Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

Beyond the Bottle: Acquired Tastes

September 15, 2021 by Ken Weaver

One of the most interesting parts of exploring beer is starting to enjoy things that you didn’t like before. Our friends recently popped some bottles of lambic to share at their house, and my wife Ali couldn’t help but recounting the time that I’d tried my first sour beer. We’d been living in DC, it was around 2005—and I was on a mission to try said “sour beer.” Such beers were a lot more scarce back then, and after assembling a target list of four or five of the well-rated sour examples over on RateBeer.com (where I’d been tasting through the various style categories), I managed to find my first sour beer: a $26 bottle of Cantillon Lou Pepe Kriek.

I only recently learned Cantillon’s Lou Pepe lineup of extra-impactful lambics took its name from a region of southwest France, where grandfathers are called Lou Pepe. Needless to say, I was not ready for grandpa lambic. I slowly drank it all because it was a $26 bottle of beer.

It’s harder for me to get to that same degree of unfamiliar flavor turf now, fifteen years on, a lot of it spent as a professional beer writer and reviewer. But it’s still fun to try and find that unexplored terrain… I recently picked up a Kölsch-style ale with Ceylon cinnamon and, uh, guava (from our local go-to HenHouse Brewing), which turned out shockingly good despite the disparate parts. And a friend shared an actually decent hard seltzer recently, from a local place called Ficks (made with real fruit juice). Who knew. What about you? What new drinks are you exploring? Working on any acquired tastes? Hit us up on Twitter @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Summer Beers

August 15, 2021 by Ken Weaver

The Rare Beer Club’s got two potent but summer-minded beers featured this month: an imperial witbier and an imperial pilsner. And it got me to thinking about summer beers in general. As Sonoma County’s opened up, we’ve been venturing out a bit more, including some trips out to Moonlight and Russian River. And the warmer months have been calling for some lighter beers (although a little Double Dry-Hopped Pliny the Elder in metal cups in Russian River’s Windsor beer garden wasn’t too bad either). Our regular summertime go-tos include Reality Czeck from Moonlight and Trumer Pils, both firmly hopped lagers brewed in NorCal. We’d also visited a beer garden in Sebastopol recently that thankfully had Brasserie De La Senne’s refreshingly bitter Taras Boulba on tap—which we find way less often on the West Coast.

Bell’s Oberon. Dry, citrusy lambic and oysters. Fresh canned pale ale on the beach. As of late: we’ve also been picking up more non-alcoholic options, like Lagunitas’ IPNA.

At least, that’s what I’ve been craving while the weather’s hot. Kegerator currently includes a nicely crisp 5.8%-ABV pale ale with Amarillo, Citra and Mosaic hops from our local folks at Cooperage Brewing Co. What have you been digging this summer? What’s the one summer-minded beer you wish you could get right now? Hit us up on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: The Drunken Botanist

July 15, 2021 by Ken Weaver

I’ve amassed a pretty decent library of beer- and alcohol-related books over the years as part of my work, but it’s rare to encounter one that fundamentally shifts how I think about beer. I finally got around to reading Amy Stewart’s The Drunken Botanist (had gotten it as a gift off my wish list a few years back), subtitled “The Plants that Create The World’s Great Drinks.” It approaches alcoholic drinks through the lens of botany, starting with the main sources of fermentable sugars—from agave to wheat—before heading into briefer sections that discuss the numerous herbs, spices, flowers, fruits, trees, nuts, seeds, vegetables, etc. that are used to infuse, mix, and garnish our drinks. Just about everything we imbibe starts out as a plant.

While not beer specific, The Drunken Botanist includes sections on barley, hops, and yeast, as well as so many of the special additions that contribute unique flavors and aromatics to beer. The book’s broken into easily manageable chunks—five pages focused on oak, for example; a few pages on lemon verbena; a single page for lesser-used things like tamarind—sprinkled with both botanical science and key historical tidbits, and it was ideal for picking up during lunch or whenever I had a spare half-hour. I learned about how fungi-infected rye might’ve influenced the Salem Witch Trials. How modern citrus trees likely trace their origins back to early versions of the pomelo, citron, and/or mandarin. And how basically all modern plums in the U.S. originate from the plant breeding of Sonoma County’s own Luther Burbank (my wife and I lived on the same block as the Luther Burbank Gardens for a number of years; it was also the first time I had allergies). Overall, the book succeeds in bringing to life the many historic and contemporary ties between the plant world and the alcoholic beverages we love.

Have you checked out The Drunken Botanist yet? Found other good beer-related books over the last year you think are worth digging into? Let us know on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Sorta Kinda Normal, Maybe?

June 16, 2021 by Ken Weaver

It feels weird to think we’re (hopefully) through the worst part of a pandemic. My wife and I managed to get our first dose of the Pfizer vaccine the very first day we became eligible here in California, and now we’re counting down the days after our second dose until the 95%-ish immunity kicks in. As of writing this, the CDC announced that fully vaccinated individuals could feel confident resuming normal activities again—even, dear god, indoor ones. Active cases here in Sonoma County have been hoving around 200 to 300, rather than the 7,000+ cases we’d seen during peaks in January. We’re this close to hitting our final reopening tier.

It feels like, fingers crossed, the end of a very long, dark tunnel. Our pod has ventured out to our local go-to spot (Moonlight Brewing Co.) a few times now—listening to live music and enjoying pints of their Reality Czeck lager and Bombay by Boat IPA, in well-spaced outdoor seating. Our ‘nephews’ played Legos and trounced us at card games. We ran into friends we hadn’t seen in forever. It all felt… so oddly normal. And the beer has never tasted so good.

How have things been shaping up in your area? If you’ve been vaccinated, how did that first beer out taste? What local places have you been missing that you’ve finally felt comfortable visiting again? Let us know on Twitter via the @RareBeerClub account. Also! Be sure to tip and treat your waitstaff well; they’ve been through a lot making these spaces available to us.

Nebraska Brewing Company Special Offer

June 10, 2021 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

For this Special Offer, we’re excited to have the opportunity to work once again with our friends over at Nebraska Brewing Company to offer our RBC members four of our favorite barrel-aged ales from their lineup. If you’ve never had the opportunity to sample any of their complexly layered Barrel Aged Reserve Series offerings, you’re in for a treat. Each beer is capable of additional cellaring, but they are drinking perfectly now.

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.

Please Note: All beers are 500-ml (16.9-oz) bottles.

Barrel Aged Reserve Series: Mélange à Trois – Belgian-Style Strong Blonde Ale aged in Chardonnay barrels. 10% ABV.
Barrel Aged Reserve Series: Fathead – Barleywine-Style Ale, aged 6 months in Whiskey barrels. 12.1% ABV.
Barrel Aged Reserve Series: Black Betty – Imperial Stout, aged 6 months in fresh Whiskey barrels. 10.6% ABV.
Barrel Aged Reserve Series: M.O.A.B. – Imperial Stout aged in Bourbon barrels. 13.7% ABV.

Flexible ordering allows you to order 4, 6, 8, 12, 18, 24, or 48 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 12:00 PM Pacific on Thursday, June 18th. Orders will begin shipping out about a week later.

Cheers!

Kris Calef
President, The Rare Beer Club^®

Beyond the Bottle: Exploring Non-Alcoholic Beer

May 10, 2021 by Ken Weaver

A friend recently brought over some bottles of Lagunitas’ IPNA for me to try, back when he was doing Dry January—and I’ve found myself picking up occasional six-packs of it since. If you’re not familiar: this is Lagunitas’ non-alcoholic IPA, which they released toward the end of 2020. For me it’s pretty comparable to an actual IPA and, as I’ve been trying to take more days off from alcohol throughout the week, it’s been a helpful option for taking the edge off. I’ve had minimal experience with non-alcoholic beers, but it’s made me curious to try more.

One of my local shops has a whole non-alcoholic beer section, and I’ve been slowly working through things, finding some good n/a options for the off days. Athletic Brewing’s IPA was a bit less satisfying, but they’ve got a whole range of n/a releases: from hazy IPA to gose to a maple brown. Paulaner Weizen-Radler did the trick, combining a subtle hefeweizen core and spritzy lemon juice, and these have been solid beside spicy chicken sausages as a lunch-beer alternative. Weihenstephaner has an n/a wheat beer I need to check out, and I’ll get around to the various spendy Mikkeller options out there (really enjoyed their Drink’in in the Sun a friend brought on a beach trip). Note that n/a options tend to be priced like normal beers; I see these as being an occasional pickup, when I’m looking for hops etc., just sans alcohol.

Have you headed down the non-alcoholic-beer path yet? Spelunked the non-alcoholic IPA caves? Finding anything particularly good? Hit us up on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Light at the End of the Tunnel

March 25, 2021 by Ken Weaver

Out here in Sonoma County, we’re finally heading out of the ‘Purple Tier’ phase of COVID times. The Purple Tier is basically the worst tier of California’s four-tier, color-coded system in their Blueprint for a Safer Economy, and we’ve never known any other tier. Watching the local case numbers drop steadily over the past few months, as folks get vaccinated and peaks from over the holidays wane, it’s been pretty fantastic to see our daily new cases dip down to double digits. As of March 14^th, we headed down into the Red Tier for the very first time.

This isn’t a huge shift for all businesses. Breweries and distilleries no longer are required (for whatever reason this existed in the first place…) to have people order food before ordering a beer, though they’re still only open for outdoor service. There’s also reservations involved, as well as a 90-minute time limit for guests, but it’s at least a little bit of progress. Bars still have to remain closed, but restaurants are now able to open up for indoor service at 25% capacity. Local COVID levels are still ‘Substantial’ in the Red Tier—but, finally, things are improving.

Personally I can’t friggin wait to get a vaccine and take advantage of indoor dining again, and I’m so looking forward to eventually getting to sit inside a pub and catch up with people I’ve not seen in forever. How are things looking in your neck of the woods? Have breweries had any of their restrictions lifted? Are you seeing positive changes where you’re at? Chime in on Twitter via @RareBeerClub. Hope things are finally clearing up wherever you’re at.