The Beers of the Season

The Beers of the Season
One of the things I like most about the Christmas season is the beer. Many of the best brewers brew special beers for the winter/holiday season, and I like to sample a number of them. I don’t drink as many different beers as I did a few years ago – we have wine with most big dinners – but I still try a number of my favorites over the holiday season.
Winter/holiday beers tend to fall into one of two broad categories:

• Spiced beers


• Beers that are one or more of darker, stronger, or hoppier

These days, the latter tend be more common. I like both sorts, though I do with there were a few more spiced beers about. I like both sorts of beers, and must confess that yet one more reason that I really prefer fall and winter to mid-summer is that I much prefer the great winter beers to the lighter beers that many brewers feature in the summer.
I don’t pretend this review is complete. I don’t even pretend to cover all the holiday beers I’ve tried this year.  I just want to note a few of my favorites. I may follow this review with more, since I hope to make to the better beer bars in Pittsburgh over Christmas break.  We have some good ones (though none quite to the level of the Sunset Grill in Boston, which we visited over Thanksgiving break).
As I noted, there aren’t as many spiced beers as there of other types of holiday beers. However, one of the best holiday beers – Anchor’s Special Ale (aka Anchor Christmas) is as always one of the treats of the season. Every year, I look forward to the batch, and every year it’s a bit different. It’s always a dark beer, but flavored often with some sort of pine as well as other spices. This year seemed a bit subtler and less sharp than last year, but it was still a fine beer. It’s not an everyday drinking beer (which can be a problem in Pennsylvania where it’s expensive to buy beer in less than cases), since the spices make it something you want to drink on its own, not with food of any sort. But if you like spiced beers at all, this is one to try.
Anderson Valley also had a winter beer this year.  It’s called Winter Solstice, and the main spice is vanilla. Since vanilla is one of my favorite flavors, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The body is lighter than the Anchor, but that matches well with the vanilla. I had it alone, but for those looking for food pairings, I’d imagine that this one would go well with deserts of various sorts.
Great Lakes Brewing is another of America’s great brewers (and has one of America’s great brew pubs). Their Christmas beer is, like Anderson Valley, comparatively light in body, but with nice hints of ginger and cinnamon. This isn’t their best beer (try their Burning River Pale Ale), but it’s another good spiced holiday beer.
On the hoppy side of the spectrum, we have another of the world’s great beers: Sierra Nevada Celebration. Every Christmas season, I look for two beers – Anchor, as noted above, and Sierra Nevada Celebration. It’s a very hoppy India pale ale, but with substantial body to balance the hops. If you like hops, it’s a beer not to miss.
Victory’s Hop Wallop is even hoppier than their Victory Hop Devil. It’s good, but (and as a hop head, I hate to admit this), maybe even over the top with the hops. (Hop Devil, on the other hand, is extremely hoppy, but I’d list it as one of the dozen best American beers). It does have good body, but for a hoppy holiday beer, I’ll stick with Celebration.
Some of the dark beers I’ve tried also probably deserve to be reviewed, and perhaps I’ll get to them in the next few days.  As I said, I also plan to try a few more in the next week or so, and I’ll let you know if I find any particularly interesting ones.