Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

Beyond the Bottle: Old Ales

January 15, 2020 by Ken Weaver

One of the two featured beers this month is Lost Abbey’s Righteous Son, a barrel-aged old ale made exclusively for The Rare Beer Club. Old ales are a dark and maltier subset of beers tracing their origins back to England, and they typically emphasize a generosity of notes like caramel, toffee, nuttiness, and/or molasses (even a bit of roast)—essentially hitting some of the same malt spectrum as barleywine, though without the same intensity of hops or alcohol impact. The Rare Beer Club’s founder Michael Jackson wrote old ales “should be a warming beer of the type that is best drunk in half pints by a warm fire on a cold winter’s night.”

While the above provides a basic sense of expectation for beers labeled as “old ale” today—higher in alcohol, darker malts, modest hops, often some sherry-like oxidative notes—there’s a lot more nuance to what “old ale” referred to historically. Martyn Cornell’s article “So what is the difference between Barley Wine and Old Ale?” is a great resource for any deeper dive.

If you’re digging Lost Abbey’s Righteous Son (or old ales in general), tracking more of these down can sometimes be a bit of a hunt. English examples making it stateside are pretty few and far between, while many of the old-ale examples made stateside are more barley wine-y. Great Divide’s longstanding winter seasonal Hibernation Ale (brewed annually since 1995) is one promising option that’s easier to track down, and North Coast’s potent Old Stock Ale is made year round. Got old-ale recommendations? Hit us up on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Silver Streak x2

December 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

This will be the second of the Rare Beer Club’s anniversary beers to receive its name from a classic comedy, and it seemed like an ideal opportunity to pop an early bottle of Silver Streak for tasting notes and check out the movie itself. Silver Streak (1976) is partly buddy comedy between Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, and partly soft-thriller where everyone’s trying to kill Gene Wilder’s character—who proves that there is no limit to the number of times you can fall off a train. There are definitely parts of the movie that haven’t aged well, though it’s the first of four movies Pryor and Wilder did together, and is probably best in tandem with Stir Crazy (1980). Wilder’s character is next-level vanilla; Pryor brings most of the energy.

Not many beer parallels (there’s buckets of Champagne), although I couldn’t help but notice the love interest of Gene Wilder’s character, played by Jill Clayburgh, introduces herself by noting her character’s name is short for Hildegard. Saint Hildegard of Bingen is seriously one of the coolest people in history—and is generally credited for first recording the preservative qualities of hops!—along with establishing herself as an accomplished herbalist, a composer, scientist, writer, visionary, inventor of alphabets, church reformer, and lots of other things.

Best beer parallel I’ve got. The train scene at the end might be worth the price of admission. Got a classic comedy to recommend as a namesake for a future Rare Beer Club anniversary beer? Hit us up with your favorites on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Hallertau Blanc Hops

November 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

The Hallertau Blanc hop, prominently employed in this month’s featured To Øl Chateau Øl, is a relatively new option for brewers, first commercially released in 2012. A daughter of the Cascade hop, Hallertau Blanc was created by the Hop Research Center Hüll in the Hallertau region of Bavaria, Germany. It was specifically made in response to the growth in America’s craft beer industry, and BSG Hops suggests using them as one might southern-hemisphere hops: in styles like wheat beers, beers with Brettanomyces, Belgian-style ales, and a mélange of IPA and similar. The hops are considered to be on the tropical side of things, with notes of pineapple, passion fruit, fresh lemongrass, gooseberry, and grapefruit.

Almanac Beer Co. has used Hallertau Blanc hops in a wide variety of releases over the years, including in their White Label (paired with California-grown Muscat Blanc grapes, for good measure), various “de Brettaville” releases, and their Flavor Wheel series. Hallertau Blanc is one of the key hops in BrewDog’s Hazy Jane (of the more readily available options), while Stillwater Extra Dry is dry-hopped with Hallertau Blanc, Citra, and Sterling hops. Mikkeller, Grimm, The Kernel, Modern Times, Other Half, and a bunch of other breweries have been experimenting with Hallertau Blanc across a mélange of styles… so keep an eye out. Have a local option with Hallertau Blanc you’re digging? Chime in on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: The Last Day of Christmas

October 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

The Rare Beer Club has long been a supporter of The Bruery’s 12 Days of Christmas series, offering each release to RBC members dating as far back as 2009 with Two Turtle Doves, a Belgian-style dark ale brewed with cocoa nibs and toasted pecans. I’ve been working as the club’s newsletter writer for the latter half of the run—from 7 Swans-A-Swimming in 2014 to the present—and each release has combined the concept of Belgian brewers doing stronger, occasionally spiced dark beers for the holiday season with the annually rotating prompt from that 12 Days of Christmas song. 2 Turtle Doves riffed on ‘turtle’ candy. 3 French Hens used French oak barrels. 5 Golden Rings went a bit out-there—11.5% golden ale, with spices and pineapple. 8 Maids-a-Milking was an imperial milk stout… but fermented with Belgian yeast.

This year’s release of 12 Drummers Drumming marks the final release of the series, after 11 years of annual Belgian-style holiday beers, starting with Partridge in a Pear Tree. It’s worth taking just a moment to consider the series in context: it’s one of the first major (let’s call it) higher-concept series of annual one-off releases riffing on a core theme I can recall in craft beer, following in the SoCal footsteps of stuff like Stone’s Vertical Epic Series (02.02.02 to 12.12.12). Both are impressively ambitious projects, each taking over a decade to complete, and it’s especially neat that The Bruery’s started theirs in 2008—the same year they opened.

So, what other large-scale brewery release series am I totally overlooking? (The Lost Abbey’s Ultimate Boxed Set from 2012 comes to mind, though those 12 one-off beers were released monthly…) Also: have you been cellaring any of the 12 Days of Christmas series to pop with this year’s final release? Let us know on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: Why Hard Seltzer? Why Not?

September 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

Alright, one last swing at this trend before The Summer of Seltzer comes to its close. Shout out to the folks at the San Francisco Chronicle for recently doing the unenviable task of blind-tasting through 38 different varieties of hard seltzer in the name of science. Key finding: “In our professional opinion, there are some not terrible hard seltzers, but there are no actually good hard seltzers.” That was pretty much my take after tasting through a couple dozen of them a few years back for work—and neither result’s surprising. This has nothing to do with taste.

It’s interesting to look at the responses to this coverage on the Chronicle’s Insta page, which basically boils down to competing values: “Why don’t you have tastebuds?” vs. “Why don’t you like fun?” I don’t have enough room to turn this into a sociology deep-dive (which also doesn’t sound super fun), but I think it’s interesting to think about where one fits into these annual summer drinking trends that all fade pretty fast: hard root beer, frosé, aperol spritz…

For people excited by these Instagrammable trends (not me), it’s partly about knowing about this new thing, about being up on a certain part of culture—and it’s frankly not very different from riding the hazy-IPA train (def me), or pastry-stout blimp, or whatever’s next in beer. It feels tribal, because it totally is. And I think it’s particularly interesting to consider how these various competing values (flavor vs. how a beverage looks and feels, for example) figure into how the craft beer world’s shaping up. I might even get around to sampling that black cherry White Claw this weekend (per recommendations…). I just can’t imagine making a habit of it.

Beyond the Bottle: The Seltzer Monster

August 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

Hard seltzer has been making a lot of noise this summer… This segment of bubbly alcoholic water has seen a 193% increase year-over-year in a recent Nielsen survey, and some industry analysts predict it’ll reach a $1-billion industry by the end of the year. U.S. Today (admittedly not the most immediate barometer for cutting-edge beverage trends…) named it “the boozy beverage of summer 2019.” Your mileage may vary… But White Claw memes abound, and I have spent a nontrivial part of my week sketching out seltzer monsters for Massive Potions.

It’s well outside the core Rare Beer Club wheelhouse—but it’s been kinda hard to ignore.

I did a roundup of hard seltzer for my column at All About Beer Magazine a few years back, to the degree that I’m pretty good with never having to drink another one. But I’ll presume that the segment has improved at least a little bit from those earliest days, and I’m curious to hear from Rare Beer Club members who’ve ventured to hard-seltzer land. Have you actually tried anything interesting in this space? Or is it all nostalgic sugar water, masquerading as a health-conscious option to pull in the light-beer crowd? Chime in on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.

Beyond the Bottle: The Summer of Hoppy Sours

July 15, 2019 by Ken Weaver

It’s harder to pinpoint beer trends these days, when anything not bolted down gets tossed in the fermenter. But the coalescence of kettle sours and hazy IPAs certainly have this summer looking like a peak moment for hoppy sours. I’ll limit my disparagement of kettle sours (got that out of my system last month!) and head right on into the folks that are doing combos of hoppy and tartness well. If you’re digging that August Schell Basin of Attraction—go forth.

New Belgium’s Le Terroir is one of the old-school examples that sent a lot of us down this road. It’s a dry-hopped sour ale that sees long-term aging in oak foeders, before getting dry-hopped with Amarillo and Strata, and I still remember tracking this one down in Boulder a decade back: tropical, grassy, beautifully handled throughout. Almanac Beer Co. out here in NorCal has done a bunch of “Hoppy Sour” releases, with recent takes including Strawberry Hopcake (featuring a mélange of fruits, plus Sabro, Citra and Cashmere hops) and Tropical Galaxy (a Brett-focused foeder beer with a hefty dry-hop of Galaxy). Cantillon’s Cuvee des Champions and Iris are dry-hopped classics—if you can find them. And Crooked Stave, De Garde, and Prairie have also each released a variety of hoppy + sour options as of late.

Got a hoppy-sour beer you’ve been digging? Chime in on Twitter via @RareBeerClub.