Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club - Page 3 of 43 - A craft beer blog written by the experts of The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

Rare Beer Club Naming Contest with Pints for Prostates and Rowley Farmhouse Ales

June 6, 2018 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

We need help naming a beer, and if you help us you can win a 6 month, 2-bottle membership to The Rare Beer Club®! Sounds fun right!?

This contest is our annual collaboration with Pints for Prostates, and this year Rick has secured Rowley Farmhouse Ales, located in Santa Fe, NM, to create their version of a Gotlandsdricka, the indigenous beer of Gotland, Sweden’s largest island. According to Founder and Head Brewer, John Rowley, “It’s our homage to Scandinavian farmhouse ales, which are lesser known, but have been brewed longer than the classic Belgian and French versions. Our take on this historic style contains a portion of birch smoked malt and was mashed and lautered over a false bottom of locally foraged juniper.” The beer will also contain locally foraged juniper berries, gathered from a favorite trail of John’s east of Santa Fe.

The limited-edition label will feature the Pints for Prostates logo, which includes the blue ribbon to remind people of the ongoing search for a cure to prostate cancer, a leading cause of death among American men. “The annual release of a special beer through The Rare Beer Club helps us to connect with guys and urge them to take charge of their health by getting screened for prostate cancer,” said Rick Lyke, a prostate cancer survivor who founded Pints for Prostates after successful prostate cancer surgery in April 2008.

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, June 6^th, 2018. Entrants will have until 2 pm PDT on Wednesday, June 20^th, to submit up to three names.

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 2018, or earlier, to receive this exclusive beer from Rowley Farmhouse Ales.

For more of the nitty gritty including contest rules and how to enter, visit our contest entry page.

Good luck!

Beyond the Bottle: The Yeast With a Thousand Facets

May 30, 2018 by Ken Weaver

One of the two featured beers this month—Logsdon’s Rakau Boy—includes the brewery’s house strain of Brettanomyces yeast. Logsdon’s founder, David Logsdon, was also a founder of Wyeast Laboratories when it opened back in 1985, and that entity’s since grown to become one of the country’s two main yeast suppliers. The house yeast character of Logsdon comes after multiple decades of exploring different variations of Brett and other common (and less-common) yeast types. Wyeast currently offers a few strains of Brett commercially, including B. bruxellensis, B. claussenii and B. lambicus: each of which can produce very different results, as flavor and aroma contributions vary considerably between different strains and applications.

One of the best resources I’ve found for those looking for a deeper dive into the world of Brettanomyces is the Milk the Funk wiki, and the main Brettanomyces page is a great place to begin therein. In addition to including a copy of the “Brett Aroma Wheel” from Dr. Linda Bisson and Lucy Joseph at UC–Davis—which includes over 60 core descriptors of flavors and aromas resulting from Brett strains, from fruity to solventy to spicy—this wiki page also has an impressively detailed account of the many different strains of Brett being offered from smaller, niche yeast companies that have been increasingly popping up as of late. Should you be looking to geek out on lesser-used Brett species like B. naardenensis, this is likely your jam.

For those looking for more new Brett-beer options: a Brasseries de la Senne and Monk’s Cafe collab called Major Tom—a strong saison, bottle-conditioned with Brett from De la Senne—is slated to get into distribution starting around June. And for true devotees of wild yeast, the seventh annual Carnivale Brettanomyces in Amsterdam begins its four-day run on June 21^st.

Rare Beer Special Offer: Põhjala Brewery

May 14, 2018 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

We’ve had this Estonian brewery on our radar for a few years now, as they’ve been gradually gaining a significant presence across Europe and knocking out collaborations with folks like Stillwater Artisanal, To Øl and De Struise. We’ve collected four of our absolute favorites out of the brewery’s lineup for this offer, each packaged in a carefully designed, 12-ounce bottle: two riffs on imperial Baltic porter, as well as two exceptional imperial stouts. These four are each ideal for sharing, as even the smallest—this Cognac-barrel-aged Baltic porter—lands at 11%+ ABV. Despite the overall strengths of the picks, we singled these individual beers out for being especially smooth examples—and showcasing some truly unique special additions.

For each of these four beers, a total of just over 50 cases was recently brought into the U.S., and we’ve been allocated the majority of each for this Rare Beer Club special offer. (All four of these will otherwise only be available in small quantities at a handful of select accounts.)

To learn more about the beers and to order, visit our Special Offer page.

Cheers!

Beyond the Bottle: The Coolship Challenge

April 18, 2018 by Ken Weaver

Libertine Brewing Co.’s Aubree is one of an increasing number of beers being spontaneously fermented through the use of a coolship—a wide and shallow stainless-steel vessel, typically, that allows brewers to expose in-progress beer to the ambient air. This process, once limited to the traditional methods of Belgian lambic, is pretty much the opposite of how one usually brews today: pitching a single homogenous vial (or vat, bucket, etc.) of yeast from one of the main yeast labs, and using a monoculture with near-uniform genetics to reliably ferment said beer. If you’re looking for a challenge, though, fermenting with local yeasts can provide one.

Michael Tonsmeire’s American Sour Beers has a particularly helpful section on using coolships. “The isolated strains of brewer’s yeast that we pitch into our ales and lagers,” he said, “have characteristics that took untold generations for brewers to select for, important properties like alcohol tolerance, flocculation, and desirable flavor profile. Finding a wild yeast strain with all of these same attributes is as likely as dropping a net onto a prehistoric field [!] and having the first animal you catch be as easy to raise and delicious to eat as a modern cow.”

The next time you’re sipping on a spontaneously fermented beer, whether from Libertine or Allagash or Russian River or Jolly Pumpkin, or myriad other international brewers aiming to coax cow-equivalents from the local air, keep in mind the unseen effort that went into them. The dumped batches. The ones that end up too lactic or too acetic, or worse. The months or years of fingers crossed… Digging any new coolship beers lately? Hit us up @RareBeerClub.

National Beer Day!

April 7, 2018 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!