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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

What Exactly is a Holiday Beer?

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So right about this time of year we, get a lot of questions from our customers about Christmas Beers and Winter Warmers.  It’s no real surprise as the definition of what constitutes a holiday beer is somewhat blurry, as are the lines of traditional beer styles in general.  So I sat down and penciled out a few thoughts on the matter which led me to think about what some of my favorite holiday seasonals were over the years.  I went back pretty far and dug up a few we ran over a decade ago.  Give it a read and let us know what you think!  I’d also like to know what some of your favorite holiday beers are so let us know.

For a fun holiday gift, check out how to make your own Craft Beer Advent Calendar!

Prost!
Kris

American Beer Day

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With so many beer celebration days now, it’s hard to keep track which one is coming next. With International Stout Day just around the corner (The first Thursday in November), we have more than enough beer to talk about in the next few weeks! Today’s focus, though, is National American Beer Day.

To join in the celebration, I wanted to review a bottle from our friends at Shmaltz: Jewbelation (17): REBORN. With over 20 years of brewing, Shmaltz produced this beer in celebration of their end of contract brewing and the opening of their own brewery location in Clifton Park, NY back in 2013.

This beer pours a crazy dark mahogany with a persistent tan head. On the nose there is quite the complexity from the 17 malts with notes of heavily roasted coffee, brown sugar, and chocolate dancing over forward layers of fruitiness – figs, plums, and stewed apples. The 17 hops have faded in the last four years but you can still see some of their life in the very end of the nose with a light waft of hop spice. Underneath it all is a welcomed whisky-like booziness just to remind you that it is 17%.

On the palate, you basically experience the nose in reverse. The whisky note comes front and center, but is balanced out with some fresh roasted coffee notes and chocolate. The flavors linger out to the fruits shown in the nose but settle on a warming baking spice finish. The body on this one was so massive, it was basically a meal in of itself. Overall, an awesome beer experience and I hope I can find one more bottle to cellar to celebrate an American Beer Day in the future.

Thank you America the Beautiful and God bless our amber waves of grain!

~CJ

Beyond the Bottle: What’s Your Go-To Gose?

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The gose style of beer has been through some worse days. The 20th century saw this German style of beer—typically quite tart, with additions of coriander and sea salt—completely cease production on more than one occasion. Ron Pattinson put together a particularly compelling history of the style over on his blog Shut Up About Barclay Perkins about ten years back, which also serves double duty as being a snapshot of what the gose scene was like in 2007. (Spoiler alert: ‘Scene’ is a strong word.) At the time, Pattinson wrote: “For the first time since before 1939 there is more than one brewery currently making a Gose, two in Leipzig itself. It’s still easier to find Kölsch in the city, so Gose hasn’t been restored to its former popularity, but the style is more secure today than it has been for any time in the last 50 years.”

Today, there are hundreds of examples. Some authentic. Some authentic-ish. And some with additions of prickly pear, or dry-hopping, or aged in tequila barrels and over 10% ABV. The combo of lactic tartness (particularly as kettle-souring practices continue to spread) with the tempering additions of salt and coriander (plus a myriad of other things) has helped fuel lots of creative attempts in this general style space in recent years. Our sense of gose broadened.

So, what’s your favorite? Personally speaking: Westbrook’s Gose (from South Carolina) has been a reliable go-to (in cans!), offering assertive tartness that aims at authenticity. Upright’s Gose (from Oregon) is another delicious U.S. take, but employs French saison yeast instead of focusing on lactic acid—resulting in more of a curious wheat beer. And while purists may shake their heads at Perennial’s Suburban Beverage out of Missouri (using Key limes, Meyer lemons and Valencia oranges), it’s exactly the interpretation of ‘gose’ I’d want at the beach.

Whether traditional or (may the brewing gods have mercy on our souls…) barrel-aged, we’re curious what you’re digging on the gose front. What’s hitting the spot lately? Let us know on Twitter: the Rare Beer Club’s over @RareBeerClub, and you can find me @kenweaver.

Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales & The Rare Beer Club Beer Naming Contest

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So you didn’t win the grand prize in our recent beer naming contest with Yazoo and are weeping tears of sorrow into your freshly poured glass of Space Ace Oddity. Am I right? A bit of a tangent first. Did you dig that beer as much as I did? A fellow craft beer lover and vendor we work with sent me a bottle a year or so ago when it was first introduced to a very limited Michigan market and I was genuinely floored which doesn’t happen much these days. Really, really love that beer and hope you did too.

So on with the good news. You’ve got one more chance this year to win a 6 month, 2-bottle membership to The Rare Beer Club by naming our next exclusive beer, brewed by none other than craft beer legend Ron Jeffries at Jolly Pumpkin!

Ron wasn’t sure he could work us into his production schedule this year when I first pinged him in the new year, but then he reached out a couple months back and asked if I was still interested because he was kicking around a Blackberry Pumpkin Saison recipe that would work nicely in October. It took all of a nanosecond for me to concur that this was indeed a primo idea.

We’ve done 6 exclusives with Jolly Pumpkin over the last 23 years and in all honesty…No seriously, I really mean it…They all kicked ass. You will not be disappointed and it will indeed be an honor to have been the one to name it so put down your device, bust out a yellow pad and start noodling on some ideas.

Wait. Don’t power down just yet. Are you still there? There’s some stuff you gotta know first.

The beer is a 7.0% Spelt Saison that’s been aged for 7 months in oak foeders which will contribute spice, and sour fruit notes developed through barrel aging and naturally occurring Brettanomyces yeast and Lactobacillus bacteria. Perle, Vanguard and Southern Cross hops were used along with pilsner malts and spelt to make the beer. A pumpkin and blackberry puree was added to the oak foeders 3 months into their resting period.

Here’s another secret squirrel tip. The last 5 JP beers featured were named Ursae Majoris, Los Vivos y Los Muertos, Rosie Del Barrio, Lupulo de Hielo, and Biere de Goord so you could say there seems to be a bias toward foreign language based names. Don’t let me stifle your creativity baby. Run with what feels good. I’m just sayin’…

Here’s what you need to know to play, good people of Gotham.

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 Monday, June 26th, 2017. Entrants will have until 2 pm PDT on Monday, July 17th, to submit up to three names. That gives you a week to think about each name! You can do this!

Finalists will be chosen by The Rare Beer Club and Jolly Pumpkin on July 20th, at which time contestants, club members, and the general public can vote for their favorite name. The winning entry will be announced on Wednesday, July 26th 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 October 2017, or earlier, to receive this exclusive beer from Jolly Pumpkin.

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

Beyond the Bottle: WTF is a Braggot?

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Braggots are relatively unfamiliar turf for me: beer plus honey, with everything beyond that a mystery. The Oxford Companion of Beer adds that they’re made with malt and honey, ideally the honey in greater abundance, to separate them from honey beers; braggots reside in the space between beers and meads. OCB: “Historical references suggest braggot is a Celtic drink from at least the 12th century; it is mentioned in The Canterbury Tales.” (A modern-ish version reads: “Her mouth was sweet as bragget or as mead / Or hoard of apples laid in hay or weed.”)

Romantic stuff. In The Beer Bible, Jeff Alworth adds that “Braggot […] is ancient. There is no strict definition beyond honeyed beer, and by that description, braggot goes all the way back to the Sumerians. Archeologists have discovered honeyed beer in pottery from Phrygia from 700 BCE […] and in Gaul during roughly the same time period.” In his Radical Brewing, Randy Mosher quotes the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus, speaking about the Germanic people: “[They] lie on bear skins and drink mead or beer brewed with honey from large drinking horns. They can bear hunger and cold weather easily, but not the thirst.”

Braggots are not the easiest things to track down. The well-regarded Brother Adam’s Bragget Honey Ale from Atlantic Brewing Co. (“named for Brother Adams, a monk from Buckfast Abbey who is credited with saving the bee industry”) was the lone encounter with the style I’ve got notes on. Kuhnhenn Brewing Co. in Warren, Michigan has made a bunch of these over the years, including a Dry Saison Braggot, Imperial Raspberry Braggot, and Heights of Sterling Braggot (dry-hopped with Sterling). If you’re lucky, your local might have a one-off.

National Beer Day!

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we-want-beerOn 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!

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