Various Holiday ales through a foggy weeks recollections

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Mr. Blues
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Various Holiday ales through a foggy weeks recollections

#1 Post by Mr. Blues » Sun Nov 26, 2006 1:14 pm

Tried the following holiday ales over this last festive week:

Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale: Great standard holiday offering from Sierra Nevada & reasonably priced at $7.50 a sixer. Good hoppy, malty balance with hints of spices. If I remember correctly, around 6% alcohol.

New Belgium brewing companys' 2 Below holiday ale: OK and nicely priced at $6.50-7 a six but didn't detect much in the way of spices and more hoppy than malty. Thin body instead of a robust mouth feel. If I remember correctly, around 6% alcohol.

Great Divide brewing companys' Hibernation ale: This was a new one to try & everyone else liked it but it gave me some funky, 'earthy' taste & aftertaste that I can't put my finger on & wouldn't want to if I could. At $8.99 a six I think it's WAAAY overpriced. Not much of anything spicy but maybe that's the earthy funk I haven't discerned. 8% alcohol.

Sam Adams Holiday Porter & Sam Adams Old Fezziwig Ale: Both 6% alcohol, both standard holiday offerings from Sam with the porter being more robust/less hoppy and the Fez being the spiced brew. Both excellent & affordable but can only get them (so far as I know) in the sampler 12 packs for $12 along with two each of four other styles.

Sam Adams Winter something or other from the same 12 pack, another standard seasonal: When the label says, "A wheat lager with spices" I say, "Make up yer damn mind what you're trying to brew!?!" An OK but ordinary ale that tries to be everything at once and ends up being nothing special at all other than affordable but there's better out there (Sierra Nevada).

Anchor Steam 2006 Holiday Ale: Unlike other brewers each year Anchor alters the recipe, sometimes giving you a hint of what's been brewed by what kind of tree graces that years' label. This year it's a beech tree. Alrighty then. Still a good balanced, spiced ale although it was difficult for me to tell what kind of ingredients are in the '06. I'll always get at least two sixers of Anchor Holiday but at $9.50 a six I think they've begun pricing themselves out of the average joes range. Probably around a 5-6% alcohol but I'm guessing here.

Baseball Bat Homebrew Co. Holiday Humbug Mojo: Patterned after the Anchor Steam Holiday ale, the Humbug gets brewed the prior year around the holidays and then gets shoved into a dark, cool basement to age until the next holiday season. (We tried it within 1-2-3 months the first few years & found it was still incredibly over-spicy-powering although good if you liked someone cramming a handful of anise, orange peel, coriander, cinnamon, juniper berries and jamaican allspice down your throat.) After a year of aging, you still get a very good dose of spices along with a full, malty thick-rich-&-chocolick taste which is needed to offset the 8.5%!! alcohol in this close-to-holiday-barleywine. VERY affordable too, the only hard part is keeping your paws off of it until 12 or more months after you've bottled the dark nectar. Been doing the same standard recipe but jumped up the malt a little in this brew and will probably add another ounce of bittering hops into next years batch to try & help balance the increase in malt.

& there you have it as best as I can remember, or not. Many of them went well with turduckhen but damned if I can recall what others we had besides the Humbug!

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pc
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#2 Post by pc » Sun Dec 17, 2006 10:45 pm

I've been working my way through the winter seasonals as well. I haven't been brewing since I moved, so it's been all commercial beer for me lately.

My favorite so far has been Great Divide's Hibernation. This is like an American version of an Old Ale. Tons of malt flavor, lots of chocolate, 8% abv. and a lot of hops as well. Dangerously drinkable at that alchohol level.

Sierra Nevada Celebration is good as always. Great hop flavor with the malt to back it up.

The Anchor Christmas seems a little restrained on the spices this year. One six of this is enough for me.

There seems to be a lot of beers that would fall into a category of Big Amber Ales. The Goose Island I drank had a bottled on date that was less than three weeks previous. It tasted like it as well. Really fresh. The Boulevard Nut Cracker is pretty similar. A nice malt sweetness and a bright hop flavor. Avery Jubilation is in the same style and tasty as well. Breckenridge's Christmas Ale seemed a little flat in flavor compared to the others.

New Belgium's 2 Below is a lot lighter that a lot of the other winter seasonals. It has a citrusy hop flavor that I really liked.

Schlafly's Christmas Ale is also lighter in color. It is spiced, but not too heavily. Kind of a pumpkin pie type of flavor. It didn't really do much for me.

I always buy a bottle of Sam Smith's Winter Welcome. It is not really that exciting, a little stronger than a standard pale ale, but at least it is in a brown bottle this year.

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