What is a Winter Beer?

We’ve only featured Père Noël once, but were just recently considering running it again because it’s so damn good and the importer only brings in about 250 cases a year. It’s Belgian, so it stands to reason that any spice additions take a back seat to the core yeast flavor components and the beer’s big, herbaceous hop qualities. The core flavor profile offers generous tree fruits (think pears), a decisive pepper contribution, and soft citrus acidity. All in all, a really well constructed, flavorful beer. And you gotta love the label art, which shows Santa’s loving embrace of a tulip glass full of the stuff.

Now that we’re 10 years into The Bruery’s 12 Beers of Christmas Vertical Series, we can safely say that the second offering in the series, 2 Turtle Doves, was hands down one of the standouts. It embodies what we all tend to associate with a Christmas beer perfectly. In short, it’s a big, boozy, rich, malt-driven flavor profile offering bitter chocolate, woody aromatics, gin-like juniper and alcohol notes, and a lingering toasted pecan and roasted malt finish. Some serious yum factor going on here.

Decisively Belgian, we found plenty of Belgo yeast fun stuff: cloves, coriander spiciness, and orange peel were noticeable in this tasty winter ale. It also had lots of dark fruit notes, cherry preserves, and a mead-like honey characteristic which we found really nice. It goes down a bit too easy for 8%, so be wary of the photocopier at this year’s company holiday party if you’ve had more than one. Barbãr finishes quite floral, with spicy edges, honey spiced with ginger, and a touch of ripe figs. You’ll dig it.

Ridgeway Brewing Company produces a bunch of fun winter warmers and holiday ales, most of which sport colorful names like Bad Elf, Insanely Bad Elf, Santa’s Butt, and of course, our favorite in the lot, Pickled Santa. The brewery uses fresh spices, not spice extracts nor pre-ground blends, to make this baby, and it shows. We felt the beer was a bit of a cross between an ESB (Extra Special Bitter) with its drinkability and moderate bitterness, and Winter Warmer, with its intriguing spiced character. Big, sweet, malty notes complimented by allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove. Worth a test drive in any sleigh.

Mikkeller makes a different version of this bad boy every year, and of the many, many versions we’ve tried from the highly respected Danish Brewery, the 2014 edition featured in The Rare Beer Club has been our favorite, so far. Think of the milk chocolate and cocoa richness of a generous imperial stout combined with a spicy yeast character and rich notes of softer caramelized sugars. A stocking stuffer that won’t leave room for much else, but will be received much, much better than wool socks or a chia pet.

I know, I know, another beer from Denmark with “Santa” in the name. Right about now, you’re probably thinking that’s all it takes to make this list. Don’t get me wrong; Santa’s the man, but you’ve gotta do more than name drop to make this list, baby. It’s 10% big and 100% shameless to be sure. Closer to a Belgian-style quad than anything else, To Øl’s Shameless Santa differs in that it offers up a prominent bittering component. You’ll get plenty of burnt caramelized sugar notes, but also firm, hop-based citrusy and spicy qualities. This is some seriously tasty nectar to be coveted with good friends in front of a blazing fire, preferably in the middle of a snowstorm with the power out.