DIY Craft Beer Advent Calendar

November 21, 2022 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

The holidays are packed with traditions. Things like Christmas trees, carols, cookie baking, drinking Christmas beers and winter warmers, and frantic, last-minute gift shopping keep us busy throughout the season, but it’s the little traditions that make it so enjoyable. Customary gifts, like advent calendars, are classic holiday mainstays that plenty of parents give to their kids. What’s not to love about getting a surprise piece of candy every day for 24 days? Count us in. But, what about those who want a little more in their advent calendar? Well, The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club™ has got the perfect homemade solution: a Craft Beer Advent Calendar.

Yes, you read that right: an entire DIY advent calendar full of sweet, delicious craft beer. The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club™ has noted the rising popularity of these great gifts, and we’ve decided that it’s time to ensure everyone knows how to make one for the beer enthusiasts in their life. When you give someone a Craft Beer Advent Calendar packed with tasty microbrews, you aren’t just giving them a craft beer Christmas gift – you’re giving them 24 days of great beers. Santa’s got nothing on you.

How to Build a Craft Beer Advent Calendar

Steps:

Decide on a design (square, rectangular, or triangular)
Cut shipping tubes or dividers
Glue shipping tubes or dividers together
Fill each tube with a craft beer bottle or can
Decorate
Enjoy

Building a Craft Beer Advent Calendar isn’t as easy as grabbing a random box in your house, throwing in your extra/unwanted beer, and putting some wrapping paper over the top. You need the right materials, some spare time, and a little bit of craftiness (or at least those “cut stuff up and glue things together” skills you hopefully mastered in kindergarten).

Start by deciding which design you want to use. There are three common options: square, rectangular, or triangular. You can find plenty of DIY beer advent calendar instructions all over the web, but making your own homemade Craft Beer Advent Calendar doesn’t require a Master’s in structural engineering. The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club™ has got you covered with the basics.

Tools & supplies for a square or rectangular Craft Beer Advent Calendar:

• A box or a case of beer
• Cardboard dividers
• Glue
• Scissors
• Wrapping paper
• A marker

For the square and rectangular options, you can easily use a moving box or a used case of beer, specifically the kind with built-in cardboard dividers – any case of bottled beer should have these. You can choose to lay the box on its side, or keep it flat on its bottom. Simply place your beers into the box, make sure they’re held in place with the dividers, and cover the top with festive wrapping paper. Mark the locations of each beer using the numbers 1-24, and you’re set. Feel free to pat yourself on the back and enjoy a celebration beer (NOT one of the beers from the calendar). If you want, you can add a 25th slot for a little extra something something. More on that below.

Tools & supplies for a triangular Craft Beer Advent Calendar:

• Poster/shipping tubes
• Glue
• Scissors
• Wrapping paper
• A marker
• Stickers (optional)

Now, for those with a craftier side, the triangular option offers a little extra fun. You’ll need to buy some long shipping tubes capable of fitting bottles or cans, and then cut these up into 24 even sections. Glue them together however you want, though we suggest making it triangular, as it’ll look a little like a Christmas tree. You could even put a star on top if you’re feeling particularly festive – we won’t judge you.

After gluing the tubes together, fill the tubes with tasty beers, decorate and cover the front with a little wrapping paper, and mark the tube openings with the numbers 1-24. You now have a triangular Craft Beer Advent Calendar to give to your best beer buddy. He or she’s gonna love it.

An important side note that must be mentioned: don’t be lame and fill your Beer Advent Calendar with a case of the same macrobeer. Be creative with the beer you choose by selecting unique beers from all 7 continents. Well, 6 of the 7, at least. We don’t think anyone is brewing in Antarctica (even though that’s an awesome idea). You could be extra festive and fill it with nothing but unique holiday beers!

Keep in mind that a Craft Beer Advent Calendar isn’t confined to Christmas time. Arbor Day, Flag Day, Bring Your Daughter to Work day, it doesn’t matter – you can make the 24 days leading up to any holiday special (and tasty) with your Craft Beer Advent Calendar.

Improving Your Beer Advent Calendar

So, how do you improve on something as awesome as a Beer Advent Calendar? It’s simple, really: you spread that cheer throughout the year.

A traditional advent calendar features 24 slots representing the 24 days leading up to Christmas, but who says that you have to follow tradition? Add a 25th slot, and give your friend a gift that keeps on giving: a membership to The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club. After all, who doesn’t want amazing craft beers from around the country (and the world) delivered to their door once a month throughout the year? No one, that’s who.

For the widest selection of beers, choose between our brand-new Hop-Heads Beer Club, our U.S. Microbrewed Beer Club, our International Beer Club, or get the best of both worlds with our U.S. and International Variety Beer Club. But, if you’ve got a beer lover who spends their time and energy hunting down the rarest, most obscure beers, we’ll suggest The Rare Beer Club™, our only club that features the world’s best hand-selected rare beers.

Now, go out there, build your own Craft Beer Advent Calendar, and make some lucky beer lover’s Christmas the best one they’ve had. And remember: if you really want to make sure they have the best Beer Year of their lives, give them a membership to The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club. Santa always likes those who are nice.

Rare Beer Club Special Offer – Les Trois Mousquetaires

October 5, 2022 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

The Québécois good-beer scene is perhaps most renowned for breweries like Unibroue and Dieu du Ciel!, both of which see significant distribution throughout the U.S., but it’s small-scale operations like Les Trois Mousquetaires that remind us that it’s almost always better to visit. Located directly southeast of Montreal, about an hour north from the Vermont border, the brewery exports only a few occasional offerings, making their beers very difficult to find here south of the border. No doubt this is the reason they are far less well-known here than their fellow Quebec brewers, but we aim to help change that.

Les Trois Mousquetaires got its start back in 2004, shortly after its three founders (hence the Alexandre Dumas reference) had lost their jobs when a production plant was moved to Ontario. Using their experience as production engineers, they decided to purchase a small brewing operation on the north shore of Montreal. In 2008, brewer Alex Ganivet-Boileau took over the brewing responsibilities, and over the years the company has expanded its lineup from a pair of lagers to its current, expansive focus on German-style creations. Like the Greater Montreal region itself, the Les Trois Mousquetaires offerings capture a certain Old-World, European charm, but in a very bold and exciting way. We’ve been extremely big fans of this brewery for a number of years and we’re thrilled to secure limited quantities of not one but four superb examples of their brewing skill. Enjoy!

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.

Grande Cuvée Porter Baltique 2022 – Baltic Porter. 10% ABV.
Grande Cuvée Doppelbock 2022 – Doppelbock. 8.6% ABV.
Grande Cuvée Porter Baltique Édition Spéciale (Bourbon & Brandy Barrel Aged) 2021 – Baltic Porter aged in Bourbon & Brandy Barrels. 10.5% ABV.
Grande Cuvée Déjeuner Impérial 2021 – Imperial Stout aged in Bourbon barrels w/ maple staves and maple syrup, then cold-steeped w/ premium coffee. 11.5% ABV.

Flexible ordering allows you to order 4, 6, 8, 12, 18, or 24 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 Tuesday, October 18th at 12:00 PM Pacific. Orders will begin shipping out about a week later.

Cheers!

Kris Calef
President, The Rare Beer Club^®

Beyond the Bottle: Been a Pleasure Exploring Beer with You

September 15, 2022 by Ken Weaver

Had to dig real deep into my inbox to figure out when I’d started doing this work. Adam Nason from BeerPulse, who I had worked with while running the RateBeer Weekly newsletter, had put me in touch with Kris Calef here at the Rare Beer Club, and things just went from there. I couldn’t find the exact month I’d first started sending in notes, but it would’ve been around December of 2012—almost ten years ago! That’s longer than I’ve done just about anything ever.

I stuck around with this job for a number of reasons. I really liked working with all the folks here—Kris, Lindsay, Brett, Kristina, Gina, and Tony. I’d always really enjoyed the beers and was impressed by how consistent the club’s tasting panel was at choosing good options; even though my tastes had shifted more to lagers and IPAs in recent years, it was fun to get to try world-class Belgian strong ales and barrel-aged imperial stouts—or whatever out-there RBC collab Kris and company had cooked up for the club. For a lot of our exclusive beers, I was one of the first people on the planet to get a taste of these new releases—sometimes before the actual brewers did! It’s a weird, wonderful job. And I’ve tried hard to do my best with it. Getting samples to land on time was the hardest part. Pretty sure we were never more than a few days late with notes in the past 9+ years. I’m proud of that, and wow, that was not easy.

Where am I headed? I opened up an online art store about a year ago (kenweaver.com/shop) focusing on watercolor-and-ink art inspired by Sonoma County. And I picked up a part-time job doing technical writing and editing work in the clean-energy industry. Going to miss this gig, you folks, and the people I’ve gotten to work with at Rare Beer Club. Say hi if you catch me at a beer or art event anytime in the future. Wish you all the best, and thanks for reading!

Beyond the Bottle: Dabbling in “Cold IPA”

August 15, 2022 by Ken Weaver

I’ve probably had a few beers labeled “Cold IPAs” over the past year or two, but sitting with my wife at HenHouse Brewing here in Petaluma and drinking their new Ales for ALS beer—a “Cold IPA” with Ahtanum, Citra, Ekuanot, and Loral hops—was the first time I’d stopped and asked myself what a Cold IPA actually was. I’m pretty sure I’d been thinking of the Brut IPAs and India Pale Lagers of the past, and wrote Cold IPAs off as “this too shall pass.”

So… after reading way too many articles on the topic, the best I can make sense of this is as follows: Cold IPAs tend to use adjuncts (corn, rice, etc.) in their malt bill but generally avoid caramel/crystal malts; they are firmly hopped like a West Coast IPA, usually with a lot of dry hopping; and they’re fermented with either lager yeast or a combo of ale and lager yeasts, at a slightly warmer temperature (for lager yeast) than usual to avoid sulfur production. I’m not convinced that there’s any real clear distinction between Cold IPAs and India Pale Lagers, as the arguments of “Cold IPAs are hoppier” and “Cold IPAs don’t have sulfur” overlook the reality that there were hoppy-ass and low-sulfur IPLs well before anyone smashed the words “cold” and “IPA” together… But I think maybe I’ve seen too many IPAs for one lifetime.

That all said… Beers aiming for this particular part of the flavor spectrum can be pretty darn tasty and focused in their intent: crispy, clear, distraction-free showcases of HOPS. And it’s kinda hard to argue with that. This curiously hopped HenHouse one was delicious.

Beyond the Bottle: Sippin’ Quads

July 15, 2022 by Ken Weaver

The loosely defined Belgian-born style category of quadrupels or Abts tends to indicate the breweries’ strongest core offerings: higher in ABV than a dubbel (but packed with similarly dark specialty-malt character), stronger too than blond tripels, and typically more restrained in core sweetness than the beers labeled Belgian dark strong ales. It’s all a bit fuzzy. Quads / Abts are complex beers, but surprisingly smooth and rather easily paired with food courtesy of their Belgian yeast strains, which dry out the result, keeping overt sweetness in check. The end results are usually packed with generous dark malt character, as well as yeast expressions of clove, pepper, and other spices. Examples including Rochefort 10, Westvleteren XII, and St. Bernardus 12 are all outstanding examples of high-ABV brewing—with good reason. In spite of quite potent ABV levels (usually 10%+ or well beyond) they’re very easy to dig into.

The Rare Beer Club’s featured a wide range of quad / Abt examples over the years, including some renditions that stray well off the beaten path of the malt + yeast focus this style would traditionally stick to. Most recently, we’ve tasted La Trappe’s Practise What You Preach (a quad brewed with Scottish heather honey and American hops), Brouwerij Maenhout’s Ferre (a paler, fruity quad that’s more orange-amber than the amber-brown or darker we’d expect), Two Brother’s QuadRadical! (a blended quad, incorporating rum-soaked fruits), and Strange Roots’ Ancient Vortex (a blend of quadrupel and sour Flanders red ale). If you haven’t tried the traditional examples, though, these are incredible beers to sip on: packed with dark fruits, vinous warmth, and often dense caramelization, even licorice notes. The very first three Abts / quads mentioned above can be tracked down with varying effort (Westvleteren’s stateside availability comes and goes), but you can also look out for Lost Abbey’s Judgment Day, La Trappe’s Quadrupel, Unibroue Terrible—or check around at your local breweries. American renditions can sometimes be less careful with the Belgian yeast’s role, but you’ll get the gist.

Beyond the Bottle: Sipping Berliner Weisse

June 16, 2022 by Ken Weaver

The origins of Berliner Weisse, like so many beer styles, is pretty fraught, but this tart, rather low-ABV style was once the most popular alcoholic beverage in Berlin—with around 700 breweries making it during its peak in the 19^th century (per Fritz Briem’s piece in The Oxford Companion to Beer). Made with wheat in addition to barley, fermented at least partially with lactic acid bacteria, these refreshing beers were often around 3% ABV and were traditionally served with a choice of raspberry or woodruff syrups—though those are a bit challenging to find in the U.S. these days. The majority of current-day examples here are consumed on their own, though many breweries lean heavier on acidity, ABV, or employ fruit in the beer itself.

The Rare Beer Club’s highlighted a number of German-style Berliner Weisse versions over the years (in addition to this month’s Lunar Interference from August Schell), including at least a couple other releases from Schell’s Noble Star Collection, such as Basin of Attraction (a dry-hopped take) and Solar Evolution (a mashup of the Berliner Weisse style and Flanders red ale). 1809 Berliner Style Weisse (created by Dr. Fritz Briem, who also wrote the Oxford Companion’s “Berliner Weisse” entry) and The Bruery’s Hottenroth are two of the examples you’re more likely to find out in the wild, and both capture the style profile pretty well. Bear Republic’s Tartare has been solid (but heavy-handed on the acidity), and Oregon’s de Garde Brewing has spent a good bit of time here—creating a variety of intriguing fruited examples.

Beyond the Bottle: Traditional Gruit Ales

May 19, 2022 by Ken Weaver

Gruits tend to be understood today as beers that use something other than hops to provide their bittering elements. But that sense of hops as an essential part of beer—alongside water, barley, and yeast, and sometimes a few other things—is a relatively recent one. In The Oxford Companion to Beer’s entry on gruits (written by the reliable Dick Cantwell, and referencing the key text “Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers” by Stephen Harrod Buhner), gruits are described as “a generic term referring to the herb mixtures used to flavor and preserve beer before the general use of hops took hold in the 15^th and 16^th centuries in Europe.” So, 500 years of hop dominance (ballpark) for a beverage that’s been around since (ballpark) at least 7,000 BCE.

Gruit mixtures varied depending upon what was locally available—but common inclusions were sweet gale/bog myrtle, yarrow, and wild rosemary, while all sorts of other ingredients could be included as well: ginger, caraway, juniper, cinnamon… even some hops. While the socio-economic influences that led to the shift away from these (sometimes psychotropic…) ingredients is way past what I could possibly fit into this column space, it’s pretty fascinating for anyone who’d like an herbaceous deep dive into weird beer history.

Gruits are still pretty uncommon on the whole, with some of my favorites over the past 10 years or so being Upright’s Special Herbs (which hasn’t been made in years) and Moonlight Brewing’s gruit-inspired seasonal Working for Tips (which uses fresh redwood branches instead of hops). A recent SF Chronicle cited the efforts of Moonlight, Woods Beer, and Mad Fritz here in the Bay Area as being a local resurgence of gruit—but a lot of the stuff mentioned is either super limited or been around for a while. Gruits are still pretty far out there in our hop-centic beer world today, but they can also offer a neat peak into our past.