DIY Craft Beer Advent Calendar

December 5, 2019 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.

Beyond the Bottle: The Seltzer Monster

August 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

Hard seltzer has been making a lot of noise this summer… This segment of bubbly alcoholic water has seen a 193% increase year-over-year in a recent Nielsen survey, and some industry analysts predict it’ll reach a $1-billion industry by the end of the year. U.S. Today (admittedly not the most immediate barometer for cutting-edge beverage trends…) named it “the boozy beverage of summer 2019.” Your mileage may vary… But White Claw memes abound, and I have spent a nontrivial part of my week sketching out seltzer monsters for Massive Potions.

It’s well outside the core Rare Beer Club wheelhouse—but it’s been kinda hard to ignore.

I did a roundup of hard seltzer for my column at All About Beer Magazine a few years back, to the degree that I’m pretty good with never having to drink another one. But I’ll presume that the segment has improved at least a little bit from those earliest days, and I’m curious to hear from Rare Beer Club members who’ve ventured to hard-seltzer land. Have you actually tried anything interesting in this space? Or is it all nostalgic sugar water, masquerading as a health-conscious option to pull in the light-beer crowd? Chime in on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: The Summer of Hoppy Sours

July 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

It’s harder to pinpoint beer trends these days, when anything not bolted down gets tossed in the fermenter. But the coalescence of kettle sours and hazy IPAs certainly have this summer looking like a peak moment for hoppy sours. I’ll limit my disparagement of kettle sours (got that out of my system last month!) and head right on into the folks that are doing combos of hoppy and tartness well. If you’re digging that August Schell Basin of Attraction—go forth.

New Belgium’s Le Terroir is one of the old-school examples that sent a lot of us down this road. It’s a dry-hopped sour ale that sees long-term aging in oak foeders, before getting dry-hopped with Amarillo and Strata, and I still remember tracking this one down in Boulder a decade back: tropical, grassy, beautifully handled throughout. Almanac Beer Co. out here in NorCal has done a bunch of “Hoppy Sour” releases, with recent takes including Strawberry Hopcake (featuring a mélange of fruits, plus Sabro, Citra and Cashmere hops) and Tropical Galaxy (a Brett-focused foeder beer with a hefty dry-hop of Galaxy). Cantillon’s Cuvee des Champions and Iris are dry-hopped classics—if you can find them. And Crooked Stave, De Garde, and Prairie have also each released a variety of hoppy + sour options as of late.

Got a hoppy-sour beer you’ve been digging? Chime in on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Dry, Bitter, Belgian

May 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

In chatting with Garden Path’s Ron Extract about this month’s featured The Garden Paths Led to Flowered, he mentioned XX Bitter from Belgium’s Brouwerij De Ranke as being a point of inspiration for it. If you haven’t yet crossed paths with XX Bitter, it’s more bitter and expressive in its show of herbaceous, grassy hops than one would expect from a 6% blonde. And it’s also basically the perfect sort of beer for repeated pints: layered, not numbingly bitter, crisp with depth.

It was a bit easier to get hold of fresh XX Bitter and the similarly poised Taras Boulba (from Brasserie de La Senne) back when living in DC, as the fresh import options are a bit patchier these days in California. Our tasting crew in DC sought out these beers and any adjacent kin: Orval, De La Senne’s Zinnebir, Thiriez Extra (from France), Jolly Pumpkin’s Bam Biere… In basic terms: potent hops, but more traditionally noble/herbal/floral—plus supportive yeast.

Hoppy Belgian blonde… Belgian pale ale/IPA… Buncha overlapping terms for this general space. The Rare Beer Club has previously highlighted De Ranke’s XXX Bitter, an amped-up version of XX Bitter with 50% more hops. Up here in Sonoma County, some of the closer alternatives are session options like Redemption or, with a more neutral yeast, Aud Blond from Russian River—but still not quite that hop density + yeast combo of something like XX Bitter.

Have a dry, bitter, Belgian-inclined beer you’re digging? Chime in on Twitter via @rarebeerclub.

Beyond the Bottle: More Beers with Tea

April 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

One of the two featured craft beers in The Rare Beer Club this month is Brasserie Dunham’s Pale Duck, a dry-hopped and tea-infused saison that has Dan Cong oolong tea added just prior to botting. Eloi and company over at Brasserie Dunham wanted to develop a new beer with tea based on one of their core offerings, Leo’s Early Breakfast IPA: a collaboration with Anders Kissmeyer that includes guava and Earl Grey tea atop a more traditional IPA framework. At least one beer made with tea has been featured in the Rare Beer Club previously, as some of the club’s long-time members may recall Biere de Goord: Jolly Pumpkin’s green-tea saison.

Best Tea Beers

If you’re enjoying Pale Duck, or just curious about beers with tea to try, you’ll likely have a few options available nearby.

Sah’tea by Dogfish Head Brewery

Dogfish Head’s Sah’tea, which originally debuted back in 2009, was probably my first tea beer (as was true for a lot of folks), although it’s been bit since this one’s seen a bottling. Modeled after a Finnish beer from the 9^th century, the wort for Sah-tea is “caramelized over white-hot river rocks,” and uses foraged juniper berries and black tea.

Hopfentea by Perennial Artisanal Ales

A more frequent appearance, Perennial’s Hopfentea is a 4.2% Berliner Weisse-style ale steeped on a house-made tropical tea blend, including hibiscus, lemongrass, mango, and papaya.

Magic Ghost by Brasserie Fantôme

And Fantôme’s Magic Ghost specifically incorporates green tea in its funky and strong Belgian ale framework. (And now that I look it up… It was featured by The Rare Beer Club way back in 2011.)

Lots of breweries are experimenting with different types of tea as of late. Got a local beer option made with tea you’re digging? Let us know what’s good on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Revisiting Weizenbocks

March 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

It has been at least a few years since the Rare Beer Club featured a weizenbock as one of its featured selections. The most recent example I dug up was Meantime Brewing Co.’s Limited Edition Weizen Double Bock, which the club featured back in August 2014. This style, as is true for many of the more out-there traditional beer styles in the world, has tended to find more frequent expression outside its country of origin (although many of the tastiest classic examples of the weizenbock space still definitely come from Germany). But the fact that the club’s 2014 weizenbock example was from England—and this newest one from Les Trois Mousquetaires in Quebec—kinda echoes the general state of the weizenbock style overall.

The history of weizenbock generally traces its lineage back to Schneider Aventinus, which was introduced by famed weissbier producer Private Weissbierbrauerei G. Schneider & Sohn in Bavaria back in 1907. That said… writer K. Florian Klemp noted in the (since-defunct) All About Beer Magazine that bock used wheat way back in the pre-Reinheitsgebot 14^th century; in that frame, this combo of wheat + strong malty beer has at least been explored a bit before. For modern drinkers: I’ll say that these beers are some of my favorite to seek out, combining the fluffy, toasty contributions of wheat with that rich, malty focus of a bock or doppelbock.

If you’re digging the Les Trois Mousquetaires example, there’s a decent chance you’ll be able to find some other weizenbocks locally. Aventinus, Weihenstephaner’s Vitus, and Ayinger’s Weizenbock are worth checking out and on the more readily available side. My personal fav in this general space is probably The Livery’s Bourbon Barrel Aged Wheat Trippelbock from Michigan—which clearly takes everything up a few notches. Have a local weizenbock you’re digging, or a fav classic? Let the club know what’s tasting good on Twitter: @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Mango Beers

February 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

If a fruit exists, there’s a solid chance it’s been made into a beer by this point. But mango is one of those periphery fruits that, while used nowhere near as frequently as classic additions like, say, cherries and raspberries, still tends to feature consistently well in beers like tropical IPA. Hop varieties like Citra, Galaxy, Mosaic and Azacca can give mango notes to beer sans the addition of actual fruit, while providing easy anchor points when using actual mango.

There’s definitely more than one way to mango. Hundreds of mango varieties and cultivars exist, turning yellow to oxblood in color when ripe, and they’re cultivated all over the world (with around half of the world’s production coming from India). When my wife and I were teaching school down in Nicaragua for a few months, there were these massive mango trees outside the schoolhouse, and the kids knocked the fruit down with long sticks and ate every single one green. (YMMV when it comes to trying this out with varieties found stateside…)

For folks looking for more mango-y options, there are a bunch about. In additional to your local brewer’s seasonal options, Omnipollo’s Bianca Mango Lassi Gose has seen some solid distribution stateside, melding mango puree to a gose framework.

For a fruited IPA of more biblical proportions, keep an eye out for To Øl’s Garden of Eden, an IPA with additions of apricot, guava, mango, papaya, and passionfruit. It might even prevent scurvy.

Got a mango or fruit beer you’ve been digging? Let us know what’s tasting good on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.