In the News Archives - Page 4 of 14 - Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

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

June 21, 2018 by Kristina Manning

The Rare Beer Club® thanks all who participated in the naming contest for our upcoming exclusive beer from Rowley Farmhouse Ales. We enjoyed reviewing the 220+ entries which were as fun and clever as in past contests. Thank you for that.

It’s always a challenge to whittle down a sizable list of great beer names to just three finalists, but John, Rick and I spent a couple hours laboring over our favorites and now you and your friends get to pick the winner!

As a reminder, here is how the upcoming beer was described for the entrants:

“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.”

Without further ado, here are the finalists:

Smoldering Fjord
The Smoking Swede
Mäns Hälsa (“men’s health” in Swedish)

To vote for your favorite, visit our contest 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!

National Beer Day!

April 7, 2018 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

On March 22, 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt signed an amendment to the Volstead Act known as the Cullen-Harrison Act, a law to allow people to brew and sell beer (as long as it was under 4% ABV). Once signed, President Roosevelt was famously quoted “I think this would be a good time for a beer.”

On April 7, 1933 the Cullen-Harrison Act went into effect and for the first time in thirteen years hundreds of people gathered outside taverns, pubs, and breweries to buy and drink their first legal beer.

As you join in on the celebrations on National Beer Day, what brew are you reaching for?

Cheers!

Brewiety Merges with The Rare Beer Club

March 30, 2018 by Kris Calef

We are excited to announce that Brewiety, an innovative beer club focused on delivering outstanding beers from the nation’s most respected brewers, has recently merged with The Rare Beer Club®.

After a long drought and having not received a shipment since last year, existing Brewiety members have been excited to learn how their club membership has improved as a result of the merger and were allowed to customize their first shipment from a list of over 15 truly rare, outstanding beers, many of which were brewed exclusively for The Rare Beer Club.

Learn More About The Brewiety – Rare Beer Club Merger

Beyond the Bottle: Foeder Feeders (& Filip)

March 14, 2018 by Ken Weaver

I recently got to check out Almanac Beer Co.’s new facility in Alameda, California, which I was checking out on assigment for ABV Magazine. The brand-new Barrel House, Brewery and Taproom (the building itself dates back to World War II…) marks a major shift for the folks at Almanac, who up until now relied on contract or partner brewing to get their beers out into the world. Check out the full coverage and photos in ABV, but suffice to say that Almanac has committed to the sour game. Asking co-founder Jesse Friedman what he was most excited about with the new spot, he replied, “I’m excited to get these foeders filled.”

Foeders, the big barrels often used for aging sour beers, aren’t a thing you, like, impulse buy. Wood & Beer: A Brewer’s Guide by Dick Cantwell and Peter Bouckaert is the best resource I’ve seen for foeder specifics, and the two authors put the general size for these barrels about 600 liters or more (with significant wiggle room, but this is around the size where the production methods change and the barrels go from assembly-line to custom). The smallest foeder sold currently by Foeder Crafters of America is just a little bit larger than that, at seven barrels, or 14 kegs’ worth. For a sense of the size of some of the larger foeders, though, there’s a useful anecdote in Wood & Beer about a broken ladder and a temporarily lost employee named Filip.

Have you gotten to check out any other recent foeder-aged beers? Rodenbach, New Glarus, New Belgium, Side Project, Bruery Terreux and numerous others have been making foeders part of their sour-beer operations, and, at the very least, you’re unlikely to find many foeder-aged beers that breweries are doing just for a hoot. (I tend to read it as ‘probably not a kettle sour’.) Any foeder beers hitting the spot? Join the conversation on Twitter @rarebeerclub.