Holiday Beer!

Although I'm a strict Atheist (I go to all the meetings), my wife and I do celebrate the holiday season. Evidently there's some religious thing called "Advent" that has something to do with something that happened a couple thousand years ago, or something. They probably stole it from the pagans.

Anyway, what really matters is that for this "Advent" thing evidently somebody sets you up with daily gifts. I vaguely remember one of my grandparents giving me some sort of calendar doohickey with doors that you opened each day during Advent to reveal a chunk of candy. Well, now that I'm all grown up, I get beer instead!

The local brew shop here created a small set of "Beer Advent Calendars" -- essentially a really fancy case of beer with each beer individually placed in a small box labelled with the date it's supposed to be opened. My wife was kind enough to buy one of these for me, and it's been great.

So far, the beers have been:

November 30: Mikkeller -- Holiday Ale (dark, strong Belgian ale with spices), 750ml bottle. I'm a huge fan of Mikkeller beer. Very cool setup where a couple of guys rent brewery space and make kick ass beer. I've had several of their beers, and have been consistently impressed.

December 1: Heater Allen -- "Hugo" bock. Nice beer, 22oz bottle, I normally don't like Bock, but this one was quite good. This is a fairly new local (McMinnville) brewery that's been pretty impressive with their lagers.

December 2: Bridgeport -- Old Knucklehead Barleywine, 22oz bottle. I haven't opened this one yet, maybe tonight. I've had previous releases of Old Knucklehead and have liked it, so I'm assuming that will continue. I don't drink much Bridgeport beer these days, but they are one of the "main" Oregon breweries that got the whole microbrew revolution going around here.

December 3: Ninkasi -- Total Domination IPA, 22 oz bottle. I've had this one before, and it's quite nice. I've been enjoying Ninkasi's beers a bit more recently. They're a relatively new local (Eugene) brewery that's only been around for a couple of years, and a couple of their early offerings weren't great. The stuff I've had recently has been good though.

I'll post more details as I open more of these up, it's going to be a good month...