Notes from the Panel Archives - Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

DIY Craft Beer Advent Calendar

November 13, 2018 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 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

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.

Materials 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.

Materials 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 festive – we won’t judge you.

After gluing the tubes together, fill the tubes with tasty beers, 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’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: Great American Beer Fest Notes

October 10, 2018 by Ken Weaver

Knocking out this latest column right after getting back from Denver. It was my fourth year judging out at the Great American Beer Festival, and it’s one of the parts of my involvement in the industry that’s particularly rewarding each year. Three days, and up to six flights a day, of beers across varying styles and executions, judged blind with some of the more thoughtful and experienced palates in the beer world. This year we were 298 judges across 12 countries, sensorily combing through approximately 8,650 beers entered by 2,400 American breweries.

Also: 391 entries in the new hazy/juicy IPA category. Which gives you a sense of tone.

Some clips from the highlights reel: The competition is in the process of transitioning fully to an eJudging platform, so I got to knock out some of my first-round notes with a tablet—which I think is guaranteed to streamline the process and clarity of notes going forward, and they’re rolling it out carefully. During the sessions of the beer festival itself: it was interesting to see lines snaking away from hazy-focused spots like Weldwerks and Great Notion, where that fanfare hadn’t quite crested a few years ago when we’d first seen them. Weldwerks’ end-corner booth had a dedicated side for brewers and judges; even that tended to have a line. I chatted with a few folks about what it means to have a competition with an increasingly less familiar set of names winning awards as the industry expands, and if that’s cause for concern. As expected: Certainly saw a number of Brut IPAs at the fest. On the Rare Beer Club front: shout out to The Bruery for taking a bronze for Mischief—their 10^th GABF medal to date.

Beyond the Bottle: More on Gotlandsdricka

September 28, 2018 by Ken Weaver

One of the two featured RBC beers this month is styled as a Gotlandsdricka, a particularly out-there style from Sweden one doesn’t see very often. It had me thinking of Finnish sahti, which shares the use of juniper, among other key details. Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing and Svante Ekelin’s entry in The Oxford Companion To Beer are both good spots to start digging in.

The featured beer from Rowley Farmhouse Ales overcomes two of the main challenges in brewing authentically minded Gotlandsdricka: they foraged boughs of juniper from around their local Sante Fe region (these traditionally get preboiled and/or used to make a filtering base during lautering), and they acquired birch-smoked malt through a friend who happens to do things like that in the Jemez wilderness, outside of Sante Fe. That addition of a birch-smoked malt provides, as Mosher puts it, “a faint wintergreen tang.” He includes a recipe for Gotlandsdricka that includes traditional adds like bog bean, blessed thistle, and bog myrtle.

These beers have a lot going on. The only example I can recall trying off the top of my head was the Jester King Gotlandsdricka, many many years ago. Närke Kulturbryggeri makes one of the other examples that sees any significant availability. Jopen in the Netherlands and Off Color in Chicago both have their own versions. Though Mosher and others mentioned that Gotlandsdricka was very possibly the everyday drink of the Vikings (mead was reserved for fancier occasions), they’d have a tough time finding a steady supply of it today.

Beyond the Bottle: An Endless Descent into IPA Land

August 16, 2018 by Ken Weaver

I first wrote about the hazy-IPA trend a few years back in All About Beer Magazine, and at the time there was still the lingering question of: Are these murky IPAs really going to make it? I had been tasting all kinds of weirdness for my AAB column at the time, as breweries tried to work through every flavor of the month to pay off expansion bills: kettle sours, lifeless fruit IPAs, alcoholic seltzers… In that light, the ascent of hazy IPAs felt like a breath of fresh air.

Fast-forward to the present—which is pretty damn hazy. The beer-trading world has shifted heavily toward brewpub-only hazy IPAs (or New-England IPAs, or Northeastern IPAs—or whatever one’s inclined to label them, as they’re pretty much everywhere now), to the degree that even the once-maligned can has become a point of prestige. Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, and pretty much anybody paying attention released a canned hazy IPA in the time since. My Instagram feed has slowly simplified into a wall of super-hazed IPA and hasn’t turned back.

But, of course, the IPA pendulum keeps swinging… Out here in California (and apparently at least as far away as Poland already), we’re seeing the emergence of beers labeled “Brut IPAs” that use a brewing enzyme to ferment down to a bone-dry, Champagne-like feel. Though my first (internal) response was, “You mean like Pliny?”, these IPAs seem to be heading towards a space less overtly bitter than typical West Coast IPAs, while also less sweet than hazy ones. The most cynical side of my brain wonders how many more beer styles we can come up with involving the word IPA… But its practical side reassures me the answer is many, many more.

Beyond the Bottle: The Whole Melon

July 15, 2018 by Ken Weaver

One of the two featured beers this month is O’so Brewing Company’s Project LO, a wild ale that’s dry-hopped with Huell Melon hops. I couldn’t remember tasting this particular hop in anything specific, and many of the releases featuring this newer hop tend to be draft-only or limited distro. Firestone Walker’s Easy Jack is one of the more readily available options, and it puts the hop in tandem with various German, New Zealand and American additions. The Cloud from Stillwater Artisanal features Huell Melon hops alongside Hallertau Blanc, Mosaic and Mandarina Bavaria varieties. And Maui Brewing’s latest collab with Crooked Stave, Two Tickets to Paradise, features it in a tart tropical saison with Mandarina Bavaria and Motueka.

Huell Melon was released in 2012 by the Hop Research Center Hüll, a historic hop research institute in the Hallertau region of Germany, and it’s touted for having softer notes of melon and berry—particularly ripe honeydew and strawberry. Brewers Supply Group notes that the hop goes particularly well with the yeast characteristics of hefeweizens and Belgian-style ales, while also suggesting it as a possible standalone hop for summer seasonals or Brett beers. If it’s still a bit under the radar, a lot of breweries have done small batches with this hop. Look for it under the name of Huell Melon, Hüll Melon or (if a little less often) Hallertau Melon.