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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

2017 Holiday Special Offer!!

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It’s our pleasure to bring you another Rare Beer Club® Special Offer! This 2017 Holiday Offer features four limited-production and limited-distribution beers, each of which impressed us greatly and truly represent excellent choices to accompany good times during the holiday period. You can read a summary below or visit the special offer page for full tasting notes and access to the order form.

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.

  1. The Spencer Brewery: 2015 Trappist Holiday Ale – (Authentic Trappist Holiday Ale) A lightly spiced holiday ale from Spencer, after two+ years of cellaring behind it, it’s developed into something sublime. Aged notes of rich caramels and more contribute layers that expand this beer into something else, giving it entirely new dimensions. 9% ABV.
  2. Brouwerij Van Steenberge: Piraat Special Reserve – (Rum-Barrel-Aged Piraat Ale (Belgian Strong Golden Ale))That sweet and floral underlying character from the rum barrel is a great match to the peppery, honeyed core of Piraat, and together these things do magical stuff. 10.5% ABV.
  3. Humbolt Brewing Company: 2015 Black Xantus – (Barrel-Aged Imperial Java Stout)An imperial java stout, brewed with a fair-trade, organic coffee sourced from Joebella Coffee Roasters in the nearby town of Atascadero, and it then gets barrel-aged for six months in a combination of bourbon, wine and Firestone Union barrels. It’s unlike anything else we’ve had. 11% ABV.
  4. The Bruery: White Chocolate – (Bourbon-Barrel-Aged Wheatwine Ale w/ TCHO Cacao Nibs & Fresh Vanilla Beans)This beer is an experience. A mischievously pale, golden-orange offering that simultaneously provides a deftly balanced impact of bourbon, chocolate and cocoa. The TCHO cacao nibs and fresh vanilla beans that go into the core profile of this beer do exceptional work, providing a dense main structure for the rest of this to unfold. 13.8% ABV.

Flexible ordering allows you to order 2, 4, 6, 8, or 12 total bottles, combining any of the 4 featured beers in any way to get there so that you can easily try all four. Orders ship after our July 31 cut off date.

Order online or at 800-625-8238 Mon-Fri 7 am – 5 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.

Click the “Learn More” button for full tasting notes, and to access the order form.

If you wish to get any of these limited selections, please respond to this special offer by 12:00 PM Pacific on Monday, November 20, 2017.

Cheers!

 

Beyond the Bottle: Who’s Got Your Favorite Design in Beer?

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There’s so much vibrant work being done in the overlap of beer and design. I especially dig the narrative angle of much of the Jolly Pumpkin label art—the hooded female traveler and attendant owl on Forgotten Tales of the Last Gypsy Blender; the regal & thirsty feline on La Roja, with epaulettes and cat bun; the paddling skeleton (in maybe the same jacket as the cat) floating by a dragon-fruit sea creature on Persimmon Ship. I have zero clue what the masked figure on the L’épouvantail Noir label is up to, for example. But I definitely want to find out.

Compelling beer-label design will often involve including a certain measure of narrative heft, usually driven by character. The cloud kings, multi-season brains, and supernatural spaces of Jester King’s artwork by Josh Cockrell. The full piazzas, barrel-aged apartment buildings, and living landscapes of Colin Healey at Prairie Artisan Ales. Also: witchsharks, wizard wolf, and ruin layouts from Bellwoods Brewery in Toronto, designed by Doublenaut. Partizan Brewing in London. The lush cans of Indeed. Plus, the pattern-heavy: the Stillwaters and Other Halfs.

It’s hard to imagine that there’s ever been a more creative, competitive period in label design. Which brewery’s artwork are you currently digging?

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

Beyond the Bottle: What’s Your Favorite Trappist Beer?

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The “Authentic Trappist Product” designation for beer is well regimented, with 11 breweries currently allowed to use the labeling. The ATP hexagon identifies beers made inside Trappist monasteries while adhering to certain key requirements—such as being brewed by monks or under their supervision, and generating profits used solely for monastic upkeep, or charity.

The majority of us become familiar with Trappist beer through one of the Belgian breweries: Achel, Chimay, Orval (Michael Jackson’s presumed favorite), Rochefort, Westmalle and the much-esteemed Westvleteren. There’s also Austria’s Stift Engelszell, La Trappe and Zundert in The Netherlands, Tre Fontane in Italy (with piddly distro), and Spencer here in the U.S. A twelfth, Mont des Cats in France, is technically a Trappist beer but it gets brewed at Chimay.

So, think back… Which of the above has made the biggest impact on you? Personally, I recall ideal pairings of Chimay Blue + Ashton VSG cigars back when I lived out on the east coast (and still smoked cigars). Orval’s pretty much always difficult to pass up. Westy 12’s proven world-beating or meh depending on the batch, while Westvleteren Blond is wholly different and pretty great in its own right. Plus, the Achel and Westmalle golden and brown beers are otherworldly and actually easy to find… But man, I’d put Rochefort 10 up against anything: epic malt depths and caramelization, but absurdly smooth and crisp. What’s your favorite?

Beyond the Bottle: What Was Your First Sour Beer?

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Sour beers can be a shock to the system for newer beer drinkers. So much so that it’s hard to forget your first. Couldn’t tell you my first IPA, first stout—even my first smoked beer (I’m pretty sure it was a Schlenkerla, tho). Sieve memory. But I do remember my first sour beer.

It was a 750mL bottle of Cantillon’s Lou Pepe Kriek. I’d snagged it from a nearby institution of alcohol known as Chevy Chase Wine & Spirits, in DC. It was where you’d go, especially a dozen years ago, for the weird stuff: cold-shipped Finnish Sahti (thumbs up), ice cider from Quebec (thumbs up), and pale lagers from places you’d never heard of (wiggly thumb). The damn thing cost like $25, which was ludicrous. It smelled like vinegar. My wife (now entirely fond of sour beers) was like, You’re on your own. It was awful and I drank the whole thing.

Revisiting that beer three years later (in 2008): One of the best things I’d ever tasted.

Dear Readers: What was your very first sour beer? (Ideally not said Lou Pepe.) Was it great? Was it harrowing? Have you revisited it since? Hit us up on Twitter: Rare Beer Club’s exactly that (@RareBeerClub), as am I (@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

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