online archives. In November 2004, Rare Beer Club and Michael Jackson welcomed the debut of Dogfish Head’s Burton Baton.

In an interview with Jackson (who’d been with the club from early on), Dogfish Head’s Sam Calagione explained that this particular beer—a brand-new release created for The Rare Beer Club—was meant to represent the shared historical brewing landscape between himself and Jackson, specifically those vividly hopped IPAs of England’s Burton-on-Trent, formative to them both. Burton Baton started as a slightly larger version of the brewery’s 90 Minute IPA, with hops continually added throughout the entire boil. It was then dry-hopped and aged on French oak staves for four to five months, before lastly being blended with fresh 90 Minute.

Much more recently, the club’s featured blended beers such as Broken Bow’s Blended Barrel Aged Barley Wine (highlighting a combo of bourbon, rye and red wine barrels), De Proef + Left Hand’s Wekken Sour (a blend of the former’s Flemish sour and the latter’s impy stout), and Monkish’s Rara Avis (a blend of Brett saisons: one rye, one spelt). Also: Grand Teton’s Vintage 2014 (blended and aged in rum barrels). One could go on. Any blended beers made a big impact? Any you’ve truly dug? Hit us up on Twitter: @rarebeerclub and @kenweaver.

Beyond the Bottle: What’s Your Favorite Barrel for Beer?

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The Rare Beer Club is featuring two barrel-aged beers this month: Nebraska Brewing Co.’s HopAnomaly, aged in French-oak Chardonnay barrels, and American Solera’s The Ground Is Shaking!, which spent eighteen-plus months inside of Vin Santo wine casks from Italy.

It’s pretty remarkable to consider how much the act of barrel-aging beers has taken off over the course of 25-ish years. Before I left All About Beer this fall to get back to freelancing, we had Jeff Alworth take on the history of Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Stout, which was the first barrel-aged beer of its kind when it was created in the early 1990s. (Jeff has been doing great stuff in his Classic Beer column, and this one is definitely worth checking out for a deep-dive into barrel lore.) We’ve quickly gone from a time when aging beers in barrels was a pretty weird thing to do—even the now-conventional stuff, like bourbon, brandy or rum—to our rather different present circumstances. You’ll find beers aged in Fernet barrels, Grand Marnier barrels, maple-syrup barrels and tabasco barrels. It’s approaching true that any food-ish product that gets barrel-aged itself has had some of its resulting barrels used to age beer.

So, aside from tabasco, obviously, what’s your favorite type of barrel for beer?

My first thought was whiskey or brandy, just considering all of the exceptional BA imperial stouts and barleywines over the years. I’ll often get a lot of chalkiness from Brett beers aged in red-wine barrels, and tequila and I have an evolving relationship—so no to both of those. While I rarely drink Chardonnay (we’re generally Pinot people), it’s Chardonnay barrels that I’ve personally found most intriguing expressed in beer, especially with a pale base. Russian River’s Temptation. Side Project’s Saison du Fermier. Anchorage Bitter Monk. Yes, please.

Beyond the Bottle: Who’s Got Your Favorite Design in Beer?

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There’s so much vibrant work being done in the overlap of beer and design. I especially dig the narrative angle of much of the Jolly Pumpkin label art—the hooded female traveler and attendant owl on Forgotten Tales of the Last Gypsy Blender; the regal & thirsty feline on La Roja, with epaulettes and cat bun; the paddling skeleton (in maybe the same jacket as the cat) floating by a dragon-fruit sea creature on Persimmon Ship. I have zero clue what the masked figure on the L’épouvantail Noir label is up to, for example. But I definitely want to find out.

Compelling beer-label design will often involve including a certain measure of narrative heft, usually driven by character. The cloud kings, multi-season brains, and supernatural spaces of Jester King’s artwork by Josh Cockrell. The full piazzas, barrel-aged apartment buildings, and living landscapes of Colin Healey at Prairie Artisan Ales. Also: witchsharks, wizard wolf, and ruin layouts from Bellwoods Brewery in Toronto, designed by Doublenaut. Partizan Brewing in London. The lush cans of Indeed. Plus, the pattern-heavy: the Stillwaters and Other Halfs.

It’s hard to imagine that there’s ever been a more creative, competitive period in label design. Which brewery’s artwork are you currently digging?

Sours, sours and more sours!

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Oso Logo Bw 1 2Can we talk about sours for a minute here? You’ve no doubt noticed an uptick in sour beer production over the last few years. And quite a few of them are pretty approachable even for those who haven’t previously enjoyed them. Seems like every time we put a sour up to another beer in any given month, the sour is considerably more popular.

Of our 24 annual selections, we’ve run anywhere from 4-6 sours each year over the last 3 years. Thinking about doing more, but we want to make sure we’re keeping everyone happy as much as possible. One way to do it is to offer more sours via special offers. In fact, we’re thinking an ALL SOUR special offer. Okay, so we’re not just thinking it, we’re doing it.

Anybody heard of O’so Brewing Company in Plover, Wisconsin? I hadn’t until one of the guys on our SEO team sent me a bottle of Space Ace Oddity, a one-off run of a brett-fermented double dry-hopped Belgian white IPA made to commemorate the work of David Bowie. Really nice beer. We liked it so much that we’re having them brew us another batch just for our members which will be exclusively featured in May this year.

But we’re talkin’ about sours here, right? Right. Marc Buttera, founder, CEO and super cool cat, sent me a care package like I have not received in a few years that included twelve 750s, half of them pretty damned amazing sours. It was really hard to pick just 4, but we suffered through it and are running with the following in our July 2017 Rare Beer Club special offer:

On top of that, we’ve already got 7 sours slotted for 2017 and are looking to lock down on an 8th, including featured offerings from AleSong, Mystic, Panil, Sudwerk and an exclusive from Jolly Pumpkin Brewery.

I’d love to hear any and all thoughts you have on the direction we’re taking with sour beers!

Prost!
Kris

Rare Beer Club Naming Contest with Yazoo Brewing and Pints for Prostates

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Wanna win a 6 month, 2-bottle membership to The Rare Beer Club® Of course you do. Who wouldn’t? Well, you’re going to have to do some work then, okay? You good with that part? It’s kind of important that you’re good with that part. Although, it’s not really work if you generally associate work with things that aren’t fun. Trust me, you can have fun with this one. One of the past winners of this particular project was an 8.5% smoked Dopplebock that was given one of my all time all-time favorite names…Prostator!

We need help naming a beer people.

This contest is our annual collaboration with Pints for Prostates, and this year Rick has secured Yazoo Brewing and the celebrated head of their sour program, Brandon Jones, to create a beer to help PFP educate dudes about getting properly screened for prostate cancer. Suffice to say…It’s a really worthy cause.

It’s always fun to jump on a call with a brewer and see what kind of creative ideas they’re kickin’ around on their pilot system or what glorious goodness awaits in a barrel program. Talking to Brandon didn’t disappoint. In his words, “I have a batch of an incredible merlot french oak barrel aged aged sour and Brettanomyces Belgian Golden Strong ale we are going to fruit with a combo of blackberries, tart cherries and raspberries. The base beer before fruit is showing nice character of pepper, dark fruit, and bright lemon lime.”

There was a long pause on the call and then Rick and I simultaneously and resoundingly said, “WE’RE IN”!

Suffice to say, it’s gonna be a pretty sweet offering and we’re really fired up about it.

Here’s what you need to know to play kids.

Entering the Beer Naming Contest

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, May 24th, 2017. Entrants will have until 2 pm PDT on Monday, June 12th, to submit up to three names.

Finalists will be chosen by The Rare Beer Club, Pints for Prostates, and Yazoo Brewing Company on Wednesday, June 14th, at which time contestants, club members, and the general public can vote for their favorite name. The winning entry will be announced on Thursday, June 22nd and the contest winner will receive a 6-month, 2-bottle membership to The Rare Beer Club.

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 2017, or earlier, to receive this exclusive beer from Yazoo Brewing Company.

Have fun!

Prost!
Kris

Beyond the Bottle: American Sour Beers

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This month’s featured Space Ace Oddity is bottle-conditioned with Brettanomyces, which adds significant layering of tropical flavors and aromatics to that beer. I recently finished reading a sample copy of Michael Tonsmeire’s American Sour Beers (Brewers Publications), which heads into a serious and wisely focused study into how the most influential U.S. sour-beer brewers are handling things like different combinations of Brett strains and souring bacteria, aging on wood (and elsewhere), spontaneous fermentation (and wild-yeast wrangling), and a great deal of the process-based nuance and personal flair that goes into making these complex beers. It also has a detailed section about how ten key places—New Belgium, Jolly Pumpkin, Russian River, Lost Abbey / Pizza Port, Cambridge, Captain Lawrence, The Bruery, Cascade, Ithaca, and Allagash—approach sour beer production (including production-schedule flowcharts).

It’s pretty geeky and glorious stuff. And, in the context of The Rare Beer Club, many of these are familiar names. I rummaged through my collection of rare empties to see what I’d tasted and kept around that was mentioned in the book, snapping photos for Instagram, obviously, but my oldest experiences with at least a few formative beers in the book came from orders I must have placed with The Rare Beer Club like a dozen years ago. My first taste of Pizza Port Cuvee de Tomme—a hugely influential beer with raisin puree, sour cherries, and three house strains of Brettanomyces, created by Tomme Arthur—was through The Rare Beer Club back in March 2005. Ditto for Rodenbach Grand Cru, a feature in January 2006, and Jolly Pumpkin Bam Noire (August 2007) and Weizen Bam (July 2008). Either I or someone else in our DC tasting crew snagged it via The Rare Beer Club. While I’d shortly thereafter leave the country and subsist on Nicaraguan lager for a number of long months, these and similarly formative beers were a big part of why I started writing about the drink professionally when I got back. If you’ve been digging the sour stuff for a bit—Tonsmeire’s book offers top-notch nostalgia.

Cheers!
Ken

The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

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