Cherries bound for a thick, chocolatey stout.
Beer styles are never static. This is not a perfect analogy, but imagine beer styles as animal species. Some, like pale lagers, are common and successful; others—lambics, say—are highly specialized within small niches. As circumstances change, like technical innovation and consumer preferences, adaptable styles flourish while others find themselves in irreversible decline. The churn leads to the constant birth of new styles and, inevitably, the extinction of others. In this chapter, we’ll look to the margins of the beer world, where styles are coming and going (and sometimes coming back), or clinging, tenuously, to their ever-shrinking habitat.
UNTIL VERY RECENTLY it was, in the polite world of professional American brewing, a vulgarity to mention adding fruit, vegetables, or other ingredients to beer. These were known as “adjuncts” or adulterants—the purview of homebrewers or Belgians, not serious brewers. As a visit to a gastropub or food-focused brewpub will quickly show, this is no longer the case. Brewers now regularly add novel ingredients like a chef adds spices to a soup: to enhance certain characteristics already latent in the beer. The trend has already become so prevalent that it may, in the next decade or two, change the way we think about beer.
Our current rigid definition—water, malt, hops, and yeast—is actually the anomaly. The use of hops is only a thousand years old or so, and before that all beers were spiced. Many brewers also regularly used available fruits, vegetables, and honey to boost strength and add flavor. The list of additives in medieval beer corresponded roughly to what you’d find at the local market, and some concoctions like braggot—a blend of honey mead and ale—were common enough to have their own names. And long after hops entered the scene, breweries continued using natural flavors. Vestiges of the tradition survived well into the twentieth century in Germany, Britain, France, and of course Belgium, where it never died out. When craft breweries began making fruit ales and spiced pumpkin beers, among others, they weren’t inventing new styles; they were reclaiming them.
The current trend is partly an expression of enthusiasm among craft breweries clamoring to experiment. Indeed, they began using oddball ingredients almost as soon as they started brewing. Craft brewing emerged in part as a rejection of large-scale brewing with its use of chemicals and stabilizers, and the idea of using wholesome, traditional ingredients made sense. Unfortunately, those early brewers hadn’t yet mastered their craft when they first started using fruit and spices, and the effect was often to mask the flavor of beer.
In the 2000s, brewers came back to spice with a different philosophy: revealing the flavors, rather than concealing. This was partly driven by the increased sophistication of brewing techniques and a better understanding of historical styles. But inspiration also came from the food world, which was relying more on local, seasonal fresh produce. Spicing a beer is a way of adding layered depth, in most cases accentuating flavors already present in beer, while the use of local fruits and vegetables is a return to more traditional, place-based brewing. (So, for example, a beer with peppercorns may not taste like a pepper beer, just something spicy; but a cherry beer will taste like cherry.) New Englanders have a fondness for local blueberries (several breweries have used them), while Wisconsin’s New Glarus looks to the famous Door County cherries. In Italy, chestnuts are so popular they’ve formed an entire genre.
Cherries bound for a thick, chocolatey stout.
Kona Brewing has been especially adept at this, borrowing local island flavors that accentuate traditional beer recipes: coconut to round and scent the nutty flavors in a brown ale; passion fruit to play on the citrusy character of hops in a summery pale ale; and the smooth, roasty flavor of Kona coffee in a porter. But the flavors don’t have to be purely local. New Belgium delivers one of the most accomplished marriages of flavors in Tart Lychee, which gets tropical essence from fruit and cinnamon and a snap of acidity from barrel-aging.
It’s no surprise that the use of herbs and spices in beer also coincides with a trend in brewing beer specifically to complement dishes—or that France and Italy have joined the United States on the vanguard of the trend. Rich Higgins, one of the most avid exponents of culinary beer, created lagers and ales to specifically partner with the menu when he opened San Francisco’s Social Kitchen brewpub. Spices migrated from the kitchen to the brewery, and Higgins tossed everything from ginger and lemongrass to mustard seeds into his brews. In one case, he added beets to a dubbel. “You get a nice earthy sweetness from the beets that melds very well with the roasted malts and the fruity yeast. The yeast has really high elements—I call them ‘spiky’—the flavors of bubble gum, figs, plums, and cherry. And then with the lower-down flavors that form the foundation of the beer you get some vegetal earthiness from those beets.” By smoothing the roast notes, it “increases the number of foods the beer will go with.”
Adding extra flavors doesn’t define a new style of beer; rather, it’s a way of expanding the range of existing styles—and nearly any beer could be tricked out with a dash of spice. (Though practitioners of some styles like very traditional German lagers might be appalled by such an adulteration.) Belgian ales, with their more assertive esters and phenols, are obvious candidates, but brewers don’t stop there. American brewers regularly heighten the citrusy and spicy flavors of hops with citrus zest and spices. Porters and stouts are common targets for chocolate, coffee, and chile peppers. Light wheat ales are made slightly sweet, aromatic, and sometimes tart by fruit additions. Even Christmastime lagers are sometimes treated with a bit of spicy garnish. ■
THERE IS A certain seasonal rhythm to beer drinking—darker, stronger beers in the cold winter months and paler, lighter beers for the hot days of summer. Some are so suited for a certain season that we mainly think of drinking them only during that time: heavy stouts, barley wines, and doppelbocks in winter; kölsch, weizen, and pilsner in the summer. But a few beers have emerged as purely one-season specialties—much like matzoh, fresh corn on the cob, and gingerbread.
Why do we have so many winter drinking rituals? Perhaps to survive the season. In the days before central heating, getting through winters was a trial, and not everyone made it. Those who did endured months of icy fingers and frozen windowpanes. People have been whipping up potions to withstand that nasty chill and dark for … ever? Well, a long time. In England, they called it “wassailing,” which is a precursor to our tradition of caroling, and it goes back at least a thousand years. The word comes from the Old Norse ves heill, a toast meaning, “to be of good health” or fortune. The English were wassailing before the Norman Conquest, and the tradition carried on until the nineteenth century.
Properly speaking, a wassail is a bowl of hot, spiced ale. Preparations varied, but it was typical for the beery concoction to include liquor as well as sugar and spices, fruit, and sometimes eggs. Sometimes toast was floated atop the bowl—the origin of our practice of offering toasts. The mixture was heated but never boiled (the hops become unpleasantly bitter if it reaches a boil). One recipe from 1835 gave these instructions: “Pour a pint of strong, hoppy beer over a half-pound of brown sugar and grate nutmeg and ginger into the mixture. Add three slices of lemon and two sugar cubes rubbed over lemon peel.” Next you’d actually put the whole thing through another fermentation, with—oddly enough—toasted bread added to the mix. After a few days, it could be served (presumably warmed) with hot roasted apples floating in it. That recipe is notable for lacking booze, but another, from Scotland, deploys a half-pint of whisky to a quart of beer—plus two eggs—and was said to “get a man’s boots off on a cold night.”
For some reason, spiced and warmed egg-beer has fallen out of fashion. In its place an indistinct category known as “winter warmers” has emerged. Like amber and red ales, these are sort of an American invention. British brewers will sometimes label a beer as a winter warmer, but in the sense of a category, not a style. In the United States, breweries have honed the concept. From deep amber to mahogany, and brewed strong (7% seems typical), American winter warmers feature candy or dark fruit malts with spicy hop garlands. Breweries started brewing these in the 1980s, and perhaps because brewers of the day avoided adjuncts, most are not spiced. Like so many craft styles, this one was pioneered on the West Coast, and many of the originals are still standards: Pyramid Snow Cap, Deschutes Jubelale, and Anderson Valley Winter Solstice.
Another seasonal concoction has roots entirely in the United States: pumpkin ale, a harvest style made in time for Thanksgiving feasting. The humble pumpkin, totem of Halloween (the poor Irish, who apparently invented jack-o’lanterns, had to make due with turnips), was used by American colonists to make rough beer for those who could not afford the good imported stuff. The Virginia historian Robert Beverly, writing three score and twelve before the nation’s independence, said it was a kind of beer the “poor sort” brewed “with molasses, bran, Indian corn malt, and pompions [pumpkins].” Finding suitable sugars for yeast to digest into beer was always a chore for those early colonists. (No wonder that America was therefore principally a cider and rum country.)
Craft breweries revived pumpkin beers as a novelty in the 1980s. Instead of making olden “pompion” beers, though, they made orange-tinted ales seasoned with pumpkin pie spices. We can probably blame Bill Owens for this. The founder of Buffalo Bill’s Brewery had been reading about these colonial brews and decided to try one in the mid-1980s. He actually grew the pumpkin himself and added it to an amber ale, but alas, “there was no pumpkin in the flavor.” It occurred to him that he might evoke a squashy flavor if he added pumpkin pie spice to the conditioning tank just prior to carbonation. The beer was a hit and in the three decades since, Buffalo Bill’s Pumpkin Ale has had many, many imitators.
There is actually no reason pumpkin beers need to be spiced, Halloween-orange ales, but most of them are—enough that they have evolved into their own style. Buffalo Bill’s original is a modest beer (5.2%), but some are quite boozy; Southern Tier Pumking, maybe the current standard-bearer for the type, is 8.6%. Schlafly Pumpkin Ale is 8%. A few breweries chart different courses, but they stand out as the exceptions. Seattle’s Elysian Brewing gets more excited about pumpkins than just about any brewery. They have made a multitudeof pumpkin beers, including a stout and IPA. Lakefront makes Pumpkin Lager. And Trinity Brewing, from Colorado Springs, makes Emma’s Pumpkin Saison. ■
THE GERMANS suffer under the weight of the stereotype that they are overly rigorous and precise, even officious—that there is a right way to do things and that way is the German way. The stereotype extends to beer: It is made to exacting standards and improvisation is verboten. There is something to this, especially in the realm of the famous lagers. But Germany is not all pilsner and bock. Consider styles like altbier and Berliner weisse—or even the banana-and-clove weizens of Bavaria. Poke around a bit more and you’ll find references to the names of obscure beers that eventually died out—Lichtenhainer, Grodziskie, and gose. (Though fortunately, all are enjoying a tiny revival in Germany, Poland, and the U.S.) They are smoky or sour (sometimes both), salty, spiced; they’re the kinds of beers we associate with unruly Belgium, not Germany. These obscure ales point to a wonderfully rich history, one that brewers are beginning to reclaim as they make beers once thought lost for good.
We don’t have to delve into the mists of time to find a very different landscape—going back just 150 years will do. The Germany of the mid-nineteenth century had far more in common with neighboring Belgium than with its modern self. As in Belgium, German beer styles were hyperlocal; names of the beers were more often than not the name of the local town with an “er” suffixed on: Cottbuser, Crossener, Kulmbacher, Cöpenicker, Lebuser, Bernauer, and so on. Over the centuries, there are references to scores of these kinds of beers, representing a range every bit as diverse as those of Flanders and Wallonia. Some were popular enough to transcend local tastes—very old styles called Mumme, broyhan, adambier, and jopenbier were examples—but they were highly individual, even bizarre beers.
Take jopenbier. Made in the Prussian city of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), it was popular enough in its day to be shipped as far as Britain. It was brewed at a staggering original gravity well north of most barley wines, and made in the fashion of Belgian ales with a twenty-hour boil and spontaneous fermentation. It was aged up to a year “covered with a thick blanket of greenish-white mould” and even then finished out with a gravity of a strong beer (1.080 or above). By all accounts, the extremely rich beer was tasty—but not something one could drink a lot of. It was often used as a mixer.
We could go through the list, gesturing like a carnival barker at the strange and freakish expressions of ancient German brewing. (It would make its own compelling book.) Yet there was a thread running through these old ales. Most of them were quite weak, below 3% ABV, and some were as weak as 1%. They were fermented incompletely, with typical attenuations of 30 to 60 percent (modern beers are around 75 percent attenuated). They were sour, as infected with bacteria and wild yeast as the beers of Lembeek. The historian Ron Pattinson, writing in Decoction!, put it this way:
What are the common characteristics of many traditional German top-fermenting styles? Low ABV and high level of acidity. That about sums them up. A beer like Berliner Weisse, nowadays at the extreme low end of ABV and extreme high end of acidity, was a fairly run-of-the-mill beer 150 years ago.
Four of these kinds of beers survived well into the twentieth century: Berliner weisse, Lichtenhainer, gose, and Grodziskie. The latter three appeared to go extinct by 1993, but as mentioned, all have been rediscovered in the last five years like a lost bird found deep in the rainforest. In addition to being low in alcohol and largely acidic, nineteenth-century German ales were often made with wheat and some had a smoky element. A flavor diagram of the four styles might look like the Venn diagram on the next page.
You can see that there’s a lot of intersection. (Lichtenhainer is the only beer that finds itself in three groups, but that was only true intermittently; some versions were made with all-barley grists and some included wheat.) These characteristics were common among what were at the time called “weisse” beers: white, not necessarily wheat. They were distinct from the brown beers that were more typical in the period before pilsner swept through the countryside. What’s especially fascinating is that you could plug Belgian and French bières blanches of the era into this diagram and they would populate those intersections. And Belgian, French, and German breweries also had separate traditions of brewing brown ales.
TASTE OVERLAP OF 19TH-CENTURY GERMAN ALES
Berliner weisses are the sole living link to this family of ales, but the others were not long separated from the family. Of the dozens of gose breweries in business before the world wars, only one survived into the 1960s, closing mid-decade. Yet in the 1980s, breweries began experimenting with the style, and in 1999, Gosebrauerei Bayerischer Bahnhof committed to brew it full time. (The two styles are treated to their own chapter starting on page 389.)
Of the smoked ales, Grodziskie has shown a bit more life than the other. The beer outlasted Prussia, but was defeated by the attack of lagers. Brewed for generations in the Polish town of Grodzisk, the style was still made until the mid-1990s. The fascinating difference between Grodziskie and its cousin, the never-endangered German rauchbier, is wheat. Rauchbier used smoked barley, Grodziskie smoked wheat—an ingredient that perished with the style, making its revival much more difficult. However, in 2012, Weyermann Malting reintroduced oak-smoked wheat malt, and a number of breweries immediately brewed their own versions of Grodziskie. Lichtenhainer, the other smoked ale, remains the most obscure. The beer, something of a cross between Grodziskie and Berliner weisse, was last brewed in 1983. A few examples have made brief reappearances since Lichtenhainer’s death, though interestingly, none are smoked. Brauerei Talschänke brews a beer called Wöllnitz Weissbier in that mode. Predictably (and perhaps correctly), many classify it as a Berliner weisse. A touch of smoke would help clarify the distinction.
Grodziskie and Lichtenhainer were related beers. Both used smoked malt, and both were light bodied. We know from recipes mentioned at different points from the 1860s until just before World War I that Grodziskies changed. By the end of that period, they were made with 100 percent wheat malt and very heavily hopped. One source calls them a “rough, bitter beer.” But earlier recipes were different. In one, Grodziskie sounds a lot more like its acidic cousins. Brewers added willow bark to the mash tun, left the beer to cool overnight, then transferred the willow to the fermentation vessel to assist the process. That beer had only a “slight taste” of smoke.
Unlike the later version, which didn’t sour after even two years in the bottle, the earlier one was probably more acidic—and therefore more closely related to Lichtenhainer. Like Grodziskie, Lichtenhainer was brewed differently in different eras. One source said it used only barley malt, while others said it might contain as much as 50 percent wheat. In Lichtenhainers, though, it was the barley that contributed the smoke—as in rauchbiers, made farther south in and around Bamberg. The beer sounds most beguiling: “They are highly-attenuated, highly carbonated and wholesome and are regarded as special beers.”
Because we associate smokiness with meat, the type of wood used to smoke malt is important to its presentation. Hickory suggests ham; alder, salmon. Weyermann smokes its wheat with oak—a clean, neutral smokiness that doesn’t overwhelm recipes made with as much as 100 percent of the malt. Weyermann’s beech-smoked barley rauchmalt, on the other hand, does begin to get meaty after proportions of 40 to 50 percent.
In a similar vein, the beers should be fermented with a neutral ale strain, not a weizen yeast. The clovey phenols and banana esters clash with smoky flavors. Lichtenhainers may begin with a lactic fermentation or regular alcohol fermentation (there are historical examples of both methods), but the beer was not as acidic as Berliner weisses. Grodziskies are generally not described as tart beers, but there is evidence that they were 150 years ago. Some brewers have helped balance their Grodziskie with acidulated malt or sour mashes. I’ve found this helps modulate the native intensity of the style, which can easily lapse into “rough bitterness” if left undefended against the forces of malt and hop. ■
A Recipe for Braggot. In the Bickerdyke text, the Victorian authors quote a recipe from 1584 not likely to be reproduced by your corner brewpub.
“Take three or four galons of good ale or more as you please, two dayes or three after it is cleansed, and put it into a pot by itselfe, then draw forth a pottle thereof and put to it a quart of good English hony, and sett them over the fire in a vessell, and let them boyle faire and softly, and always as any froth ariseth skumme it away, and so clarifie it, and when it is well clarified, take it off the fire and let it coole, and put thereto a peper of pennyworth, cloves, mace, ginger, nutmegs, cinnamon, of each two pepperworth, stir them well together and sett them over the fire to boyle againe awhile, then being milk-warme put it to the rest and stirre all together, and let it stand two or three daies, and put barme upon it and drinke it at your pleasure.”
IF THE WORD braggot conjures any mental image at all, it may be something along the lines of a medieval woodcut of men in tunics and long socks drinking from foaming tankards. Or perhaps the famous couplet from the story of the miller in Canterbury Tales: “Hir mouth was sweete as bragot or the meeth,/Or hoord of apples leyd in hey or heeth.” Nothing lodges in the mind so firmly as a Middle English love poem, does it?
Braggot, as these references suggest, is ancient. There is no strict definition beyond honeyed beer, and by that description, braggot goes all the way back to the Sumerians. Archaeologists have discovered honeyed beer in pottery from Phrygia from 700 BCE (that’s where legendary King Midas ruled; the beer inspired a Dogfish Head brew called Midas Touch) and in Gaul during roughly the same time period. But braggot is most often associated with the medieval period, particularly in Britain and Ireland, where it was called variously bracket, bragotte, and bragawd (among others). It was usually spiced, and there were famous versions brewed around London and in Wales.
As Chaucer told us, braggot was a sweet drink. The British were the last of the Europeans to adopt hops, and braggot flourished while preferences still ran toward the sugary. As tastes eventually turned toward hopped beer, braggot waned, eventually dying out by the mid-nineteenth century. As with so many lost styles, braggot has captured the fancy of craft breweries, and they have revived it from time to time.
Writing under the pseudonym John Bickerdyke in 1889, Charles Henry Cook, John Greville Fennell, and J. M. Dixon made this observation, which should be taken as axiomatic when discussing braggot: “To define Bragot with any degree of preciseness would be as difficult as to give an accurate definition of ‘soup.’” It is commonly described as a mixture of mead—honey wine—and ale, but this wasn’t always the case. Sometimes it referred to beer made with honey as an ingredient, or beer sweetened with honey and spices. Or, as you can see in the recipe on page 346, it can be a drink made by boiling finished beer with honey and spices and then fermenting it again. No doubt there were dozens of other permutations over the centuries.
The old medieval braggot would shock modern palates with its sweet heaviness, a porridge likely tinged with sour (the more so as it aged). Breweries making braggots in the twenty-first century update it to accommodate the evolution of our palates. Modern interpretations are left a little sweet by beer standards to accentuate the contribution of honey (though nothing in comparison to medieval brews)—which actually gets consumed during fermentation. These beers tend to be quite strong, and some split the difference between mead and beer—with tripel-like results. It remains a very obscure style, however, and the field is wide open for experimentation and exploration. ■
CELIAC DISEASE and its slightly less-evil stepsister, gluten sensitivity, are serious conditions that can cause real pain and suffering. As more and more people are diagnosed, there is an increasingly large demand for gluten-free products—including beer. Glutens—the proteins in cereal grains such as wheat, barley, and rye—long seemed inescapable in drinks brewed from those very ingredients. But as gluten-free diets have taken hold, so have enterprising brewers developed beers that eschew barley, wheat, or rye in an attempt to satisfy the demand.
Gluten-free beers started appearing on market shelves in the mid-2000s, and all of the early products were made with sorghum. This makes sense: Sorghum has been used for millennia as the basis for African beers. The problem, at least for markets where people expect beer to taste a certain way, has been that these have an entirely different taste and texture from barley beer. This also makes sense: African sorghum beer is unhopped, soured, and served fizzy with active fermentation—not exactly like your average pilsner or pale ale. Breweries have continued to experiment with other grains and even legumes to achieve a more beery-tasting beer. Green’s, an English brewery, uses buckwheat, rice, and millet. Ground Breaker, an Oregon gluten-free brewery, uses chestnuts and lentils.
Gluten-Free Standards. The definition of “gluten-free” seems self-evident, doesn’t it?—no gluten. With government regulation, however, it depends on which self you ask. The World Health Organization sets its gluten-free standard a bit higher—twenty parts per million or less. This is also the European standard. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration is currently leaning toward a definition that would exclude any food (or beer) “derived from a prohibited grain,” irrespective of tested gluten levels. (The FDA doesn’t believe it’s possible to accurately test for the presence of gluten.) This decision will affect the fortunes of the nascent industry, and breweries using sorghum-based recipes are cheering the FDA’s current thinking.
Gluten-Free Beers and Their Grists.
SORGHUM-BASED
Bard’s Tale (Buffalo, NY)
Green’s (Stockport, England), includes buckwheat, rice, and millet
Ground Breaker (Portland, OR), includes chestnuts and lentils
Mbege (Sprecher, Milwaukee, WI), includes millet and bananas
New Grist (Milwaukee, WI), includes rice
New Planet (Boulder, CO)
O’Brien (Bakery Hill, Australia), includes millet and rice
Redbridge (Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis, MO)
St. Peter’s (Bungay, England)
ENZYME-TREATED BARLEY–BASED
Brunehaut (Brunehaut, Belgium)
Daura (Estrella Damm, Barcelona, Spain)
Omission (Widmer Brothers, Portland, OR)
Producing a decent facsimile of regular beer remains the holy grail for gluten-free breweries. The first efforts just weren’t very good. Sorghum doesn’t taste like barley or wheat; it’s thin and can produce sour or metallic flavors. Thick, fluffy heads are formed by protein, so sorghum beers had head-retention problems. To combat the differences, breweries added fruit, gave the beers extra fizz, tried to sweeten them—but they have never been able to really complete the alchemical magic of making them match customer expectation.
The most promising recent innovation, and a controversial one in the celiac community, involves using regular malted barley. In the brewing process, enzymes denature the protein molecule, leaving the finished beer with gluten levels below international standards. The technique was a happy accident, discovered while trying to reduce chill haze in regular beer, but because these beers do contain some gluten, they may cause reactions in celiac sufferers. The upside is that while these beers taste a bit thinner than regular, gluten-rich beers, they are in other ways identical. If research confirms them to be safe for the gluten-intolerant, the market will surely move in this direction.
Breweries that add other grains to the grist have had more success. Not only do they add more richness to the body and more flavor complexity, but they help offset the cider-like flavors that come from sorghum. The experiments have only begun, so further discoveries are bound to pop up. ■
WHAT FOLLOWS IS a starter course, not a full meal. You’ll have to explore in your area, as most of these types of beers come along as specials and one-offs. Concoctions like braggot and Lichtenhainer are rare indeed and even the adept beer watcher will search in vain for months before sighting such a creature in the wild.
LOCATION: Milton, DE
MALT: Undisclosed
HOPS: Undisclosed
OTHER: Honey, grapes, saffron
9% ABV, 12 IBU
An experiment that started with an archaeologist ended in a beer that is intended to evoke the beer of ancient Phrygia (now in Turkey). It’s a bit braggot, a bit wine, and a bit spiced ale—all in a beautifully sparkling golden ale that has a cooling, refreshing quality. It’s actually quite clean, with a peachy, gewürztraminer palate.
LOCATION: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
MALT: Pale, malted and unmalted wheat
HOPS: Undisclosed
OTHER: Hibiscus flower, coriander, orange peel
5.9% ABV
Dieu du Ciel (“God in heaven”) calls Rosée d’Hibiscus a witbier, but that’s misleading. Hibiscus is no shrinking violet, and adds both color and tons of flavor. The beer is wheaty and crisp—almost tart—but the hibiscus is perfumey and lends a piquant note. It has no hop character, so the effect is a bit like that of a gruit. It’s one of those beers you need to drink down to the bottom to really appreciate—and perhaps even to the end of your second bottle.
LOCATION: Lakewood, NY
MALT: Pale, caramel
HOPS: Magnum, Sterling
OTHER: Pureed pumpkin
9.6% ABV, 1.079 SP. GR., 40 IBU
The aspirational “king” in the title has turned prophetic, as Pumpking has become one of the favored pumpkin ales. The idea is simple: more. It is everything the traditional pumpkin ale was, but compressed into a pie filling of satisfying density. Lots of spice and sweetness, which both conceal the alcohol cleverly.
LOCATION: Asheville, NC
MALT: Pale, pilsner, Vienna, caramel, chocolate, wheat
HOPS: Cascade, Mount Hood
OTHER: Spices (vary by year)
5.2% ABV, 28 IBU
Highland’s winter seasonal has no fixed spices (much like Anchor’s Christmas Ale), so the character changes with the calendar. The base beer is a deep amber (look closely and you can see holiday red) and warming malt notes of dark fruit and toffee. Sometimes the brewery uses vanilla, which makes it a sweet treat indeed.
LOCATION: Salt Lake City, UT
MALT: Undisclosed
HOPS: Undisclosed
OTHER: Undisclosed
10.3% ABV, 39 IBU
It is nearly impossible to discern the flavor of pumpkin in beer, a fact Uinta has turned to its advantage. Instead of coddling the squash, it squashes it instead with alcohol, bourbon, and vanilla. The pie spices inflect the wood-and-liquor more than the beer and draw it out, giving it a curious flavor not unlike crème brûlée.
LOCATION: Seattle, WA
MALT: Pale, caramel, chocolate
HOPS: Nugget, Willamette, East Kent Golding
7% ABV, 1.071 SP. GR., 47 IBU
In the 1980s, there swept through the Pacific Northwest a wave of sturdy, dark ales hopped stiffly and often with sylvan scents of cedar and fir. An enduring favorite is Snow Cap, which is warmed not only by alcohol but also by malt sweetness. It’s made seasonal by its woody hops of English descent.
LOCATION: Bungay, England
MALT: Pale, caramel, chocolate, wheat
HOPS: Challenger, Golding
6.5% ABV, 1.065 SP. GR., 34–38 IBU
A winter ale should warm, and it’s partly the malts that accomplish that. Hops are steely and sharp, but malts, especially the toffee-rich ones that infuse St. Peter’s beer, soothe. There’s a bit of chocolate here as well, and the malts are garlanded with a touch of spruce-like hops. Leave the figgy pudding, take the Winter Ale.
LOCATION: Krebs, OK
MALT: Undisclosed, but includes smoked wheat malt
HOPS: Lublin
4% ABV
If the Grodziskie style emerges in the U.S., Choc gets all the credit. Krebs’s finest went above and beyond by not only tracking down an original Grodziskie yeast strain from Poland, but also convincing Germany’s Weyermann Malts to introduce oak-smoked wheat malt. Add Polish Lublin hops and you have the closest thing to the last historical Grodziskies. Because it harkens back to the most recent Grodziskies, Choc’s is lightly hopped, with just a touch of hay and herb behind the main melody—a smoky wheat sonata that is by turns crisp, fluffy, and smoky. It doesn’t seem like smoke would be thirst-slaking, but in a light wheat ale, it really is.
LOCATION: Bar Harbor, ME
MALT: Pale, black, Munich
HOPS: Pilgrim, Wye Golding
OTHER: Honey
10.5% ABV
The brewery ages this beer for six months and encourages you to continue aging it as long as you like. Fresh, it is honey scented and sweet, but undergirded with syrupy caramel maltiness and a spine of boozy heat. The alcohol is subsumed in folds of sweetness as the beer ages and the dark fruits and caramel increase.
LOCATION: Portland, OR
MALT: Pale, caramel
HOPS: Citra, Sterling, Mount Hood
4.6% ABV, 20 IBU
Gluten-free beers usually thwart the expectations of beer drinkers. Not Omission, though, which would pass among a passel of gluten-rich beers. Employing the denatured barley process, it has a bright straw color and a lively bead. I’d call it a helles, with the delicacy of hop and malt working in harmony. Of the three Omission beers (all gluten-free), the lager works better than the ales, which have a thinness of body that hints at what’s been removed—though hop-heads will enjoy the IPA.
LOCATION: Brunehaut, Belgium
MALT: Undisclosed
HOPS: Undisclosed
6.5% ABV
Like Omission, Brunehaut uses an enzyme-extraction method that begins with barley. But Brunhaut’s beer is Belgian, with all the fruity esters and yeast character you want. A bit of fig, rum, and a dry finish. It’s a beer good enough that you could serve it without mentioning the gluten-free part; people will be so distracted by the characteristic Belgian flavors that they won’t even miss the gluten.
LOCATION: Portland, OR
MALT: Pale roasted chestnuts, lentils, and organic tapioca maltodextrin
HOPS: Horizon, Willamette, Cascade, Meridian
5.8% ABV, 60 IBU
I will confess that most gluten-free beers not made with the enzyme process leave me cold. They lack the body and depth of regular beers. But Ground Breaker uses both chestnuts and lentils to add texture and the result is closer to “regular” beer than other efforts. It’s still thin, but it’s incredibly silky. The lack of body means the hops are electrical and alive, but they add mostly vivid flavor and not unbearable bitterness.
