The modern holiday season is rife with signs of cozy winter ambience and age-old tradition pumped up to catchpenny idolatry. Candy canes, reindeers, drummer boys, dreidels, nutcrackers, ladles of eggnog, animatronic Santas, snowflakes, and tangles of holiday lights all provide a certain atmospheric lingo for the season. Now what if you could bottle all of these signifiers of the holidays, ferment it, carbonate it and drink it down? Well, in a sense, that is what is being done every holiday season by beer brewers around the world with their own brands of holiday beers. While the cloying comfort of eggnog and the spicy fortified lift of mulled wine will always lead the pack for the time-honored seasonal libations, the sheer quantity and quality of this seasons holiday or winter beers threaten to gain some much deserved ground.
The inception of the holiday brew dates back a few centuries to the traditional Belgian ales, where the brewers were mostly monks who reserved their finest ingredients until year's end for a festive beer honoring the birth of Christ. These holiday beers tended to be brewed much stronger, darker, and heavier in calories than their spring and summer counterparts, in an effort to offset the grueling rigors of a merciless winter. Back in present-day America, the holiday brew furor really began in earnest in 1975 at Anchor Brewery in San Francisco. Known for their heralded and patented "steam beer" technique, Anchor owner Fritz Maytag decided to brew something different for winter, which had been considered the slower season for beer consumption. As a sort of one off, he brewed the now-famous and widely sought after Anchor Christmas Ale, and the rest is beer history.
Holiday beers are brewed around the Hudson Valley, and the rest of the world, starting in late October/early November. They are not so much of a particular style, but more defined by an evocative character. This may be anything from a bolstered alcohol content to the addition of fruits and spices to the brew, like cranberry, cinnamon, and cloves. All in all, these beers set out to capture the flavor of the season and our many associations surrounding the holidays.
John Eccles, Brewmaster at the Hyde Park Brewing Company since it opened in 1996, insists that the true appeal of these holiday beers is their power to evoke memories and associations through smell. For Eccles, Christmas was typified by the aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg spiced eggnog from his youth. So Eccles indulged his memories by adding a satchel of cinnamon and crushed nutmeg to the brewing of his annual Santa Lager. "The idea is to capture the character of the holiday, but not so much that people's eyeballs bug out," Eccles insists. The subtlety of Santa Lager apparently runs counter to the over-the-top tendencies of most holiday products, as Eccles observes, "Just about everything we know about Christmas is really more or less a marketing tool, and having a Christmas beer is part and parcel with the beer industry wanting to be part of the season and the money exchange." Regardless of his skepticism, Eccles insists that most of these microbrews exist to expand the palate and, while he may not always be enthused by the results, he remains a champion of his fellow brewer's right to experiment and push the beer envelope.
 Brewmaster Darren Currier inspects the tank at the Gilded Otter. |