Well, it’s sort of an odd Christmas this year. Two of our tribe work in hospitals and couldn’t avoid the Christmas shift. So our Christmas Eve is tomorrow and Christmas morning on the 27th. Odd.
I whipped out a quick “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” on the piano this morning, hung the lights on the tree this afternoon, and that’s about it. My wife and I refrained from exchanging gifts, until Wednesday.
I am drinking a Christmas Ale, however, from Breckenridge Brewery of Littleton, Colorado, along with a pizzelli from last night’s Feast of the Seven Fishes. So I’ve got that going for me.
The beer is one of the older Christmas beers on the market, using the same recipe since 1993. It’s a clear, dark amber ale with appealing garnet highlights. The brewery calls it a winter warmer, but it’s probably more accurately pegged as a strong ale, suffused with an immediately noticeable caramel malt nose that follows through in the palate, along with a hint of fruit and chocolate, and a spicy bite at the finish from Mt. Hood and Chinook hops.
The brewery was founded in 1990 in Breckenridge, Colorado (where there’s still a taproom), but kept expanding until moving to a 12-acre spread in Littleton in 2015.
Why haven’t I had this one before? Because the brewery was purchased by Anheuser-Busch shortly after the move. My old grudge with A-B (I’ll tell you the story over a beer sometime), was enough to leave it off the list lo these many years.
But last August A-B InBev unloaded the brewery to the U.S. branch of Tilray Brands, a Canadian cannabis and packaged goods company. That not only reinstated the brewery’s “craft” status according to the Brewers Association, which adjudicates such matters, but to my good graces.
Tilray didn’t stop there, by the way. The $85 million deal with A-B included their Shock Top brand and a bunch of other breweries they’d purchased in the last decade or so, including Blue Point, 10 Barrel Brewing, Redhook and Widmer Brothers. Which would appear to bump them up to #5 in the Brewers Association list of the Top 50 Craft Brewing Companies.
All this because Kid Rock took an automatic rifle to cans of Bud Lite after A-B ran an ad with a transgender actor and sales of the beer plummeted? Maybe. One does wonder which of Santa’s Christmas lists Kid Rock wound up on this year.
Anyway, I hear tell there’s a spinoff of the Breckenridge Christmas Ale called Holidale that uses the same recipe, but ages the beer in whiskey barrels. Maybe next year.
Name: Christmas Ale
Brewer: Breckenridge Brewery, Littleton, Colorado
Style: Winter seasonal
ABV: 7.1%
Availability: Nov-Dec, in over 40 states
For More Information: www.breckbrew.com
[December 25, 2022]
< 12 Beers of Christmas 2: Allagash Gatherwell
12 Beers of Christmas 4: Abita Christmas Ale >
