by Rajan | December 17th, 2009
Like every year, it seems I am only just complaining about how early they’re playing Xmas music when I blink and the holidays are upon me.
As mentioned before, this year I decided to try some holiday beer choices. Handy in that regard was the Styles Session on holiday beers (the 13th in the series) run by Maggie of Beer Ethos and Will of Beer Menus. I believe I’ve mentioned these events here before – every 1-2 months they do a roughly 8-beer tasting of different styles at Rattle N Hum. Holiday beers aren’t really a style, but it was a good enough grouping to assemble some beer.
My goal was to find something I liked at least nearly as much as the He’brew Jewbelation (either one), but unfortunately I came up short in that department. While none of the beers was particularly bad, they just didn’t wow me too much. I don’t have the list handy to go through, but I will highlight that the best of the bunch, in my opinion, was the Elysian Bifrost, probably because of all the beers we tried, most of which were malty and boozy, the Bifrost had the most hop character of any of them. I’d be willing to try it again.
The highlight of the night, though, was the beer I had before the tasting, the Smuttynose Big A IPA – hoppy, fruity, lots of taste and character, with enough malt to balance it out. Imperial IPAs have been some of my favorites recently and this one didn’t disappoint. I picked up a bottle the other day to have at home.
Tonight, I’ll continue my tour of winter beers by attending Barcade’s Winter Beer Night. I’m particularly looking forward to trying the Hoppy Holidays from the Chelsea Brewery (there’s my hop bias again) as well as sampling the He’brew Jewbelation 13 on draft again.
More to come later.