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Time to frost cookies and then have a beer that tastes like what you are doing. Southern Tier Brewing brings us Frosted Sugar Cookie…
“You won’t believe it’s beer and not a tin full of iced confections. Our Frosted Sugar Cookie Ale is full of soft and airy vanilla and cake notes, iced to perfection. Happy Holidays from ours to yours.”
Next stop, NY and Southern Tier for their ode to Old Man Winter…
If you cast your mind back, you will remember that Southern Tier and Victory Brewing have combined forces under the Artisanal Brewing Ventures banner. Now the two breweries have announced plans run a R&D brewery and taproom together in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The innovation brewery will do both beers that are “specific to Charlotte and the Carolinas” and will also pour flagship brands such as Southern Tier’s Nu Skool IPA and Pumking along with Victory’s Golden Monkey and Prima Pils.
The facility will have a “25-barrel brewhouse capable of producing approximately 10,000 barrels annually. The facility will include a fermentation cellar, quality lab and packaging hall along with a beer garden and indoor/outdoor private event spaces.”
Check your Craft Beer Acquisition bingo cards. If you have Southern Tier and Victory teaming up, you might be a winner.
The first big business transaction of 2016 is thankfully straightforward and shouldn’t cause too much waves amongst the craft beer fans. Basically Artisanal Brewing Ventures (ABV) is now the parent company to the two East Coast breweries both with extensive brewing behind them. Southern Tier with 14+ and Victory with 20+.
The brewing operations will remain independent but where the combined strength will come is “in collaborative sales and marketing efforts to strengthen, support and expand its distributor and retail partnerships. Victory and Southern Tier brands will become increasingly available to loyal and new consumers across their combined markets as a direct result of this union.”
Both companies have pretty large distribution footprints but we in SoCal may be the beneficiaries because we get only Victory now but some Southern Tier may end up hitching rides to our favorite beer shoppes. The other benefit is that these two are off the table for the big sword swallowers and ABV is now an option for those who have been approached.
Each month, I focus a spotlight on breweries from a city, region, country but this month, I am throwing a change-up. There are quite a few big, burly beers that are described as having a fig like flavor to them. But oddly enough not a large amount of beers actually have Figs in them.
Now I am not a fan. Wouldn’t eat a raw or cooked fig or know if one is preferable to the other. But I would at least try a fig enhanced beer. So, this month, instead of the normal taster tray from one brewery, I will roll out (over three posts) a fig flavored taster tray from past and present.
We start, appropriately enough with Figueroa Mountain and their 4th Anniversary beer that is brewed in the style of an Abbey Quad. The base beer was then aged in oak barrels with figs. The finished beer will bear dark fruit aromas and caramel notes with yeast spiciness.
Beer # 2 is 2Xmas from New York’s Southern Tier. This version is a winter warmer with four varieties of malts plus orange peel, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger plus the figs giving it a spice cake or mulled wine flavor profile.
That’s the start of Fig-cember tasting tray.
In tomorrow’s Food GPS Brew & You column, I touch on three wildly different beers that I was too scared to try until now but for those in an unadventurous mood, here are the Top 5 Pumpkin beers as rated on RateBeer.
1. Midnight Sun T.R.E.A.T. Imperial Chocolate Pumpkin Porter (Oak Aged)
2. Selins Grove Pumpkin Ale
3. Southern Tier Oaked Pumking
4. Avery Rumpkin
5. The Bruery Autumn Maple (Barrel aged)
How many have you had?
My favorite pumpkin ale is from TAPS in Brea. Victor Novak has crafted a beer that has the spice notes but is pumpkiny. Like having a slice of pie.
We are getting near the end of Christmas beers but there is time to head to New York and Southern Tier….
“Swedish flags are a fairly common sight in our part of the country. Holiday parties often have warm concoctions of spices and booze at the ready to knock the ice off of toes while raising spirits. We were inspired by a “Glogg” party, deciding on the spot to brew a beer that pays tribute to this Nordic tradition. 2xMas Ale combines traditional brewing ingredients with figs, orange peels, cardamom, cinnamon, clove and ginger root. It’s a holiday addition to the 2X line and another reason to toast to the season, but unlike Glogg, we recommend serving this one”
Local beer is great if you are the local. But if you want to get a full rounded palate and not become one dimensional in your beer love, then you have to look for some beer outside the box of your normal life. (Very new-agey, don’t ya think?)
That is all preamble to the great box of beer that arrived while I was in Portland….
Now this is a great selection for many reasons. One, you have a variety of styles. Two, a good representation of different breweries with vastly different approaches and third, a nice specialty, hard-to-find beer.
You will probably be seeing reviews of at least the Sorachi Ace.
If you haven’t had Southern Tier before, this summer refresher might be the place to start.