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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: Beer and Survival

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In recent months I’ve been checking in on how breweries here in Sonoma County have been handling COVID-19 complications, including California’s statewide closure of indoor dining on July 13th. With that pitch-perfect 2020 timing: we now have wildfire season upon us. Here in Petaluma (20-ish minutes south of Sonoma County’s biggest city, Santa Rosa) we’ve only seen ash and smoke thus far, but there are 500+ fires and 750,000+ acres burned statewide. Hazy skies. Scary-ass sunsets. Regularly checking our local air-quality numbers. Got our bug-out bags repacked. My wife just sent me over a Google spreadsheet of our “What would we grab in 20 minutes?” list. The house is prepped, in case friends need to evacuate here again.

For our local breweries, which had been finding COVID-19 workarounds like outdoor beer gardens, it means one more step backwards. All of the Santa Rosa breweries I mentioned last month—Russian River, Moonlight, and Cooperage—have had to temporarily suspend their outdoor operations due to air-quality issues, all switching to take-out only for the moment. Here’s hoping air-quality levels improve soon and fire season won’t be as bad as it looks.

That said… this is familiar turf. We’ve endured wildfires, and everything 2020’s thrown so far. We had N95 masks way before COVID. We’ll get through this too. Here’s hoping you are holding up ok through everything. Support the small businesses you want to stay open. Stay strong. I’m gonna go crack an apocalypse beer and fall asleep on our bug-out bag.

Mikkeller Rare Beer Club Special Offer

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We’re excited to announce another Rare Beer Club® Special Offer!

We’re happy to have had the opportunity to work with the Mikkeller team to bring our members a selection of delicious and hard to find brews this month which exemplify Mikkeller’s creativity and skill. We sampled an array of beers to home in on six particularly engaging selections that we couldn’t put down, and that you won’t want to miss!

A list of the beers appears below, but we encourage you to visit the special offer page for full tasting notes and access to the order form. NOTE: All beers are 330-ml bottles, except for the 12″ Winale which is 375-ml.

If you’re new to the club: welcome! One of the best things about being a member is that, in addition to our normal monthly selections, you can take advantage of our periodic special offers on additional exciting and hard-to-find beers. Cheers!

  1. Beer Geek Flat White – Oatmeal Stout w/ Coffee & Lactose. 7.5% ABV. 330-ml.
  2. Beer Geek Limfjords Porter – Porter w/ Licorice & Coffee. 7.7% ABV. 330-ml.
  3. Beer Hop Breakfast – Black IPA w/ Coffee. 7.5% ABV. 330-ml.
  4. Mexas Ranger – Ale w/ Spices, Almond Milk, Cocoa, Chili, Black Beans, & Avocado Leaves. 6.6% ABV. 330-ml.
  5. Spontandryhop Citra – Dry Hop Citra Sour Ale. 5.5% ABV. 330-ml.
  6. 12″ Winale – Ale brewed w/ Wine Grape Juice & Champagne yeast. 8.1% ABV. 375-ml.

Flexible ordering allows you to order 4, 6, 8, 12, 18, 24, or 48 total bottles, combining any of the six featured beers in any way to get there so that you can easily try them all.

ORDER ONLINE or at 800-625-8238 Mon – Fri, 7am – 4 pm Pacific. If your Rare 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.

Learn More for full tasting notes, and to access the order form.

The order cut-off for this Special Offer is 12:00 PM Pacific on Monday, July 20th. Orders will begin shipping out about a week later.

Cheers!

 

 

Kris Calef
President, The Rare Beer Club®

Craft Beer Delivery to Your Home

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The pandemic has more and more of us seeking out reputable services and online shops that can safely deliver craft beer. And who can blame them? I’ve been working out of the house for over 2 months now trying to drown out what feels like a daily assault of leaf blowers, garbage trucks, and weed whackers. Hell, there’s a dog barking, my children kicking up a ruckus, and a chainsaw buzzing at the very moment that I’m typing up this post. When it’s time to logoff and leave the coalface behind for the day, I’m more ready for a beer than I’ve ever been each day. Fortunately for me, I’ve got a pretty sweet beer fridge in my garage, well stocked with recent and past selections from our clubs. Yeah, I’m gonna shoot straight with you. It’s good to have a warehouse full of really good craft beer at your disposal when you need it… And even when you don’t.

Anyway, back to your needs, specifically your beer fridge. Shipping hard-to-find, professionally curated craft beers is exactly what we’ve been doing for just over 25 years now, both through our 5 distinctive beer club memberships and by allowing club members the ability to re-order their favorites at discounted prices.

So here’s what’s changed on our end. In these challenging times, we’ve made the decision to open up our beer store to everyone, not just active members.

Read more about our craft beer delivery options.

Stay Safe, But Don’t Stay Thirsty my friends,

Kris

Beyond the Bottle: Shoutout to the Beer Artists

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I’m really digging the label art featured on Sudwerk’s Microfauna, created by the brewery’s in-house label artist Gregory Shilling and featuring, I think, a tardigrade (aka ‘moss piglet’) double-fisting some beer cans, surrounded by microbial drinking buddies. It’s super weird, evocative, scientifically questionable… but I think it’s great, and it nails the overall surreal and world-building vibe that permeates so many beer labels and beer artworks these days.

I love this creative space. And, while we’re all bunkered down for the indeterminate future, now seems an ideal time to shout out some of the folks contributing a ton within the space of label design and beer-related artwork. First off, AJ Keirans with @16ozCanvas has been rounding up a bunch of us for podcasts and features, and his archive of podcasts very likely has your favorite artist in there somewhere, going into detail about process, influences, and inspiration. Em Sauter’s been creating daily educational beer drawings and comics over at @pintsandpanels. And Nicolas Fullmer (@beyondtheale) has been sharing his increasingly detailed beer illustrations on the regular—predominantly in his label designs for Monkish.

I’ve missed a ton of folks. In Cali: the labels of HenHouse, Cooperage, and Modern Times all come to mind. Who do you find inspiring in the world of beer art? Whose label artwork do you think deserves some attention? Let us know on Twitter at @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Do You Cellar?

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Photo by junjie xu from PexelsA number of beers recently featured in the club have been vintage bottles, picked specifically because they’re drinking at their prime, and it’s had me thinking a lot about cellaring overall lately. I’ll start by saying, despite writing about beer professionally for about a decade, I tend to feel pretty out-there when it comes to discussing beer cellars or beer collections… I have (I checked) literally one bottle of cellared beer right now. It’s in our kitchen cupboard, and I didn’t buy it. Our little wine fridge is focused on younger Pinots and Tablas Creek releases.

This is very much personal preference, and it’s evolved a bit over the years. When we lived in DC and I was trading beer regularly, we at least had a closet full of ageable beer—but that was functionally more of an on-deck circle for the regular tastings our DC crew was hosting. I’ve had some wonderfully aged examples from Hair of the Dog and De Dolle over the years that remind me there’s absolutely positive potential in cellaring beers. But I’ve accepted I just don’t have a taste for oxidation… Nine times out of ten I’m going to prefer that beer fresh.

Same for vintage flights of Pinot. Ditto for aged sherry. Just how these tastebuds are wired.

As such… I’m always curious when people do keep a beer cellar (and not just of IPAs they forgot to drink… you folks know who you are). Where do you fall when it comes to aging beer? Do you keep a cellar? What styles do you like to age? (I’d totally accept a cellar full of lambic…) Have your habits evolved over time? Chime in on Twitter at @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Go-To Glassware

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Having received a bit of glassware over the holidays, my wife and I recently decided to wade through and reorganize our glass collection. (Most alcohol writers have more glassware than we know what to do with…) We’ve got three spots for glassware in the house: main section in the kitchen, a few windowed shelves in the living room (for wine glasses and snifters, so I can offset having to walk by how fancy I feel), and, thirdly, a nook for backup glassware. We did our best to Marie Kondo it up, trying to be mindful of what actually sparked joy to use.

Some stuff quickly got banished to the backup nook: hefeweizen glasses, the Spiegelau wheat beer glasses (both the shape and size of a rocket ship)… The more interesting part was what made it into the prime kitchen shelves. What was our go-to glassware we used all the time?

Here’s what those two shelves look like for us: A few thin, heavy-bottomed pilsner glasses. Two sets of glassware I designed for the comic—flexible, medium-sized wine goblets, both stemmed and stemless. A few wee and normal-sized nonics. And then the two things that I personally like drinking out of most, for different reasons. The first’s for pragmatic ones: a pair of Riedel Ouverture beer glasses, tulip-like and a perfect combo of nicely thin but thick enough that I haven’t broken them yet. The second are two small chalice glasses from Dieu du Ciel! in Montreal, for more personal reasons. Ali and I snagged these up at the brewery’s 10th anniversary party back in 2008, when we were roadtripping to the west coast. They’re a little frou-frou and fragile—but they also hit the joy button and we should use them more.

What’s your go-to piece of beer glassware? Do you tend to reach for it because of functional or personal reasons? Are you glassware ambivalent? Chime in on Twitter at @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Old Ales

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One of the two featured beers this month is Lost Abbey’s Righteous Son, a barrel-aged old ale made exclusively for The Rare Beer Club. Old ales are a dark and maltier subset of beers tracing their origins back to England, and they typically emphasize a generosity of notes like caramel, toffee, nuttiness, and/or molasses (even a bit of roast)—essentially hitting some of the same malt spectrum as barleywine, though without the same intensity of hops or alcohol impact. The Rare Beer Club’s founder Michael Jackson wrote old ales “should be a warming beer of the type that is best drunk in half pints by a warm fire on a cold winter’s night.”

While the above provides a basic sense of expectation for beers labeled as “old ale” today—higher in alcohol, darker malts, modest hops, often some sherry-like oxidative notes—there’s a lot more nuance to what “old ale” referred to historically. Martyn Cornell’s article “So what is the difference between Barley Wine and Old Ale?” is a great resource for any deeper dive.

If you’re digging Lost Abbey’s Righteous Son (or old ales in general), tracking more of these down can sometimes be a bit of a hunt. English examples making it stateside are pretty few and far between, while many of the old-ale examples made stateside are more barley wine-y. Great Divide’s longstanding winter seasonal Hibernation Ale (brewed annually since 1995) is one promising option that’s easier to track down, and North Coast’s potent Old Stock Ale is made year round. Got old-ale recommendations? Hit us up on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

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