Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales & The Rare Beer Club Beer Naming Contest

June 26, 2017 by Kris Calef

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 26^th, 2017. Entrants will have until 2 pm PDT on Monday, July 17^th, 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 20^th, 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 26^th 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

Sours, sours and more sours!

June 1, 2017 by Kris Calef

Can we talk about sours for a minute here? You’ve no doubt noticed an uptick in sour beer production over the last few years. And quite a few of them are pretty approachable even for those who haven’t previously enjoyed them. Seems like every time we put a sour up to another beer in any given month, the sour is considerably more popular.

Of our 24 annual selections, we’ve run anywhere from 4-6 sours each year over the last 3 years. Thinking about doing more, but we want to make sure we’re keeping everyone happy as much as possible. One way to do it is to offer more sours via special offers. In fact, we’re thinking an ALL SOUR special offer. Okay, so we’re not just thinking it, we’re doing it.

Anybody heard of O’so Brewing Company in Plover, Wisconsin? I hadn’t until one of the guys on our SEO team sent me a bottle of Space Ace Oddity, a one-off run of a brett-fermented double dry-hopped Belgian white IPA made to commemorate the work of David Bowie. Really nice beer. We liked it so much that we’re having them brew us another batch just for our members which will be exclusively featured in May this year.

But we’re talkin’ about sours here, right? Right. Marc Buttera, founder, CEO and super cool cat, sent me a care package like I have not received in a few years that included twelve 750s, half of them pretty damned amazing sours. It was really hard to pick just 4, but we suffered through it and are running with the following in our July 2017 Rare Beer Club special offer:

On top of that, we’ve already got 7 sours slotted for 2017 and are looking to lock down on an 8th, including featured offerings from AleSong, Mystic, Panil, Sudwerk and an exclusive from Jolly Pumpkin Brewery.

I’d love to hear any and all thoughts you have on the direction we’re taking with sour beers!

Prost!
Kris

Rare Beer Club Naming Contest with Yazoo Brewing and Pints for Prostates

May 24, 2017 by Kris Calef

Wanna win a 6 month, 2-bottle membership to The Rare Beer Club® Of course you do. Who wouldn’t? Well, you’re going to have to do some work then, okay? You good with that part? It’s kind of important that you’re good with that part. Although, it’s not really work if you generally associate work with things that aren’t fun. Trust me, you can have fun with this one. One of the past winners of this particular project was an 8.5% smoked Dopplebock that was given one of my all time all-time favorite names…Prostator!

We need help naming a beer people.

This contest is our annual collaboration with Pints for Prostates, and this year Rick has secured Yazoo Brewing and the celebrated head of their sour program, Brandon Jones, to create a beer to help PFP educate dudes about getting properly screened for prostate cancer. Suffice to say…It’s a really worthy cause.

It’s always fun to jump on a call with a brewer and see what kind of creative ideas they’re kickin’ around on their pilot system or what glorious goodness awaits in a barrel program. Talking to Brandon didn’t disappoint. In his words, “I have a batch of an incredible merlot french oak barrel aged aged sour and Brettanomyces Belgian Golden Strong ale we are going to fruit with a combo of blackberries, tart cherries and raspberries. The base beer before fruit is showing nice character of pepper, dark fruit, and bright lemon lime.”

There was a long pause on the call and then Rick and I simultaneously and resoundingly said, “WE’RE IN”!

Suffice to say, it’s gonna be a pretty sweet offering and we’re really fired up about it.

Here’s what you need to know to play kids.

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 Wednesday, May 24^th, 2017. Entrants will have until 2 pm PDT on Monday, June 12^th, to submit up to three names.

Finalists will be chosen by The Rare Beer Club, Pints for Prostates, and Yazoo Brewing Company on Wednesday, June 14^th, at which time contestants, club members, and the general public can vote for their favorite name. The winning entry will be announced on Thursday, June 22^nd 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 September 2017, or earlier, to receive this exclusive beer from Yazoo Brewing Company.

Have fun!

Prost!
Kris

Beyond the Bottle: American Sour Beers

May 15, 2017 by Ken Weaver

This month’s featured Space Ace Oddity is bottle-conditioned with Brettanomyces, which adds significant layering of tropical flavors and aromatics to that beer. I recently finished reading a sample copy of Michael Tonsmeire’s American Sour Beers (Brewers Publications), which heads into a serious and wisely focused study into how the most influential U.S. sour-beer brewers are handling things like different combinations of Brett strains and souring bacteria, aging on wood (and elsewhere), spontaneous fermentation (and wild-yeast wrangling), and a great deal of the process-based nuance and personal flair that goes into making these complex beers. It also has a detailed section about how ten key places—New Belgium, Jolly Pumpkin, Russian River, Lost Abbey / Pizza Port, Cambridge, Captain Lawrence, The Bruery, Cascade, Ithaca, and Allagash—approach sour beer production (including production-schedule flowcharts).

It’s pretty geeky and glorious stuff. And, in the context of The Rare Beer Club, many of these are familiar names. I rummaged through my collection of rare empties to see what I’d tasted and kept around that was mentioned in the book, snapping photos for Instagram, obviously, but my oldest experiences with at least a few formative beers in the book came from orders I must have placed with The Rare Beer Club like a dozen years ago. My first taste of Pizza Port Cuvee de Tomme—a hugely influential beer with raisin puree, sour cherries, and three house strains of Brettanomyces, created by Tomme Arthur—was through The Rare Beer Club back in March 2005. Ditto for Rodenbach Grand Cru, a feature in January 2006, and Jolly Pumpkin Bam Noire (August 2007) and Weizen Bam (July 2008). Either I or someone else in our DC tasting crew snagged it via The Rare Beer Club. While I’d shortly thereafter leave the country and subsist on Nicaraguan lager for a number of long months, these and similarly formative beers were a big part of why I started writing about the drink professionally when I got back. If you’ve been digging the sour stuff for a bit—Tonsmeire’s book offers top-notch nostalgia.

Cheers!
Ken

How do our Rare Beer Club customers feel about 22 oz. packaging?

May 11, 2017 by Kris Calef

We’ve been kicking around the idea of running 2-3 beers a year in The Rare Beer Club that are not packaged in 750ml bottles, but rather 22 oz. bottles for quite some time now. There are some pretty sweet beers out there that are only packaged in 22s and ultimately, it would open up that many more breweries and beers as prospective features. Think special offers or RBC exclusives from Shmaltz Brewing Company like Funky Jewbelation or Cigar City’s Marshal Zhukov’s Penultimate Push, an 11.5% Imperial Stout with Coffee and Vanilla.

Most recently, we’ve been presented with a special offering from Humboldt Brewing Company. Specifically, they sent us a couple bottles of 2015 Black Xantus, an 11% Imperial Stout infused with fair-trade, organic coffee from a local roaster, Jobella, and aged for 6 months in a combination of Bourbon, retired Firestone Union and wine barrels. It’s taken the gold at the Denver International Beer Competition and US Open Beer Championship and boasts a 99 overall rating on RateBeer.

The short of it is, we loved it. A lot. It poured opaque with a dense light brown head. The nose showed big roasted and chocolate malt contributions, coffee, and toffee, all on a notable malty molasses backdrop. The nose was a solid representation of the flavor profile: Dark caramel, molasses malty goodness, chocolate malt, coffee, and roasted malt. And with nearly a couple years in the bottle, some sherry notes started to emerge. This baby’s only going to get better with time. Mouthfeel was viscous as hell and body was full.

Anyway, we liked it enough to put it out there to our members to see how you’d feel if a couple times a year one of your Rare Beer Club bottles was in a bomber (22 oz.) rather than a 750ml (roughly 25 oz.). We’re talking about 3 ounces less beer, but in our humble opinion, well worth the trade-off.

Whaddya think?

Prost!
Kris

Beyond the Bottle: WTF is a Braggot?

April 15, 2017 by Ken Weaver

Braggots are relatively unfamiliar turf for me: beer plus honey, with everything beyond that a mystery. The Oxford Companion of Beer adds that they’re made with malt and honey, ideally the honey in greater abundance, to separate them from honey beers; braggots reside in the space between beers and meads. OCB: “Historical references suggest braggot is a Celtic drink from at least the 12^th century; it is mentioned in The Canterbury Tales.” (A modern-ish version reads: “Her mouth was sweet as bragget or as mead / Or hoard of apples laid in hay or weed.”)

Romantic stuff. In The Beer Bible, Jeff Alworth adds that “Braggot […] is ancient. There is no strict definition beyond honeyed beer, and by that description, braggot goes all the way back to the Sumerians. Archeologists have discovered honeyed beer in pottery from Phrygia from 700 BCE […] and in Gaul during roughly the same time period.” In his Radical Brewing, Randy Mosher quotes the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus, speaking about the Germanic people: “[They] lie on bear skins and drink mead or beer brewed with honey from large drinking horns. They can bear hunger and cold weather easily, but not the thirst.”

Braggots are not the easiest things to track down. The well-regarded Brother Adam’s Bragget Honey Ale from Atlantic Brewing Co. (“named for Brother Adams, a monk from Buckfast Abbey who is credited with saving the bee industry”) was the lone encounter with the style I’ve got notes on. Kuhnhenn Brewing Co. in Warren, Michigan has made a bunch of these over the years, including a Dry Saison Braggot, Imperial Raspberry Braggot, and Heights of Sterling Braggot (dry-hopped with Sterling). If you’re lucky, your local might have a one-off.

National Beer Day!

April 7, 2017 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

On March 22, 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt signed an amendment to the Volstead Act known as the Cullen-Harrison Act, a law to allow people to brew and sell beer (as long as it was under 4% ABV). Once signed, President Roosevelt was famously quoted “I think this would be a good time for a beer.”

On April 7, 1933 the Cullen-Harrison Act went into effect and for the first time in thirteen years hundreds of people gathered outside taverns, pubs, and breweries to buy and drink their first legal beer.

As you join in on the celebrations on National Beer Day, what brew are you reaching for?

Cheers!