Christmas Cheer with Christmas Beer!
All About the BeerM
with Mitch Biggar
This holiday season is the perfect time of year to sample some new and exciting beers that fit in with the season. Christmas beers, also known as Winter Warmers, are a tradition dating back at least 2,000 years, with the ancients making highly intoxicating brews to celebrate winter’s Saturnalia. This brewmaking evolved into a holiday celebration when medieval monks, the world’s first professional brewers, pulled out their finest ingredients to produce soul-warming styles for the occasion.
Today brewers continue the custom, either with centuries-old recipes or newfangled concoctions with spices and herbs, enabling thirsty beer fans to put aside their everyday favorites each winter and deck the halls with the world’s most flavorful ales and lagers, brewed especially for the holidays. Christmas Beers will put even the most curmudgeonly beer drinker in the holiday spirit.
The great thing about Christmas or holiday beers is that there is no set style. In fact, this is the time of year where brewers tend to really go wild with their concoctions. These winter seasonal beers are not often entered in beer competitions so brewers are more comfortable with throwing the style guidelines out of the window and just make a beer that they think their customers can enjoy.
Christmas beers tend to fall into a few categories. The first and the only one of these that approaches being a proper style is the winter warmer. The winter warmer isn’t generally recognized as a unique style because its interpretations are as various as the breweries that make it. It tends to have a big malt bill meaning that lots of sugar goes into the brewpot. This can result in a beer with higher than usual alcohol or a very sweet flavor profile or, more often than not, both. Back in the day, winter warmers with indulgent levels of flavor and alcohol were the perfect beer for the holiday season. However, in today’s beer scene, with so many extreme beers out there packed with near criminal levels of hops, malt and alcohol, the winter warmer seems a little less than extraordinary.
Many breweries still make some version of a winter warmer. Expect lots of flavor and alcohol however, if you are a fan of the extreme beer movement, do not expect to have your socks knocked off.
.
A lot of popular Christmas beers are those that employ adjuncts, especially holiday appropriate adjuncts. For example, Picaroons does the 12 days of Christmas where they release a new Christmas every day for 12 straight days. These beers generally sell out in a matter of hours.
Fruit, spices, herbs and sometimes even vegetables are used in these beers. Sometimes the adjuncts are a closely guarded secret, as in the case of Anchor’s Merry Christmas Ale.
These beers are unique and worth the try. Imagine a Cheery Chocolate Stout, Gingerbread IPA, Orange Chocolate Stout, Candy Cane Porter, the possibilities are endless.
Beer related questions?
Email mitch@railcarbrewing.com
