Happy Holidays, Hartland! The snow is falling and the Christmas lights are twinkling, and we are ready to welcome the season with roasty, toasty, malty, and seasonal ales! For December's installment of Ale Together Now, we focused on the history, culture, and brewing of Christmas Ales, served with snickerdoodles for the full Christmas effect. Plus, friends Teri and Dan brought a variety of colorful Holiday cookies as well! This month's Ale Together Now was a festive celebration of the tradition and camaraderie of this wonderful program. Turn on those Christmas lights, cozy up with your favorite brew, and learn all about the warm, spiced goodness of Christmas ale!
Christmas ales, or Holiday ales, are beers with sweet, citrus, and spice flavors that incite thoughts of the winter holidays. This beer style features roasted malts and/or caramel malts, for a sweet and toasted flavor, and typically have spice adjuncts such as cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, star anise, juniper, vanilla, and fruit adjuncts such as fig, date, orange, plum, cherry, or cranberry. This makes for a wonderfully festive ale that is sure to warm us up-- and pair well with winter Holiday foods! Our first sample of the evening was Old Fezziwig, a spiced brown ale from Samuel Adams Brewery in Boston, MA. Not terribly sweet but very cozy, this beer features light flavors of ginger and orange peel.
Holiday ales come from a drink called Jul beer, brewed by ninth and tenth-century Scandinavian groups during the "Jul" (Yule) time of the winter solstice in late December. These brews were dark, sweet, and high in alcohol by volume (ABV). This brew was so well loved that King Haakon the Good issued fines if beer was not served at annual Jul celebrations! In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as Christianity grew, some of these traditions were kept, though they have changed over time. Moving into Victorian England, dark malted ales were brewed as fall turned to winter, and included cozy, warming mulling spices.
The twentieth century saw even more changes to the tradition of serving dark, malted, spiced beer near the winter solstice. Stella Artois was first brewed in 1926 (just one year before Cromaine Library was founded!), and was served as a light Belgian beer for the Christmas season. In the United States, winter beers were brewed, such as Holiday Brews (from the 1930s to the 1950s), Special Ales (in the 1970s), and finally developing into Christmas Ales in the 1990s. Dozens of local breweries crafted their own versions of Christmas ale in the twenty first century, with the peak of Christmas ale popularity arriving from about 2015-2019. Within the last few years, we have seen a decrease in the popularity and brewing of the dark, spiced, traditional Jul style beer. Nowadays, we see some interesting adaptations on this style, such as Christmas ale sours and stouts/porters. Noel by Jolly Pumpkin Brewing in Dexter, MI is an interesting example of this. Noel is a mouth-puckering Christmas sour with notes of candied pecans, truffles, sugar plums, and spiced fruitcake.
Originating from British and Belgian holiday traditions, winter warmers are another interesting form of Holiday beer. These ales feature a strong malt base, and can contain subtle flavors of the colder seasons, such as baking spices, toffee, honey, and brown sugar. This makes for a "warming" ale that is also high in alcohol by volume, keeping you warm and cozy through the snowy season! This style is like a cross between a Strong/Scotch ale and a Wassail. We got to sample Winter Welcome by Samuel Smiths Brewery in Yorkshire, England, and 4 Elf by Dark Horse Brewing Company in Marshall, MI. Winter Welcome features no flavor adjuncts, making for a lovely toasty beer that is crisp and drinkable, with no additional dessert sweetness. On the other hand, 4 Elf sits at 8.7% ABV, and features strong flavors of holiday spice, dark roasted malt, and alcohol.
And of course, we can't have a Christmas Ale Together Now program without discussing the wonderful Wassail! The word Wassail comes from the Anglo-Saxon "Waes hael", meaning "be well", and refers to the activity of Wassailing-- singing and dancing to ward off evil spirits after the harvest. This beverage is a mulled or spiced beer with wine or cider, spices such as cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and roasted or caramel malts. Wassail signifies the solstice season of well-wishing and neighborly drinking. Michelle brewed up a wonderful batch of wassail featuring Founders Dirty Bastard Scotch Ale, Petite Sirah and Verdot wine, orange and apple slices, cranberry juice, cinnamon, clove, star anise, nutmeg, and brown sugar. The Wassail was dark, lightly spiced, and served warm!
We are so grateful for another wonderful year of Ale Together Now programming. Thank you to all who attended this month's program, and to those who have been attending over the last five years! We are so grateful for you and the community we have created together, centered on a mutual love of good beer.
Have a beautiful and safe Holiday season, and we'll see you in January for our next installment of Ale Together Now!
Cheers!