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Session #106: Holiday Beers

December 4, 2015 By Jay Brooks

xmas-wreath
This is remarkably the 106th Session and for the magic third time (3 is a “magic number” for those of you remember Schoolhouse Rock) I’ll be your gracious host. For my topic, I’ve chosen Holiday Beers.

Of all of the seasonal beers, the Solstice/Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/Mithra time of the year is my mostest favorite. A few weeks ago, we had our fifteenth annual holiday beer tasting for the Celebrator Beer News, and sampled 42 of this year’s Christmas beers. Each year, in the introduction of the tasting notes for the holiday tasting, I include the following description:

Holiday beers are by design no one style, but are a chance for individual breweries to let their talent and imagination run wild. At the holidays, when people stop their busy lives and share some precious time with family and friends, the beer they choose should be equally as special as the time they’re sharing. So a holiday beer should be made to impress, to wow its audience, to stand out. That’s the only criteria that should be met by one of these beers. Will it impress? Different breweries, thankfully, do this in many, many different ways. Some use unusual spices or fruits, some use special malts or hops, some use other uncommon ingredients like spruce or rye, and some make a style that itself is unusual. So there’s nothing to tie these beers together apart from their celebration of the season. That makes it both a delight and a challenge to judge. Ultimately, perhaps more than any other tasting, these beers are simply a matter of what you like and our judging is a matter of what we like. So try them and discover for yourself the many flavors of this holiday season.

So for this Session, I asked people to write about whatever made you happy, so long as it involved holiday beers, offering the following suggestions, but (hopefully) making it clear they should celebrate the holiday beers in your own way.

  • Discuss your favorite holiday beer.
  • Review one or more holiday beers.
  • Do you like the idea of seasonal beers, or loathe them?
  • What’s your idea of the perfect holiday beer?
  • Do have a holiday tradition with beer?
  • Are holiday beers released too early, or when should they be released?
  • Do you like holiday beer festivals?

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As for me, winter seasonals are by far my favorites of the beer year. I’m not entirely sure why, other than I think they’re not as defined by the season itself. Apart from often being spicy, and perhaps heavier both in mouthfeel and strength (thanks to the cooler weather), they’re not as defined by the weather outside as the other seasons. Spring and Summer seasonals are generally lighter to take advantage of the warmer, often hotter, weather. You rarely see a summer barley wine. Fall seasonals are more marzen-like, just slightly darker than summer fare, or have pumpkin aromas and flavor … not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Also, more than the other seasons, winter beers are often meant as gifts, or are taken to parties as something to offer the host and thank them for putting on the festivities. I suppose one might bring a summer wheat to a backyard barbecue, but I would still argue it’s the holidays when that is at its most prevalent.

The range of tastes, additives of fruit, spices, and other flavorings is also unparalleled compared to the other seasons’ beers. I’m particularly fond of Unibroue’s Quelque Chose, one of the few beers that’s served heated, mulled really. You’d never find that beer at an Independence Day picnic on a sweltering hot July day. Sadly, it’s not currently in production.

I really like spice beers, too, although I know I’m in the minority on that one. I loved the period of time when Anchor’s Our Special Ale was really spicy, though they’ve dialed it back quite a bit nowadays. Another beer that wasn’t being brewed for a long time was Pike Auld Acquaintance , which I recall being way spicier than its current version which returned after the Finkel’s bought back the brewery. It used to be one of annual favorites.

Beer and hat of Santa Claus

I’m somewhat surprised by many winter seasonals that don’t seem to do very much to really stand out as a winter seasonal. Way too many just seem to be another hoppy beer or an IPA, while still others are just something relatively bland or unexciting. I don’t want to name names, but they’re fairly easy to spot.

To my way of thinking, a holiday beer is a chance for the brewer to let his freak flag fly, to go nuts, to make something designed to impress. A Christmas beer should make me want to get dressed up, go out in a snowstorm to have some beers on a tray with my equally dapper friends. I’m not doing that for your weak ass lager or ale that’s no different from anything you make the rest of the year. I want your best, your wackiest and the most flavorful concoction you can muster. Even the arguably best mistake ever made — Lagunitas Brown Shugga’ — is better than many winter seasonals made on purpose. If I can’t give it to a beer-loving friend and have them say something like “wow, thanks; I can’t wait to try this beer” then you’ve failed.

Falstaff-1959-xmas

I just really like the concept of “seasonal,” and not only with beer. Seasonal foods are awesome, too. I hate that we have produce flown in from around the world so we don’t have to do with some fruit or vegetable when it’s out of season in our part of the world. We lose its sense of being special. We no longer appreciate it when it is around, knowing it will only be here for a short window of time. If people know they can get it any time they want, then it’s no longer as fascinating or desirable, at least in my opinion.

To me, a good beery illustration of this is the strong beer made by Mendocino Brewing, Eye of the Hawk. When it was around for just a short time, made only twice a year, I think in the spring and fall, it would sell like hotcakes, because people knew it would be available for just a short time. When they decided to make it a year-round beer, its sales flattened considerably. It was no longer special. There was no longer any motivation to pick it up as soon as you saw it, if you knew it would be there all year long.

And while that’s true of all the seasonals, it’s the holiday ones that really ring my bell and get me really excited. There are plenty of great Spring, Summer and Fall seasonal beers, to be sure, but for some reason I’m never quite as excited about them as the winter ones. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I think they’re all here to stay, with the seasonal category being the second most popular in traditional outlets, beat only by IPAs. People love variety, and seasonals certainly provide a great rotating opportunity to continually try new things.

Happy Holidays!

xmas-beer-lights

Filed Under: Beers, Just For Fun, Related Pleasures, The Session Tagged With: Seasonal Release, Seasonality

Session #17: Drinking Anti-Seasonally

July 4, 2008 By Jay Brooks

This is now our 17th Session, and the topic is another thoughtful one, albeit a little rebellious. Our host, Rob DeNunzio, from Pfifft, titled the Session theme Going Against the Grain Bill. In his announcement, Rob described what he means thusly.

Drinking anti-seasonally. Think of this as the unorthodox cousin of such topics as “beer and food” and “beer and music”. Beer and weather, perhaps? More like beer despite the weather, I guess. Cracking open a Guinness on the beach, finishing a day of yardwork with a Speedway Stout, or whatever else you do that raises an eyebrow, do us all a favor an take a few moments to share your non-conformist tale.

Hmm, seasons out of time. Beers out of season. How often do I drink a beer better, or at least traditionally thought to be better, suited to a particular season? All the time. When I reflect on my own drinking patterns, I discover that I give almost no thought to seasonality.

Beer followed the seasons out of necessity for centuries, perhaps millennia, prior to the age of refrigeration and air conditioning. Because it was difficult — or in some cases impossible — to get cool enough temperatures during certain warmer times of the year to brew. So brewing cycles evolved to follow rising and falling temperatures throughout the year and became traditions. As a result, various beers became available only at specific times of the year. These were in effect the first seasonal beers, driven not by marketing, but by the limitations of technology. But this was obviously not a bad thing. Anticipation created excitement and celebrations were held to mark the return of these beers throughout the year. The beers themselves were also well-suited for their time of the season, with heavier stronger beers to warm those hearty cockles and lighter ones to beat the heat of a sweltering summer.

Over a century ago, in 1859 to be exact, refrigeration was invented, and by 1876 the relatively portable refrigerator was created by a German inventor, Carl Paul Gottfried von Linde. He received a U.S. patent for his process on May 12, 1903. But earlier than that, brewers were trying to figure out how to apply the scientific learning commercially to keep their breweries cooler. In 1856, for example, “James Harrison was commissioned by a brewery to build a machine that cooled beer.” That brewers were so far ahead of the technology and in fact were instrumental in providing motivation to solve the cooling problem illustrates just how important they thought it was to the modernization of brewing techniques.

But even after the problem was largely solved, the traditions held sway for decades. Even today, there are many beers which are released only seasonally. Usually this is for marketing reasons rather than technological ones. With only one exception I can think of — fresh hop beers — every known beer style can be brewed year-round. For example, some breweries release a marzen (a.k.a. Oktoberfest) beer in the fall while many others make the style throughout the year.

Christmas or holiday beer, to take another example, are often styles suited to winter but there is no reason they could not be made at any other time of the year. Holiday beers are an interesting example of marketing in modern times. There have been, of course, beers released to celebrate the holidays nearly as long as there have been breweries. But the modern era of Christmas beers undoubtedly begins — as so many new beers inevitably do — with Anchor Brewing. Their Christmas Ale, Our Special Ale, was first released in 1975. As recently as 10-15 years ago, what breweries there were who then made a holiday beer called it a Christmas beer, but a curious thing began happening.

With the exception of Anchor’s Christmas Ale, along with Sierra Nevada’s Celebration and Noche Buena (which Modelo has since stopped importing), holiday beers with the word “Christmas” on the label would literally stop selling on December 26. Like fireworks on July 5 or Halloween candy on the first of November, fickle consumers would shun these beers like they’d suddenly become poisonous. So many breweries removed the word “Christmas” and started referring to them as “holiday” beers or even “winter seasonals” in order to extend their shelf life. And remarkably, it worked. After that, many savvy breweries began having a year-round seasonal program with four or six seasonals — one after the other — such that there was always at least one seasonal beer at any given time. The seasonal segment, as tracked by IRI and Nielsen is now the number one category, even in grocery stores.

But that’s seasonal beers, what about anti-seasonal. At the same time seasonal beers are on the rise, for every seasonal release you could probably find dozens of examples of that same style available from other breweries all year long. So the reality of seasonality is that it’s largely market-driven, any bows to tradition are now mostly coincidental or at best a convenient story to sell the beer. With the original reason that created the traditions of certain beers at specific times of the year gone for a century or more, only the romance of those bygone days remain.

We live in a time when seasonality has lost its meaning, and not just with respect to beer. Any fruit, regardless of its growing season is available at the average supermarket, flown from around the world so that our every whim not go unfulfilled. Let no sales opportunity go to waste. Convenience is king. As consumers we believe that whatever we want should be available whenever we want it, because that’s the bill of goods we’ve been sold. Remember those bothersome watermelon seeds. Gone. Strawberries in the winter? Thank you Guatemala. We don’t like to wait for anything anymore. And usually we don’t have to, because there’s someone willing to sell us whatever we fancy, regardless of the season.

Philosophically, I may not like this fact, but I’m as guilty as anyone. Pandora’s box is wide open and hope is cowering in the corner hoping greed doesn’t beat her to a bloody pulp again. I drink whatever I want, whenever I want. And thanks to air-conditioning, fans and refrigeration, that means any beer, any time. I rarely even think about seasonality when I choose a beer. I rarely even consider the weather, because unless I’m in the woods camping, I can control my environment, at least to some degree.

seasons-tree

The only factors I use are mood, food and ‘tude. Food is obvious, I’ll select a beer I think will go with what I’m eating, regardless of the season. If an imperial stout works, so be it. That leaves mood and attitude. They’re similar states, but different in a crucial way. My mood is how I’m feeling at a particular moment in time, whereas my attitude is how I feel toward the people around me, where I’m at, what I’m doing, etc. Mood is inward, attitude is outward.

But put a gun to my head, and the beers I’ll choose time and time again, regardless of the weather, are the complex ones: barley wines, sour beers, saisons and biere de gardes. I’m usually keen to try anything preceded by the designation “Imperial.” But I also love a delicate Mild or a refreshing Dunkelweiss. I like a good unfiltered Zwickel anything, but especially pilsners. The point is, I think, that without realizing it, I haven’t been drinking seasonally for a long time, if indeed I ever did. Do any of us, I wonder? Certainly I’m pleased when new seasonal releases arrive on my doorstep, but mostly because I’m always keen to try something new or different.

Clearly — as usual — my finger is nowhere near the pulse of America. Because lighter beers definitely do experience spikes in sales during the summer and darker, stronger beers sell better in cooler weather. But most sell well enough at all the other times of the year to justify them being on stores shelves year-round. So perhaps it’s simply driven by the bigger beer companies and retailers who create endless promotions based on holidays, backyard barbecues and what they believe people want. Consumers, of course, do react to products on sale, on endcaps or as a part of specific promotions and thus buy those beers at the times of year that they’re offered to them, perhaps putting no more thought into it than I do. Could seasonality be simply a self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuated by marketing? It seems likely, at a minimum. Because for everyone I know who chooses their beer carefully, weather is only occasionally a factor. Only when we can’t control it — at the beach, on the golf course, camping, places like that — are beers chosen because of the prevailing weather. And notice those are specific places, suggesting that may be the more important factor than weather or seasonality. Even as I sit here typing this, I’ve got a nice glass of Anchor Porter next to me, even though the thermometer is tipping 90°. I peered inside the refrigerator, and pulled it out without a moment’s hesitation. It just looked tasty. And so it is.

Filed Under: Beers, Editorial, Related Pleasures, The Session Tagged With: Seasonality

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