THE WAKKER WEEKLY – Issue #1769
Issue #1769 – Posted on: 20 – Dec – 2024
BUSHWAKKER SEASONAL SUDS STATUS. Bushwakker head brewer, Michael Gaetz, reports our seasonally available MISSILETOW CHRISTMAS ALE, 30TH ANNIVERSARY BLACKBERRY MEAD, MORK’S MEAD, POWERHOUSE PORTER, TREPHINATION IMPERIAL IPA and BREW & GOLD DORTMUNTER EXPORT LAGER are currently available. There are also batches of PICKARD’S OATMEAL CREAM STOUT, KAI’S MUNICH HELLES, JUST CHERRY ALE and DOUBLE HONEY RED ALE currently working their way through the brewery.
Less than a week until Christmas! A Bushwakker gift card is the perfect stocking stuffer for the Bushwakker fan on your list. A mead enthusiast will adore one of our 30th Anniversary Mead t-shirts featuring our founder’s lovable cross-eyed cat, Mork! And an ultra-comfy, snuggly-wuggly vintage Bushwakker premium sweatshirt will stave off the winter chill this holiday season. Visit our website at https://bushwakker.com/shop/ to view our various gift ideas!
This WEEKEND’S SPECIAL DINING FEATURE for Dec. 20th & 21st is a GREEK PLATTER. Our Saturday CLASSIC STEAK & A PINT SPECIAL as well as our Monday and Wednesday WINGS & A PINT SPECIAL and Tuesday PIZZA & A PINT SPECIAL are also great value deals.
DECEMBER PREMIUM WINE FEATURES: This month’s wine features are the RAVEN CONSPIRACY wines from British Columbia. The red is the DEEP DARK RED and the white is the SMOOTH BRIGHT WHITE. Both are $8.95 for a glass and $23.95 for a half litre.
Our “Missile”tow Christmas Ale and Christmas Mixed Six-Packs are now available for holiday sharing. Enjoy our rich, malty and complex English Barleywine in moderation as 8.0% ABV tends to be a touch “warming.” This year’s Christmas Six-Packs feature the most powerful line-up to date including; three meads, our Christmas Ale, a Powerhouse Porter (or Imperial IPA as a second run) and a Munich Helles to soften the blow.
Whole Bushwakker Kentucky Bourbon Pecan Pies are back once again for Christmas. Supplies are limited so order early to avoid disappointment. Visit https://bushwakker.com/product/kentucky-bourbon-pecan-pie/ to order yours today and take your holiday spread to the next level!
The Prairie Dog “Best of Regina” 2024 Reader’s Poll results are in! Much thanks to all of Wakkerville for voting us as being Regina’s; Best Warehouse District Pub, Best Warehouse District Restaurant, Best Fries, Best Pub Food, Best Nachos and Best Work Lunch! We wouldn’t be here for well over three decades without your enthusiastic support!
Congratulations to the winner of our “Bushwakker Ultimate Vintage Mead Giveaway” contest, KATHY LEWIS! Kathy recently redeemed her one-of-a-kind gift certificate with “old Scroogie Frewgie” in exchange for a collection of nine bottles of our famous Blackberry Mead, dating all the way back to 2010! Kathy and her friends and family will soon be sipping and savouring 14 years of local honey history. Cheers to winning this legendary prize known as the nectar of the gods!
UPCOMING BUSHWAKKER EVENTS
Dec. 22: DECEMBER SUNDAY OPENING (third of four.) Last Sunday chance before Christmas! Even Santa might stop by on a Sunday for a Blackberry Mead and pick up a last minute Bushwakker stocking stuffer gift card! Open from noon to 9:00 PM.
Dec. 23: Monday Night Jazz & Blues – SPECIAL Christmas edition. A RON LOOS BLUESY L’IL CHRISTMAS. Talented guitar-plucker returns to share some holiday favourites and delve into the true sanctity of the Christmas season. 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM.
Dec. 24: CHRISTMAS EVE. Open 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM. Last chance to pick up a Christmas Six-Pack, Missiletow Ale, Blackberry Mead, Mork’s Mead or a Bushwakker gift card!
Dec. 25: Closed for the Holiday. Merry Christmas! We suspect Santa will relax with a bottle of 30th Anniversary Blackberry Mead today. We hope you can too!
Dec. 29: DECEMBER SUNDAY OPENING (four of four.) Last Sunday opening! The big day of being cooped up with the family is over! Now come meet up with friends and re
Dec. 30: Monday Night Jazz & Blues. JUSS SAYIN’. A New Year’s Eve – eve performance. Great jazz and blues featuring vocalist and guitar player, Jan Seitz. 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM.
Dec. 31: NOTHING FOR NEW YEAR’S 19. We had no idea 19 years ago that so many of you would be so excited about a whole lotta’ nothin’! So much so that we are offering two seatings to our biggest non-event of the entire year. Full menu will be available as well as Chef Mike’s famous Prime Rib & Jumbo Yorkshire Pudding Dinners! Call 306-359-7276 to reserve your table today!
What Makes a Holiday Beer?
Is it the season or the style?
By Don Russell
Looking at the shelves this season, it occurs to me that Christmas beer must’ve been invented by atheists. Only non-believers completely lacking in dogma could embrace this anything-goes style of beer, a style that not only irreligiously rejects the confines of formal classification but whose original purpose was nothing less than the blasphemous inebriation of partakers on the otherwise solemn occasion of Christ’s birth.
Just take a look at some of the bottles who take the Christmas name in vain.
Great Lakes Christmas Ale is made with honey.
Schlafly Christmas Ale is made with juniper berries.
Blue & Gray Christmas Cranberry is made with, yup, cranberries.
Moylan’s White Christmas is made with rye and wheat.
And Bristol Brewing Christmas Ale is made with just about everything in your mother’s spice cabinet.
Anchor has proclaimed “Merry Christmas & Happy New Year” with tree branches and licorice.
And forget about Abita—it changes the recipe for its Christmas Ale every year.
Van den Bossche Father Christmas is corked. Sly Fox Christmas Ale comes in a can.
Gritty McDuff’s Christmas Ale is an ESB, Goose Island’s is a brown ale. Three Floyds Alpha Klaus Xmas is a porter. Weeping Radish Christmas Bier is a doppelbock.
Don’t look for any definitive guidance on the import aisle: France’s Brassier La Choulette makes a biere de garde for Noël; Brasserie Dubuisson’s Scaldis Noel from Belgium is a strong dark ale; Germany’s Brauerei Mahr makes a Christmas Bock; Harvey’s Christmas Ale from England is a barleywine. And forget about Denmark: Its Mikeller Red/White Christmas is a mix-and-match blend of British red ale and Belgian witbier.
The only thing they seemingly share in common is their head-banging potency that gives “Silent Night” a whole ‘nother meaning—especially when it’s labeled “Stille Nacht” and it contains no less than 12 percent alcohol.
Heretics! Infidels! Pagans!
Gift of the Gods
Well, now that you mention it… it turns out all these seasonal beers owe their existence not to the baby in the manger, but to the much older and more profane celebration of the winter solstice. Yes, it was naked Druids dancing around stone monuments carved with weird symbols who invented Christmas brew.
Consider the ancient world of four, five, six thousand years ago, of Stone Age tribes living in caves, before cities, before writing, before can openers. Fearful and superstitious, mankind bowed to whatever it didn’t understand, and its most visible god was the sun itself. It offered warmth and light in a cold, dark world. It controlled the growing seasons and guided the calendar. The shortest day of the year, when the sun sat lowest to the horizon, marked the end of a fruitful harvest and the start of grueling cold months before the earth would be reborn in the spring.
Surely, it was an occasion that was worthy of celebration, and there is ample evidence of solstice festivals in our earliest recorded history. Wherever people gathered, food was prepared and beer was fermented.
Yes, beer, for as we know it was the farming of grain that allowed man (or, more precisely, woman who did the cooking) to settle down and build civilization. The primitive, soupy mixes of cereal and water was dependable sustenance—a far more efficient solution to hunger than roaming the countryside in search of a wooly mammoth.
And when it eventually fermented, glory to the heavens! It made you dizzy and happy—truly, it must be a gift of the gods. Why, if you drank enough of it, you might actually see God himself.
On the occasion of the solstice, celebrants would settle for nothing less than the very best of this sacred drink—the strongest beer made with ample malted grains, flavored with the very best spices and herbs. And it would’ve flowed freely, gloriously creating a physical bond between man and the gods, between earth and sun.
And so it went, for thousands of years, with various civilizations worshipping their sun god. The Mesopotamians had Utu, the Aztecs bowed to Tonatiuh, the Egyptians worshipped Ra, the Greeks built temples to Helios. Shortly after the time of Christ, Roman cults were celebrating the birthday of Sol Invictus (Invincible Sun) on December 25th.
A Tradition, Not a Style
It was these pagan solstice holidays—filled with unrestrained debauchery each winter solstice—that many historians say Pope Julius I sought to co-opt when, in the 4th century,he declared that the holy date of Christ’s birth was the 25th of December.
Yet, while the papacy managed to take the paganism out of the holiday, it wisely never tried to take the beer out of Christmas.
Indeed, over the centuries, the entire notion of “Christmas beer” became ingrained in the holiday as much as yule logs and mistletoe. The monasteries of Europe celebrated the birth of Jesus with Prima Melior, their breweries’ best of the best. Norwegian farmers were required to brew juleøl—yule ale—for their workers or face expulsion from their property. And throughout the 19th century, British workhouses—those Dickensian homes for the poor—broke the tedium with free Christmas ale for their residents.
And so it goes today, with hundreds of commercial breweries celebrating the season in their own way.
The long backstory of this iconic style is important because it establishes that Christmas beer isn’t really a style—it’s a tradition.
Other varieties, like India pale ale and stout and bock, were born out of tradition, too. But each is made to specific criteria—the type and amount of malt and hops, the flavor, the body, the alcohol content, all of it related to the available ingredients and brewing methods of their time.
Christmas beer, by contrast, is a sprite. It is as fanciful as stockings hung by the chimney with care, of a child’s dreams of flying reindeer. It follows no criteria. Or, to put it more bluntly: Santa Claus don’t need no stinkin’ badges.
Christmas Beer Guidelines
Not that some rule-makers haven’t tried.
The Beer Judge Certification Program style guidelines (Category 21 B) say its aroma should be “reminiscent of Christmas cookies,” its appearance should be amber to dark brown, and it must taste “rich and malty.”
Interestingly, the guidelines demand: “spices are required.”
Now, a stickler would point out here that some of the brands the BJCP cites as leading commercial examples do not, in fact, contain spices. For example, the hugely popular Troegs Mad Elf from Pennsylvania might taste spicy, but that sensation is a product of its phenol-producing Belgian yeast strain, not cinnamon or nutmeg.
Even the BJCP acknowledges the shortcomings of its guidelines.
It concedes many brands that call themselves Christmas beer don’t meet its narrowly defined criteria. Even classic styles, like English winter warmers and German Weihnacht lagers—styles that are far more authentic than newfangled American Christmas beers made with, let’s say, cranberries—are not welcome. Indeed, under these rules, Samichlaus Bier—the highly regarded Austrian triple bock that is brewed only on St. Nicholas Day, a beer that the late British beer critic Michael Jackson himself saved from extinction—does not qualify as a Christmas beer, even if it’s named after Santa Claus himself.
It seems obvious that trying to define Christmas beer by color or alcohol content or flavor or ingredients is a fruitless pursuit. In this secular age, you can’t even define Christmas beer by its name; these days, we often euphemistically refer to them as “holiday” ales, or give them wintry names like “Hibernation Ale” or Snow-Something-or-Other.
So, how can we define Christmas beer?
That’s actually quite simple: It’s a beer that was brewed as a gift.
It can be any style, any flavor, any color, any name—it doesn’t matter as long as it was given and received as a gift. Why? Because gift-giving is the most essential part of the holiday.
Now, we can argue over the origins of the tradition of giving gifts at Christmastime. Some say it stems from the gold, myrrh and frankincense brought to Jesus by the magi; others note that gift-giving was part of pre-Christian solstice celebrations, including Rome’s Saturnalia. But worrying about the origins of this tradition is as unrewarding as debating the ever-changing spice content of Anchor Our Special Ale.
The significance of gift giving is that it is an act of sharing, a mindful transaction between the giver and the recipient.
In the case of Christmas beer, no everyday beer will do. A gift is something special; it must be brewed with better ingredients or spices or to a greater strength.
Likewise, it can not be accepted as an everyday beer. It must be received with appreciation for its craftsmanship, its unique flavor, its potency.
Unwrap it and smile.
But remember: Gift-giving is meaningless unless both the giver and the recipient share in this spirit of good will. Otherwise it might as well be just another sixpack of Michelob Ultra.
Drinking Songs
Don’t laugh: Centuries ago, an ordinary beer at Christmastime might’ve earned you a good thumping from an angry mob.
I’m referring to the grand tradition of wassail, a familiar if little-used word whose roots are in a fifth-century Saxon toast: ves heill, good health. Through much of the second millennium, wassail also meant the joyous singing of songs by crowds of red-nosed revelers, marching from door to door at Christmastime, carrying gaily decorated cups that would be ladled with ale.
And not just any ale.
A fitting bowl would be English ale flavored with nutmeg and sugar, garnished with toast and roasted crab apples. Some called the beverage “lamb’s wool,” perhaps because it was so warming.
And it better be strong—much stronger than the usual small beer they drank from day to day. In Norway, where many Christmas beer traditions began, a farmer who served weak beer was considered dishonorable and would have a spell cast on his land.
Or worse. Consider some of the lyrics of English wassail songs of yore:
A mug of your Christmas ale, sir,
Will make us merry and sing
But money in our pockets
Is much a better thing.
And
Come, butler, come fill us a bowl of the best,
Then I hope that your soul in heaven may rest;
But if you do draw us a bowl of the small,
Then down fall butler, bowl and all!
And
We have come to claim our right.
And if you don’t open up your door,
We’ll lay you flat upon the floor.
Yikes. This less-than-serene sentiment—perhaps accompanied by axes and cudgels—was a far cry from the origins of Christmas. So much so that the stiff-collar Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, appalled by the violence, actually banned Christmas in the mid-1600s.
Ultimately, though, Christmas would be restored and wassail would evolve into one of the grandest traditions of the season: Christmas caroling. Those gentle songs we sing in the church pews today – “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Away in the Manger” – were written as drinking songs for the street.
An Evolution
As for the beer, well it, too, evolved.
In much of Scandinavia, they warm up with steaming mugs of gløgg– a drink made with raisins, almonds, spices and a shot of aquavit. In Germany, the Christkindlmarkt vendors sell bottles of bock-like Weihnachtsbier. In Lithuania, they market Christmas eve with kvass, made from black bread. In Denmark, they begin their celebration on J-Dag, the first Friday of November, when their beloved julebryg is released. In Sweden, the kids drink julmust, a stout-like non-alcoholic Christmas drink that’s made with sugar, hops, malt extract and spices.
And in America? Christmas beer has evolved here as well.
Before Prohibition, Christmas beer was little more than a standard brand that happened to be advertised in newspapers by, ho-ho-ho, Santa Claus himself.
After Prohibition and into the 1950s, Christmas beer was not much more than a slightly malty, slightly darker lager, like a Marzen. Stacks of red-and-green cases would attract lines of customers. The Potosi Brewing Co. symbolically changed its name each year to “Holiday Brewing Company,” to produce its Wisconsin Holiday Beer.
It gradually disappeared till—surprise, surprise—Fritz Maytag revived the tradition at San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing. Maytag, of course, was the guy who was responsible for re-introducing steam beer, IPA, barleywine and other varieties as he led the entire microbrewing revolution into the 21st century.
Years ago when I asked him about the origins of Anchor Our Special Ale, he told me, “I was aware of the traditions in medieval villages where they would make special beers for various festival days. You’d have beers brewed for weddings, festivals, and other celebrations. And certainly you’d brew them for Christmas.” It made sense that a small brewery that had been revived thanks to old-world beer-making techniques would rediscover the tradition of holiday beer. There was only one problem: Maytag said he didn’t have a clue what it should taste like.
Eventually, he went with a dry-hopped English ale – a recipe that later morphed into Anchor Liberty Ale. The first bottles were hand-labeled in 1975 and immediately sold out.
In 1987, to celebrate his wedding, Maytag crafted a bridal ale filled with herbs and spices. That winter, Anchor adapted the recipe for its Christmas beer, and it’s done so ever since. Though the brewery never reveals the ale’s true content, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, spruce nibs and cocoa have been detected over the years.
Many beer drinkers now think of Anchor as the prototype for all Christmas beer, which is deserving—but also means many likewise regard spice as essential to the style.
Spice is nice, but that negates the likes of England’s grand winter warmers. Why, it just wouldn’t be Christmas without Samuel Smith’s Winter Welcome, Young’s Winter Warmer or American knockoffs of the style, like Bridgeport Ebenezer Ale or Full Sail Wassail—none of which contain even a sprinkle of spice.
And what of Sierra Nevada Celebration, a well-hopped pale ale? No spice there, either. But I couldn’t get into the holiday spirit without those gorgeous Cascades.
The problem here is with the attempt to set standards for what is undoubtedly a personal tradition.
Catholics celebrate the holiday with a Christmas eve mass. Protestants sing carols throughout the entire month. And Jewish people? I think they take bottles of He’Brew Jewbelation to Chinese restaurants on Christmas, don’t they?
Some families do that whole Seven Fishes meal, others carve a ham. Mine? Let me tell you how we celebrated the holiday growing up:
On Christmas eve, sometime after dark when the cops on the overnight shift were keeping warm in the Dunkin’ Donuts, my brother and I would sneak over to the municipal parking lot and steal a couple left-over evergreens. We stuffed them in the back of the family station wagon and carted them back to decorate our house.
Not exactly Norman Rockwell, I realize, but we still get a laugh about it while reminiscing every year.
My brother, I should mention, grew up to become a sober Baptist minister who conducts lavish candlelit cantatas on Christmas morning.
Me? I may be atheist, but I’m a true believer in Christmas beer. I can’t wait to open up my gifts.
TIME OUT – Holiday Season Groaners
What did Santa sing when he went down the chimney? “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”
You know what’s so great about this time of year? You can slam your laptop shut when your partner walks into the room, and you don’t get any disgusted looks.
Why are Christmas trees better than men? Even the small ones give satisfaction.
What do you call Santa’s helpers? Subordinate clauses.
What does Mrs. Claus get when she wears tight pants? A mistletoe.
Our 30th Anniversary Blackberry Mead, original Mork’s Mead and “Missile”tow Christmas Ale are here for the holidays. Three high test libations strong enough to power Santa’s sleigh! The alcohol is very well hidden so enjoy in moderation to avoid ending up like this sorry St. Nick.
