WILLIAMSVILLE — Plenty of other beer writers are trotting out picks to constitute two “Twelve Beers of Christmas” six-packs, so I decided to have some fun with it, too.
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The mother of all seasonal beers, of course, at least in the United States, is Our Special Ale from Anchor Brewing.
The “Anchor Christmas beer,” as it is sometimes inaccurately called to no one's dismay, usually shows up just prior to Thanksgiving and hangs out until mid-January.
For many years now, the beer has been like a trip into the mahogany forest, a dense brown ale with a spruce-like character, with hints of clove and nutmeg. A gingerbread house of a beer, perhaps, but never cloying.
The brewers keep the ingredients to themselves, and no doubt they have a good laugh when they hear or read about some of the ingredients folks think are in there.
The spruce character seems dialed back another notch this year, but there's a compensating fruity tartness that suggests cranberries to me. Adding to the impression is a more reddish tinge to the beer's color, which would certainly be in keeping with the season.
In any case, it's a treat once again, and a case seems about the right proportion for purchase.
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We've survived the Mayan apocalypse. Now all we have to do is make it through winter.
I finally made it up to Meulemans' Craft Draughts in Rawsonville and plucked off the shelf the Nøgne Ø Winter Ale, which next to the snow shovel might be the most valuable implement on hand to see us through to spring. This opaque brown elixir comes to warm us up from folks who should know something about winter: Norwegians.
It comes from a small brewery - Nønge Ø - on Norway's southern coast. Former commercial airline pilot Kjetil Jikiun was an avid home brewer who investigated breweries worldwide in his travels, but he was particularly enamored of innovative U.S. craft brewing.
The Winter Ale, called God Jul in the home country, is one of a series of winter beers Jikiun brews, said Robert Merryman, export manager for Shelton Brothers, which has been bringing Nøgne Ø beers into the U.S. for about five years.
He describes Winter Ale, at 8.5% ABV, as “strictly a blend of different malts - chocolate, black, caramel, Munich - as well as a nice blend of hops to give it a crisp finish.”
“It's not overly sweet, which some believe the Belgian Christmas beers can be,” he adds. “This is a full-bodied dark ale, highly malted, with that balancing finish of Centennial and Columbus hops.”
Winter Ale is all Merryman suggests, and perhaps a bit more - a strong brew with its coffee-ish, husky grain aromas mixing with alcoholic vapors. But it's smooth, aptly called a warmer, and the finish is subtly and agreeably tannic.
Pour this one into a snifter, put your feet up by the fire and contently watch the snow fall. Skål!
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Not to say that Samuel Adams Winter Lager isn't a warming potion at 5.6%. But this wheat bock with added spices (an aromatic cinnamon blend called Saigon Cinnamon, orange zest and ginger) is certainly more mainstream than our first two picks.
The Winter Lager won't blow you out of the water, but it's a solid bit of brewing that would probably be a delight to drink any time of the year, and it's nice to see anyone crafting a bock these days. The style seems a bit neglected of late.
But this one, actually a weizenbock, is as perennial as a Christmas cactus since its introduction in 1989.
A clear, dark ruby pour releases some of the spicy aromatics, but barely, so those who shy away from spiced beers needn't flinch.
The caramel malt backbone is in the carriage driver's seat here, as befits the style. The wheat malt may lighten the mouthfeel a tad, but this is still a chewy beer with a mild roasted quality, finished off crisply with Hallertau Mittelfrueh hops.
It could work quite well with any portion of a meal, even dessert. Or as dessert.
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In 2XMAS spiced winter ale from the young Southern Tier Brewing Company, we find something different. The brewery that has brought you Imperial Pumking Ale, 2XIPA and 2XStout offers a brew inspired by Swedish Glögg.
Glögg is a mulled wine - a warmed concoction of wine, brandy, fruits, and spices, more or less the same mix used here: ginger, cloves, cinnamon, orange peel, cardamom, and crushed figs. Southern Tier adds four varieties of malts and two kinds of hops. The brewery suggests the beer would be better chilled than warmed.
“Mint!” my wife, Lynn, cried when I had her take a whiff.
While I don't think there's any mentha involved, the aroma is a little like heading into the resort spa for a eucalyptus treatment. Probably a heavy hand with the cardamom. This one's all about the spicing, and you're liable to turn your thumb up or down accordingly.
It's thumbs up from me.
The spicing mix strikes me as unique, and I'm giving all credit to the figs. It's amply carried along by the honeyish malts, and all in all makes for a stunning Christmas package.
The 2XMAS is new this year, maybe because the brewery needed to get its spicing act on. Each year since 2003, it has also produced Old Man Winter Ale, a 7% ABV warmer without any extras - a beer now definitely on my must-try list.
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Let's get religious for a moment with a toast to the seventh-century Irish monk Foylan or Foillan, which became “Feuillien” in the Wallonia region of Belgium. Feuillien came to the area to preach the Word, but ran afoul of the benighted in the Sonian Forest.
His followers erected a chapel on the spot where he was murdered and decapitated, which became the Abbey of Prémontrés in 1125, but later became known as the Abbaye St-Feuillien du Roeulx.
The monks presumably brewed there from the early days, as monks did, but the modern brewing activity dates back to 1873 through four generations of the Friart family. Following some recapitalization in 2000, the Brasserie Friart became known as the Brasserie St. Feuillien, and some proceeds from sales still head the abbey's way.
On Christmas Eve, we finally cracked the Cuvée de Noël open before dinner, and among four of us the aroma and taste sensations were all over the map.
I take it as a good thing, especially since everyone seemed to be enjoying it. I did, and as the bottle level diminished, wished I'd bought another. There was a crop of yeast floaties in the glass by the time I'd poured the third, but it didn't seem to infect the taste.
The nose of this ruddy brown ale is a spiced fruit basket - orange, lemon, a hint of coconut, raisins - along with toffee, chocolate, vanilla.
The slightly roasty taste is equally as stimulating: a swirling complexity of flavors that finishes with an appropriate bite and a light alcoholic burn. It's enough to make you lose your head.
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With three preteen grandchildren and 10 of us altogether ripping into gifts on Christmas morning, there was ample delirium on hand.
Delirium Tremens from the Huyghe Brewery began life as a Christmas beer in 1989, but proved so popular - partially, no doubt, to its clever packaging in ceramic bottles with pink elephant designs - that it went to year-round production.
Two siblings came along, Delirium Nocturnum and Delirium Noël. And now there's a fourth, an 8.5% ABV fruit beer called Delirium Red.
My son Mike and son-in-law Glenn joined me in tasting the Delirium Noël, and then Lynn had a go, too. Our sensory impressions were all over the map.
Highly effervescent, the beer pours out a ruby brown. To me, it had a huge caramel nose, which Glenn and Lynn thought smelled like clover honey.
But there are also estery fruit notes, citrus, and ginger. As the beer warmed, I picked up more alcohol vapors, but in general the beer seemed less warming than the lower ABV St. Feuillien Cuvée de Noël.
But Glenn said, “It's almost like drinking something stronger than beer.”
Mike said, “It's a little too yeasty for me.”
The beer was a bit sweet for me, but for such a potent one, the mouthfeel seemed a tad on the thin side.
“But in spite of all our complaints,” said Glenn, “I've drunk all of mine.”
Mike: “Me too.”
Well, me three.
Not unlike the three wise men. Or the three something.
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It was snowing in Vermont on Boxing Day, which we don't actually celebrate the way the British do. But we could certainly have an English Winter Ale by way of acknowledgement to our cousins across the pond.
To this end, Heineken UK, the maker of Newcastle Brown, has obliged with the limited-edition Newcastle Winter IPA.
This is a British-style IPA, fashioned after “18th century India pale ales, which were subtly higher hopped than British pale ales.”
It's decidedly not a West-Coast-style hop bomb that many younger American drinkers have come to expect and demand from their IPAs. And at 5.2% ABV it's almost a session beer here these days.
It's a copper brown beer with toffee and honey notes in the nose, a sweet caramel follow-through in the palate, and hearty enough mouthfeel.
“It's very filling,” said Mike, who's pretty much a mainstream drinker and liked it far more than he liked the Delirium Tremens.
But there's an effervescently tart finish, the hopping with Super Styrian and Styrian Goldings hops. My sample vanished far too quickly.
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“That's some nasty stuff,” said my son about the Noel de Calabaza from Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales. Mike isn't a real big sour beer fan, so I didn't expect him to do backflips over this one. His wife, Carline, not a beer fan at all, said, “It smells like piss.”
And there you have it, folks: the dividing line between those who can take some lactic sourness in their brews and those who would just as soon forego the pleasure.
Lynn didn't much care for it either, but she did detect the wildly fruity aroma put out by this dark, reddish-brown brew: cranberries, currents, cherries. A rill of caramel sweetness runs through as well.
The palate is like a high sour tartness, puckering and refreshing if you're up for it. And I was, after a long day in the snow, unearthing cars, clearing paths on the deck, and sledding with the kids until their hands were numb, or exhaustion from walking back up the slope did them in.
With all of his beers fermented in oak barrels, and then reconditioned in the bottle, Ron Jeffries at the Jolly Pumpkin continues to turn out wild and earthy brews that one needs to be prepared for, or they may just be too over the top to process.
I enjoyed this beer, although I probably admired it more than loved it. The dank funk is pretty startling, and I have to confess part of my pleasure in it is in seeing how others are vaguely repelled by it.
I'm not sure that's quite in keeping with the sentiments of the season. But I think the sharing of it was.
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My son's departure left me without any of my recent Christmas beer drinking buddies. “Sad,” I thought, until I cracked open a Gouden Carolus Noël, a Belgium wonder from the Het Anker brewery produced over a year ago, and realized that I'd have to drink it all by myself.
This beer was my favorite so far. It's a veritable Christmas banquet of beers, teeming with lively aromas and flavors.
The brewery has been in production since 1471, with a few abeyances for various world upheavals.
The Leclef family has been in charge since 1873 and is a little tight-lipped about the ingredients, beyond enumerating six herbs and spices and three different hops. The beer has been in production since 2002, usually brewed in August, matured for a few months and refermented in the bottle.
The mahogany brew gives off plenty of warming vapors, along with a boozy plum pudding of aromas - touches of coconut, leather, licorice, cardamom, and who-knows-what-else.
The flavor is equally rich and mysterious, with coating waves of toffee and lashings of licorice. It's sweet, but not cloying, with a surprising tang at the finish rather than an alcoholic burn.
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Knowing I'd be doing the regular Saturday evening beer tasting at Forty Putney Road Bed and Breakfast in Brattleboro, as I have from time to time, I tried to make sure the Otter Creek Winter Red Ale would be among the offerings.
Innkeepers Tim and Amy Brady recently handed over the keys and are off to concentrate on their Whetstone Station venture in Brattleboro. The new mother-and-daughter team of Rhonda and Brittany Calhoun, fresh from Florida, are getting their boots wet in a hurry.
It's nice to hear they're continuing the tastings: a chance to showcase mainly Vermont beers to the mainly out-of-towners who visit the inn.
Several of our full house of beer tasters said the Winter Red was their top pick; others shrugged their shoulders.
I'm somewhere in between. It's a good beer, with a nice hoppy nose (nugget, centennial, and calypso hops) and the malts (caramel, wheat and roasted barley among them), lending an almost cotton-candy sweetness to the palate. It packs a medium mouthfeel, and a refreshing tang at the finish.
The Winter Red is a good, slightly different Vermont beer, easy to drink and easy to enjoy.
And if there's some left over for me, it's not a problem.
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Magic Hat's Wooly looked good on paper: a beer with a name and label suggesting ugly Christmas sweaters, and laced - or, rather, knitted together - with spruce.
I've had a weird relationship with Magic Hat beers. I stopped buying them a long time ago after they stopped producing the Blind Faith IPA, the only beer they made I really enjoyed.
The rest seemed bland, thin, and highly underachieving, and some, like the summer Wacko made with beet juice, were downright hideous.
On the plus side, the brewery was willing to push stylistic boundaries and experiment a little, even if I didn't particularly care for the experiments.
So along came Wooly, which at 4.5% ABV is on the low side for an extra special bitter, but it would make the beer more drinkable in multiples if the spruce thing works for you, which it certainly might.
It's a drinkable beer - not a Wacko - but it didn't really work for me.
To the pale, caramel, and Munich malts the brewery went with Apollo and Northern Brewer hops before adding spruce flavoring toward the end of the boil. But the spruce dominates the aroma and flavor, without ever feeling fully integrated into a smooth whole like, say, Anchor's Christmas Ale.
Stick with the other outliers of the Winterland Pak, the intriguing Encore, an American Wheat IPA (6.4% ABV), or the Heart of Darkness (5.7%), a nice roasty stout that could work quite well in a winter warmer role.