Tis the Seasonal

This is the season where beer gives to its drinkers a greater bounty than almost any other time of the year. I'll drink through a few of them so you don't have to waste your time drinking junk.

Ale Smith is a San Diego brewery that specializes in carefully crafted beers of mamoth flavor proportions. The Yulesmith Holiday ale is an Imperial red ale made with generous quantities of malt and hops. This brew is less spicy than many of the other holiday beers that are flavored with herbs and spices, but it has as much if not more character. Ale Smith is almost always a quality product, and the latest holiday brew is no exception.

Abita is a Louisiana brewery that also produces a Christmas beer. This year's batch stays true to the old form--a dark ale with a faint hops character. The beer is light in character, and doesn't posess the character of many of the other seasonal offerings. This is a Christmas beer for people who detest craft beer because it has too much flavor...and I'm not one of those people.

Lakewood, Ohio is home to Buckeye Brewing. Their holiday beer is also not a spiced holiday ale. Instead, it is a Belgian-styled dubbel ale with all of the sweet fruit notes and the yeasty complexity that can only come from bottle conditioning. This is a well made beer that has enough alcohol to keep you warm through the winter months.

Sammy Smith always makes one of the most widely available winter ales, and it's widely available for a reason--it's good as hell! The beer (called "Winter Welcome ale") continues to illustrate my misstep in identifying holiday beers as spice oriented (even though they typically are). This beer is medium bodied, with a rich malt character alongside a classic European hops aroma. The other cool colectible thing is that each year has a different label (the picture in the middle changes while everything else stays the same), making the beer easy to stockpile if difficult not to drink.

Every beer this time of year is not neccessarily seasonal. Victory has a few limited time offerings that were pretty tasty. Hop Wallop is the Pennsylvania brewery's uber-hopped beer, and it possesses a complex floral aroma with a hint of cotton candy and a trace of leather. My ghetto palate estimates that the beer has about 90+ ibus, and it will knock your palate out for the night. Enjoy this beer beside a giant bowl of chili and don't plan on drinking more than two because the bitterness will overwhelm you.

The other Victory beer that just came out was their barley wine Old Horizontal. The brew features toffee, apple, citrus and tar notes backed by a sneaky high alcohol content of 10.5 percent. The date on the bottle says drink before the end of 2012, and I bet this would be deliciously integrated by the next Presidential election.

If Jever isn't the finest pilsner on the planet, I challenge somebody to find a better European continental brew. The one shortcoming the beer has is that faint skunk character that is overpowered by an aggressive hops aroma and flavor as well as a surprisingly clean finish for a beer with this level of bitterness. The green bottle funk is more than superceded by the quality of the ingredients. This brew is a German classic that doesn't get as much recognition as it should for its stark individuality.

Akron brew pub the Hopping Frog offers a double IPA known as Mean Manalishi. I've never been wild about these beers, but this brew is restrained (for a double IPA), with pine flavors and aromas that create a dynamic brew that seperates itself from the other offerings from Hopping Frog.

Mikkeller offers a number of interesting brews, including the Black Hole coffee stout. This beer was so good, I'll let their PR practitioners describe the flavor for you. "An imperial stout brewed with: water, malt, roasted barley, flaked oats, dark cassanade, honey, hops, coffee, vanilla and ale yeast. Finally……! Black Hole is what Mikkeller is all about. Daring, vulgar and extreme. From the very beginning Mikkellers goal has been to push the limit and with this warming, intense imperial stout, a new chapter in the Danish beer history has been written. The high bitterness from the hops and the sweetness from the malt and alcohol, creates a good balance which makes Black Hole an explosion of nuances, but also leaves a feeling of a perfect and complex beer – in the heavyweight category." If you like coffee, you'll love this.

If the label says "Dogfish Head," you know it's f-ing good. (They can have that slogan for free if they need it for future marketing campaigns.) Pangaea is a beer brewed almost every year with ingredients from all seven continents. There is water from Antarctica, ginger from Australia, basmati rice from Asia, and malt, hops, yeast and something else from the other continents. This beer has a long finish that starts up front with ginger and floral hops before the malt lingers on the tongue. Buy this and drink in excess.

I'm not going to lie--I bought the Arcadia beer Big Dick's Old Ale because it had the word dick in the name. But the beer was surprisingly good, with flavors that show off tons of malt and a hint of smoke and brown sugar. This beer tasted like it needed about six to eight months more of bottle age before it was ready to be consumed. It should last for some time.

Thomas Hardy is a top-notch vintage ale with tons of fruit notes that lighten up as time goes on. This beer will age forever and a day, and the 2005 vintage is no different. With notes of nougat, figs and honey, this beer will be around long after these flavors fade and new ones emerge. Buy some, and save half of them for a rainy day.

I also tried Schneider Weisse, an organic German wheat beer with a citrus flavor along with a light, undistinguished finish. The beer is good, but not good enough to make me pass up the other more mainstream German weizen beers.

The Fort Collins brewery offers the Retro Red, which is an off-dry beer with a ruby tint and a clean finish. The beer is tasty if unspectacular. It is a good beer for a session of lawn mowing, but it lacks the complexity to make it a savoring brew. I like it but I don't love it, and you should do the same.

Enjoy the beer advice--I hope your evening with beer is better because of it!

Tis the Seasonal