The Session #10 - Winter/Seasonal Beer

This session might seem at first to be difficult from the perspective of someone from Houston, where the average December temperature is 53.5 degrees F. The subject I chose, though, was appropriate not only in that it's a winter/seasonal Houston brewed ale, but that I actually got a case of it in July. Despite the near 100 degree temperatures then, I still enjoyed it.

The beer I'm talking about is Saint Arnold Christmas ale. It's a nicely malty, full-bodied beer with the body appropriately balanced with just the right amount of hops. It's a fairly high alcohol beer at ~7% ABV. Faint, spicy notes engage the palate along with the warming effect of the alcohol, all of which rides atop the creamy smooth mouthfeel.

Yup, I love this stuff. In fact, it's one of my favorite beers to drink even in July. Well, the case that I bought back then is long gone and has been replaced by two more that I bought as soon as I saw it on the shelf in late November. This is indeed a most wonderful time of the year.


I like this beer enough that I decided to email and request Brock Wagner, owner of Saint Arnold, to give a brief writing for inclusion in this post. He gladly obliged:

It was our first seasonal beer. At that point, I had no plans to make other seasonals. I just really wanted to make a big, malty beer that would warm you up for the holidays. If I remember correctly, I brewed up about 50 kegs and my business partner at the time didn't think it would sell. That turned out to be the least of our problems. It barely lasted a week from our mid-November launch. It has been the most awaited of our seasonals ever since. Oh, and I'm enjoying one right now.

Cheers!

Brock

Cheers back at ya' Brock. It's easy to see why those first 50 kegs went so quickly. From their website, here's another thing I really appreciate about this beer:

We named it Christmas Ale because, well, that's the holiday most of us celebrate. Also, we didn't see anything particularly exclusive about calling it this. And we thought naming it this would set us apart from all the namby-pamby marketing wusses that tell people not to use "Christmas". We're yet to see anybody not drink this beer because of its name. So there, wussies.

Politically correct nonsense will never kill my Christmas spirit. I'd be happy to share one of my Saint Arnold Christmas ales with an appreciative person of any faith. Christmas is not about exclusion or division. It's about the spirit of giving.

So what else do I do with this beer besides drink it? Well naturally, if it's as good to drink as I claim, it would be hard to go wrong by cooking with it. So I did. I made a gumbo using this beer as a supplement to the normal roux. I use the Savoie's roux, which IMHO is every bit as good as making roux from scratch. For the meat, it was turkey and sausage. The turkey was leftover from the ludicrous number of birds I Cajun deep-fried at Thanksgiving. The gumbo was great and, of course, I paired the post-Thanksgiving gumbo meal with the same beer that went into making it.

To close this post out, I'll leave you with my rendition of one of my favorite Christmas melodies, "What Child is This":



.mp3 download link

Lastly, let me thank our good host (and fellow Houstonian) Ted at Barley Vine and say Merry Christmas, everyone! Cheers to all of you and looking forward to more fermented fun with the sessions of 2008.

Beer
Roland Fantom