Winter Beers

Winter
beers! Just the tonic for cold weather: big and hearty,
sweet and spiced, something special to celebrate the
holidays. Just thinking about them makes you feel warmer;
you don’t even need a sweater.

Brewers move to a different
calendar. They do winter beers way before it’s
wintertime.

“It’s a beautiful day right
now,” Jim Koch told me when I called to ask about the winter
beers his Boston Beer Company would be offering this year.
At the time, it was early September, sunny and breezy,
without a cloud in the sky, and a spell of oppressive
humidity had just broken. Farthest thing from your mind is
winter beers, right?

“No, we’re starting to brew
them now,” he said, laughing. “That’s one of the curiosities
of making seasonal beers, you’re always way ahead of the
season. We might do the first test brew of the Samuel Adams
Octoberfest in February or March; it really is a Marzen.
We’re thinking about what tweaks we want to make to Summer
Ale right now.”

’tis the season! Brewers
once made beers to the season because they had to.
Oktoberfest beers were called marzen beers because they were
brewed in the month of March – Marz in German – the last
month cool enough for brewing beer without risking bacterial
contamination. The last of these beers, long-aged in caves
over summer months, would be consumed in early fall as the
new season’s beers were coming ready. The French biere de
garde came from the same reasoning; a strong beer, meant to
be stored over the hot months when beer could not be
reliably brewed.

Things are different now. I
went back to the very first story I ever wrote for this
magazine, the winter beer story for 1998, and dug out a
quote from Jeff Close, who was Catamount Brewing’s wittily
urbane VP for marketing and sales at the time. “Beer seasons
these days have little to do with seasonal constraints on
materials or technologies,” he said, “and more to do with
tradition and with temperature for consumption. Beers fit
the human activities of the seasons. These beers are a
marketing occasion.”

It’s true. With
refrigeration and advances in microbiology, any beer can now
be made at any time of the year. We don’t need caves to keep
beer cold as it ferments, we can hit boil times on the nose
every batch, and stainless steel and caustic cleansers keep
wild yeasts and bacteria well away from the beer.

But as Close said, our love
of seasonal beers keeps them coming, and just when we want
them. Despite the brewers’ flexibility, we are still locked
into the turn of the seasons that our ancestors knew:
summertime is the time for fresh vegetables and fruits,
fresh-slaughtered meats, and cold meals with light, crisp,
crunchy character. When winter comes, we turn to the food
that will be available all winter long, storable food:
grains, roots, cabbage, potatoes, sausage, smoked
hams.

The big lagers and
weightier ales of winter are the equivalent of those foods:
storable beers. Cold weather turns the mind to the food that
makes beers like this sing. These beers yearn for fall and
winter food, the delayed fruits of the frenzied harvest of
September and October.

A feast for the
senses!Winter beers – holiday beers – play on our senses and
our souls. We smell them and we sigh with memory and
anticipation. They do the same thing for the brewers. “We’ll
be brewing Winter Warmer in October,” said Charlie Storey,
head of sales and marketing at Harpoon Brewery. “The brewery
smells great when we’re brewing it. It’s fun for us to brew
it. It’s a harbinger of the season, part of the annual
cycle.”

Jeff Horner was brewing up
the fall seasonal at Cisco Brewers, out on Nantucket, the
day I called, a pumpkin beer called Pumple Drumkin. “It’s
made with local cheese gourds, little pie pumpkins,” he
said. “There are a couple in the mash, most of them we roast
and caramelize, and then put them in the fermenter. There’s
a blend of holidayesque spices added in small additions all
the way through the brewing process.” (Yes, it’s the fall
beer, but he made it sound so nice I had to put it
in.)

Horner was looking forward
to brewing their holiday beer, Celebration Libation. “It’s
got cinnamon, ginger and some other spices, and some good
American hops,” he said. “It comes out a coppery, reddish
color, and it’s got lots of crystal malts so it comes out
with a nice sweetness. Stylistically? Maybe an American Red
Ale, only backed off on the hops, with some spices thrown
in. The ABV is about 6.5%, 7%. It ages well; we’re pouring
from the last of the 2OO6 bottles, and it’s
beautiful.”

Not every winter beer is
spiced, of course. Dan Lipke, the head brewer at Mercury
Brewing in Ipswich, does two, the Ipswich Winter Ale and the
locally-distributed Stone Cat Winter Lager. “We do about 1O
times as much Ipswich Winter, it’s the big seller,” he
noted.

The Ipswich Winter is like
an old ale, but not quite. “I describe it as kind of a light
old ale,” said Lipke. “It’s like an old ale, but not as
sweet, not as strong. The alcohol is around 6%; not huge,
but starting to get up there. We use a lot of Cara-Munich
12O, a dark crystal malt that will give those raisiny,
treacly flavors. I’ve toyed with adding molasses, but I’ve
resisted. We have a fairly attenuative yeast, so it’s not
real sweet. The Stone Cat is a traditional Schwarzbier: very
dark but not super-roasty, and not too heavy, probably come
out about 5.5%.”

For Koch, though, the fun
with the winter beers is all about the spices. “We’ve
learned that a given spice has the same taste differences
that hops do. We often think of spices as generic:
‘Cinnamon’ is cinnamon, it’s a box you buy off the shelf in
the supermarket. But it’s not: cinnamon is no more cinnamon
than hops are hops.

“We did a cinnamon tasting
a few years ago,” he said, warming to the subject, “of
cinnamons from around the world. We brewed with three or
four of the best of them to see which was the best for the
beer. It turned out to be from trees grown near Saigon in
Vietnam. Same thing with the orange zest. Spanish oranges
are quite different from Middle Eastern oranges, which are
different from California oranges.

“That’s one of the really
fun parts of brewing these beers,” he concluded. “We can go
all over the world, searching out the very finest examples
of each of the spices. If you want the best stuff, you often
have to get it early, sometimes from certain farms. The
really good hops growers have people competing for their
crops; same with spices.”

All for you! Of course, one
of the traditional reasons for brewing these beers is not
just fun for the brewers, but as a special ‘gift’ for the
customers, for the people who have bought the brewers’ beer
all year long. That’s the rationale Fritz Maytag gave when
he brewed what was probably the first winter seasonal of the
micro/craft brewery era, back in 1975. (The following is
from my winter beer story from 1999.)

“I liked the idea of an ale
brewed for a festival,” Fritz said simply when I asked him
how the Christmas Ale (more formally known as Our Special
Ale) got started. “We’re not taking advantage of the season,
we’re celebrating it. I was adamant that it say “Merry
Christmas” on the label. I called it a gift to our
customers, not to make a profit. It has become profitable,
but it wasn’t for years.”

Todd Marcus cites that as
the big reason he makes Cape Cod Brewing’s Berry Merry
Christmas Ale, which he described as an amber ale with
subtle overtones of cranberry, orange and clove. “We really
have to do it,” he explained. “We have to keep it
interesting for the local folks who support us year ’round.
As much as we gripe about brewing new beers, the local folks
appreciate the effort we make to give them something
special. If we just had the three beers all the time, well,
okay. But it’s nice to give them something. Sometimes we’ll
hand-bottle some 22s and give them out as gifts to our
special accounts.”

Harpoon Winter Warmer was
the first seasonal beer from Mass Bay Brewing, as Harpoon
was then known. “We introduced it in 1988,” said Storey.
“Winter warmers are a loosely defined style that has its
roots in England, using spices like cinnamon and nutmeg,
those rich spices. It was a flavor profile that defined the
beer more than hops. It’s borrowing from this established
historical style. They didn’t necessarily try to duplicate
that 1OO%, but they did like the idea of a spiced ale. So
they thought, let’s try it.”

It was pretty radical for
1988. “If people thought buying a Harpoon Ale was weird –
and it was really an outlier at the time – if they thought
that was weird,” said Storey, “Winter Warmer was blowing
people’s minds. What was going on with this beer with
cinnamon and nutmeg in it? It was off the charts. It puzzled
some people, but it delighted some people. We stuck with it
for the people it delighted, and it’s still one of our most
popular seasonals.”

Bells are ringing! When it
comes down to it, though, holiday beers are about holiday
sales: a bigger ring from those silver bells in the
register. The brewers aren’t romantically blind to that.
“We’ll always do the seasonals,” said Lipke. “It’s a big
boost. Those beers are a decent chunk of sales. We’d be
missing out if we didn’t do them. And it gives Ipswich fans
a chance to see new products.”

Koch provides a number of
beers all at once in Boston Beer’s Winter Classics 12-pack.
“We’ve been doing the Winter pack for about 12 years, we
sort of pioneered that,” he said. “This year, we’ve got the
Winter Lager, Cranberry Lambic, Samuel Adams Boston Lager,
the Holiday Porter, Old Fezziwig, and Cream Stout. The
change this year is that Cream Stout replaced Black Lager.
We introduced the Porter last year, and people really liked
that. Samuel Adams Boston Lager is a beer for all seasons,
and the Cream Stout’s in there to re-introduce people to
it.

“It’s a big season,” Koch
went on. “Across the alcohol beverage market, people trade
up in the holidays. They’re looking for something special,
something unique, and they’re willing to spend. For the
retailer, something like the Winter 12-pack is a home-run.
It’s both high-margin and incremental, it’s an impulse buy,
and you don’t generally have to discount them. They’re
add-ons. If you’re a retailer, you want to put that in the
impulse position: end of an aisle, stacked at checkout, even
outside the beer department.”

Tim Bush, the manager and
beer purchaser at Colonial Spirits in Acton, likes the
customers holiday beers bring in, especially his favorites,
the Belgian holiday specialties like Delirium Noel and St.
Feuillien Noel. “They attract general consumers and the
higher end,” he said, “and the customers are already asking
for them. People pick at them through November, and they’re
buying huge amounts anyway in the holiday season. December
is just unbelievable.”

The general manager at
Dara’s Wines & Spirits in Boston, also named Tim, thinks
holiday beers are definitely worth the extra effort of
stocking and displaying them. “They make a nice add. In the
holiday season, it’s nice, and, especially in this area,
which is full of college students. They like something
special, something different.”

Are holiday beer sales
truly an add, or are the customers just getting something
different? “You’ve got two things going on,” said Koch,
bringing up an interesting balance of forces. “One is the
sort of simple cannibalization, buying one instead of the
other. The other is that [the seasonal] creates
interest in the flagship. It was very interesting when
Heineken Premium Light came out last year. Base Heineken
sales went up because of the additional attention it brought
to the whole brand. Samuel Adams Boston Lager, seasonals,
the Brewmaster collection: they’re all up this year. The
fact that we have all these beers makes people think, ‘Wow,
that’s pretty cool, they make all these interesting beers,’
and that reminds people how good the Lager is.”

Storey agrees. “It’s a net
gain” having the seasonal sales, he said. “At any given
time, we have a seasonal in the market place. We have four
seasonals, so there’s always one out there. Harpoon drinkers
may drink Winter Warmer instead of IPA, but we see them
switching back and forth, and don’t really see that as
cannibalization. It gives them a choice, a seasonal
choice.”

Well . . . maybe, said
Bush. “It’s difficult to observe whether they’re add-ons,”
he said. “There’s a degree of substitution; people can only
drink so much. But they’re having parties, having people
over, so they need more, and you get add-on business that
way. I think it just has to be more substitution than
add-on.”

Horner just knows what he
sees, and that’s pretty straightforward. “It’s overall
positive,” he said. “The more beers we offer, the more total
sales are up.” Hard to argue with.

The party’s over! All
that’s good, but . . . what do you do on January 2nd? Do you
take down the decorations and count up how many cases of
holiday beer you’re stuck with? “It slows down
considerably,” Storey admits. “Our seasonal beer has a
strong association with the holidays. In addition, beer
drinking declines in January and February. Those are slow
months in the beer industry.”

“I think people are just
fizzled out after having been through an eight week sprint
from Thanksgiving to New Year’s,” Marcus said. “They’re
running around, meeting family, eating heavy foods –
cranberry this, squash that – and they think, I’ve got to
chill out, enough with the different flavors, and back to
the old standards.”

Jim Koch’s got some
rational advice: “Make sure you make your money in November
and December! It’s tough to fight the calendar,” he
said.

Oh, yeah? It ain’t over
’til it’s over, says Lipke. “We still brew Ipswich Winter
Ale into January. The whole switch-off between winter and
spring/summer beers really depends on the weather. If it
stays cold, you can continue to sell it through April. A lot
of winter beers are spiced, but ours isn’t, and it’s not a
holiday beer. If it was much stronger and treacly, you’d
probably see it more as a deep winter thing, but it’s
drinkable.”

The beer manager at the
Spirit Haus in Amherst, Cindy French, isn’t going to give up
either. “Some of them keep selling into February, beers like
Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. It depends on the style. Most
customers just go back to drinking their regular beer. But
we’ve got customers who just want something different all
the time.”

Cape Cod Brewing has an ace
up their sleeve; a second winter beer. “We also do an
English Old Ale,” said Marcus, “a winter beer, and people
gravitate to that in January. We barrel-age that, and people
look forward to it. February and March are pretty cold and
miserable, and people ask, ‘When are you emptying the
barrel?'”

Ah! Winter beers, a triumph
of brewer’s art over seasonal downstroke. They are a burst
of excitement at a time of year when things are slowing
down, they are an exciting difference for your customer, and
a nice bump for your bottom line. As Charlie Storey
concluded, “Brewing holiday beers is an attractive
proposition.”