Beers of the new year (2025)

I had my first Winter Skål of the season a couple days ago.

While I wish it were a bit less sweet, I still loved it. There's a great toastiness to the caramel flavor. And is it me or is it hoppier this season? It tasted like more than 17 IBU's with a sharp Noble spiciness.

I stopped in at the Fitchburg Hop Haus outpost earlier this week and was surprised at just how many IPAs they had on offer. Add in other styles with trendy hops or with genuine fruit and the beer menu was bloated with sweet flavors. I jumped on the tropical bandwagon and went with their New Zealand pilsner which featured Nectaron hops, a variety with which I was unfamiliar.

With a strong pineapple taste, there was no way I could drink more than one but it wasn't bad. The pilsner part tasted pretty good, from what I could tell.

My first Winter Skål of the season

Winter beers are my favorite. They are during winter, anyway. In addition to anticipating Tippy Toboggan, I also greatly look forward to Capital's Winter Skål. I'm not sure how a Vienna lager became the brewery's winter seasonal as this is not an especially hearty brew - their many doppelbocks are more generous with their malt - but it is a bit heavier than the beers in their regular line-up.

Not a liquid bread like their Dark Doppelbock, which is also out now, it has a wonderful roasty caramel taste to it without being syrupy. I personally wouldn't mind a bit more of those spicy hops. Regardless, I've been enjoying Winter Skål on snowy nights for years and will do so until I die or they stop making it, whichever comes first.

We've got both kinds: Vienna and Red Lagers from K Point Brewing

As I noted in my review of Lazy Monk's coffee dark lager, I was up in Eau Claire recently. Despite being quite a bit farther north than usual, it was still hotter than a June bride in a featherbed. I limited my outdoor activities to the morning and night to avoid the temperatures that were in the 90s.

"But," I reasoned, "a lot of neat things happen indoors. Babies are born indoors at hospitals and people make babies while on comfy beds in places like hotel rooms. Movies are shown in big, air-conditioned rooms. Another thing is beer. It is commonly brewed inside."

Our hotel was out by Oakwood Mall and I think I saw tumbleweeds blowing around the parking lot. That place is dead! But just a short drive west was K Point Brewing. Having been gifted a 4-pack of their tasty Rauchbier earlier this year, I decided to head over there and check out the place. Not only would there be beer on offer, but another tasty beverage as well, coffee.

K Point is what I'd guess you'd call a nanobrewery and it's a block off Highway 93 on Eau Claire's south side. It was rather odd to see how much stuff has sprung up along 93 between the interstate and Hamilton Avenue over the years since I lived in the area. The brewery is in a joint called The Coffee Grounds and, upon pulling into their parking lot, I saw no mention of K Point.

Walking in, I saw a café to the left, a seating area and beer coolers back and to the right, and a middle that looked like what I envision a Williams Sonoma store to look like: filled with kitchenware, local jams, and artisanal foods like craft baking mixes that you can mix in one of the fancy mixing bowls and bake in one of the moderately expensive loaf pans on offer.

I eventually made my way to the coolers and found the beer. There was a variety of brands on offer besides K Point (including, oddly enough, Madison's Working Draft Beer) but I stuck with the house brews. I noticed that there were 4-packs missing a can or 2 and was pleased to discover that people weren't stuffing the odd can into their pocket or purse but rather the K Point folks are happy to have you mix and match their beers as you like. Want a sampler pack of 4 different beers? Go for it.

K Point doesn't have a tasting room, per se. There was a sign saying that, if you need a brew to quench your thirst, just flag down someone and they'll pour it for you. This low profile reminded me of some comments by brewmaster Tom Breneman that he made in an email to me regarding his approach to brewing. It dawned on me that K Point is a labor of love, not an attempt to set the craft beer world on fire. They're not out to cater to trends and be the next The Brewing Projekt but rather to brew beers Tom and whomever else has a say in the matter likes and to be content with a small audience.

This is an ethos I can get behind and I did. I got a mix pack with some of their Red Lager as well as some Vienna Lager.

I kinda sorta know a teensy bit about what a Vienna lager should look, smell, and taste like but a red lager? Not sure about that one. Wisconsin loves amber lagers so I wondered if, perhaps, it was simply a different name for the same kind of beer as Capital's Wisconsin Amber, Lakefront's Riverwest Stein, or Lake Louie's Badger Club.  Or maybe it was some kind of Irish thing. I tend to think of Irish ales as also being called red ales so why not an Irish lager being a red lager?

In the end, I just assumed this stuff would be like the amber lagers that are found from the Lake Superior shore to the Illinois border. You know, amber-ish in color, medium-bodied, lots of caramel aroma and flavor, moderate hops, and fairly sweet, malty taste.

I started with the Vienna lager. Because...because...well, the style is more appealing, I guess.

It was amber, clear, and poured with a nice head. Plus there were some bubbles inside. After I had poured myself a glass and was furiously writing down notes on how it looked, I noticed that I could smell the beer even though it was a foot away from my nose and I was smelling caramel. I like those scents at a distance. It builds anticipation, makes it seem like you've got a real fresh beer on your hands. When I put my nose to it, there was also bread and grass to be had.

A nice fizz greeted my tongue along with a greatly desired but somewhat unexpected Maillardy bread taste. That caramel was present but was tempered and not particularly sweet. I found it medium-bodied but it leaned towards the lighter end of the scale, probably because of the good fizz as well as the relative paucity of malt sweetness.

Just a bit of that caramel lingered on the finish before a lovely, firm dose of hop bitterness washed over my tongue. This made for some really nice spiciness and a rather dry finish.

The red lager looked a lot like its Vienna counterpart, although it was decidedly darker. Like a deep, ruby-laced amber. And, since rubies are red, it seems that "red lager" was an appropriate moniker. A big, frothy head was tan whereas the Vienna's was lighter, more like barely off-white. The aroma was similar too with caramel and grass coming through.

My first sip revealed a good fizz adding a bit of zip in a smooth, medium-bodied beer that did not lean towards the lighter side.  The caramel sweetness was much more pronounced here and accompanied by faint stone fruit and a weird astringency. It was a bit like drinking a stronger Belgian ale, though the can said 5.7% A.B.V.

On the finish, the caramel sweetness lingered before some muscular peppery hops kicked in offering a nice dryness to contrast with the caramel and a goodly amount of bitterness.

The Red Lager was definitely along the lines of the American amber lager as I had hypothesized. It would have been fine except for that astringency. It really tasted like it had twice the alcohol in it than was claimed on the can.

And so the Vienna Lager was the clear winner here. In my correspondence with K Point's brewer Tom Breneman, he said that was into more traditional styles - "if you know what a dunkel or Vienna lager is supposed to taste like, that's what I'm shooting for," he remarked.

I think he hit the nail on the head here. Simply as a lager, he did a really nice job considering that he brews just a few barrels at a time and surely has a fairly basic brewhouse. (Or maybe not.) Both of these beers had the expected clarity and tasted "clean", i.e. - none of the fruity yeast flavors. But he coaxed some great toasty bread flavors out of the malt for the Vienna lager and kept the sweetness minimal for just a wonderful brew. I also enjoyed the hop levels in each beer. They balanced the malt flavors very well and made for a brisk, refreshing finish.

Junk food pairing: Pair your K Point amber/red lagers with some tortilla chips and a fine salsa from Eau Claire's Chip Magnet. The Wildly Delicious variety has a bit of heat but won't prevent your tongue from appreciating the fine beer.

The goal of all life is good lager: Vienna-Style Lager by Dovetail Brewery

Let me begin by dropping some factoids that I just know will blow your mind:

1) I love Vienna lagers.

2) It is highly likely that I've never had a Vienna lager from Vienna or any other part of Austria.

Should I pause here so you can gather yourselves together?

I suppose that when I write "I love Vienna lagers" what I really mean is that I enjoy American-brewed amber colored lagers that sources such as the BJCP say is permissible to label "Vienna lagers". Whether the definitions of Vienna lager promulgated by the craft beer clerisy have any resemblance to the historical Austrian style of beer is questionable in my mind. I think the rise of craft beer here in the United States has propagated countless tall tales and outright falsehoods about beer and brewing history. See pretty much everything about the IPA. Due to my laziness and blogging deadlines** I've done precious little research and so the following nano-history of the Vienna lager may be completely bogus. Caveat lector.

The invention of the Vienna lager is a story worthy of an episode of James Burke's Connections as its genesis drew upon a myriad of technologies and techniques from outside of Vienna and invented in the past. Burke would, no doubt, start several thousand years in the past somewhere in deepest Mesopotamia. I am not.

Instead let's go back to the first time a Vienna lager made its way into the Kuchen hole of a paying member of the public: c. 1840. This was made possible by one Anton Dreher, proprietor of Brauhaus zu Klein-Schwechat which I think translates into English as the Klein Schwechat Brewery. (Klein Schwechat is a town near Vienna.) But before taking over the brewery from his father, Anton had a few adventures with his Freund Gabriel Sedlmayr, Jr. (Sedlmayr the Senior was the Braumeister at a little brewery in Munich called Spaten.)

Trekking through Germany and eventually Britain, Anton learned about bottom fermentation, speedy wort cooling, and kilning with indirect heat which yielded pale, non-smoky malt. He even used the humble thermometer which was, I have read, eschewed by early 19^th century Viennese brewers because apparently they were a bunch of zymurgological Neanderthals.

The merger of new-fangled technology and new(er) methods in Dreher's brewery yielded the Vienna lager.

If we jump ahead to 2016 in Chicago's Ravenswood area, Dovetail Brewery is opened by two Chicagoans who met in Munich while studying the art of brewing. Together they brew continental European style beers with the occasional American technique or ingredient thrown in for good measure. This is not my first encounter with Dovetail's beer as I enjoyed their Rauchbier at their taproom a few years back and, more recently, their Helles. However, this is my initial taste of their Vienna-style lager and I didn't have to go to Chicago to get it as Dovetail started appearing on select Madison store shelves late last year or earlier this year, I cannot recall.

The beer is amber in color whereas the stuff Dreher was making was likely paler, more of a golden hue. It had a touch of haze and a lovely white head that went away rather quickly.

Its delightfully biscuity malt scent caressed my nosehairs and stimulated my olfactory bulb. Ooh la la! I also caught a little toffee and some grass from the hops.

The liquid was medium-bodied and featured a little toffee flavor. But the pièce de resistance was the rich biscuit taste that melded with melanoidins giving that lightly toasted flavor that my tongue covets so. My understanding is that Dovetail decocts, hence the melanoidins. When I finally stopped gushing over the grainy goodness, I noticed there was also a moderate fizziness and a tad of grassy-floral hoppiness.

At the finish there was a touch of lingering sweetness but mainly it was a bit dry with that fizz and some bitterness from grassy-spicy tasting hops.

As with the other beers I've had from Dovetail, their Vienna-style lager is superlative. I don't know exactly how close it is to the ur-Vienna lager from back in 1840 but it's at least on the right track with having the malt up front. Indeed, it's masterful in its melanoidin, terrific in its toastiness, and scarce in sweetness. This, along with the subdued hop presence, jibes with what I've read about Dreher's brew.

In the end, though, Dovetail isn't obligated to brew a beer that tastes like one from 180 years ago. It is however, obligated to brew tasty beer and they've certainly done that here. The sweetness is toned down and the bready/toasty malt flavors shine through, as is my preference in such matters, with some Noble tasting hops lending a little balance and dryness.

Junk food pairing: This beer is up for pairing with what is one of the best potato chips out there – Jay's Hot Stuff with its prominent paprika flavor and its heat.

**Hahahahahahahahaha

Yippee-ki-yay!: hans macgruber by Oliphant Brewing

When I saw the name of this bier, it was instantly familiar. Hans MacGruber, Hans MacGruber...nope. I just couldn't place it. I DuckDuckGoed it and it turns out that Hans Gruber is the villain from Die Hard played by the late and much lamented Alan Rickman. "MacGruber" is the name of a Saturday Night Live sketch that parodies MacGyver.

In addition to the teasingly familiar name, I was happy to see that Oliphant had decided to join the Summer of Rauch '16 by brewing a smoked Vienna-style lager.

The Vienna lager is one of my favorite styles of beer. I suppose it (or variants thereof) was one of the first microbrew styles I encountered back in the early 1990s with the amber lagers of both Capital and Sprecher. Its flavor of toasted grain imbued with a bit of malt sweetness and balanced by Noble hoppy goodness really appealed to me then and continues to do so now.

The style dates back to 1840 and was introduced by Anton Dreher, an Austrian brewer who had studied in both Munich and the United Kingdom where his head became filled with thoughts of pale malts and lagering. And he merged the two in his Schwechater Lagerbier, the ur-Vienna lager. Dreher had a veritable brewing empire - a lager baron, if you will. If I ever meet Ron Pattinson, I think I'll ask him if he likes Wire and then his opinion on Dreher. This should get him discoursing for hours. (If you read this, Ron, and want to return to Wisconsin, I'd be happy to attempt to host.)

Curiously enough, Dreher's son had plans at one point to open a brewery in Milwaukee.

Nothing against Oliphant but I am usually a little apprehensive when drinking lagers from small brewpubs/breweries. It's just that these outfits have less space to dedicate to aging a lager for 4-8 weeks. When I talk to brewers, they generally acknowledge that brewing a lager is tough - there's less margin for error than with an ale. Again, I'm not taking a shot at Oliphant but there are breweries out there that make 100% ales and then one day decide to brew a lager because pilsners are trendy or simply for shits and giggles and they come up with a completely mediocre beer.

Despite, or perhaps because of, all this, I was rooting for Oliphant to pull through here. Not only had they gone through the trouble of brewing a lager but also a rauchbier. I wasn't expecting Schlenkerla quality here but I was also hoping that they weren't merely cycling through styles until an eyepah was on the docket again.

My hans macgruber poured a lovely golden brown. It was plenty clear so I could see a bounty of bubbles inside the bier. Perched atop my glass was a big, light tan head that lasted a fair while. Visually, Oliphant had produced a stunner.

The aroma was heavenly and it was as if there were cherubs perched on clouds of smoke around my glass, joining me as I took in the mild smokiness which suggested, but did not smell like, bacon. There was also a luscious roasty malt sweetness.

Smoke flavor in beer is very polarizing. I have argued previously that the smell and taste of bacon in rauchbiers is largely a mass hallucination. Drinkers who've never tasted a smoke beer hear that they taste like bacon and thusly are predisposed to tasting the meat from that wonderful, magical animal. This taste also seems to be most commonly attributed to malts smoked with beech wood.

In hans macgruber the smoke is rather modest in contrast to your archetypal rauchbier, a Schlenkerla Märzen. While not very strong, it is certainly more than a mere accent. It tasted like Beech wood smoke to me but mine is an amateur palate when it comes to smoke. The Vienna lager came through loud and clear with some roasted grain flavor as well as a honeyed malt sweetness which was just a touch bigger than the smoke. To round things off was a little grassy hop flavor around the edge which tag-teamed with the carbonation to add a little sharpness, a little dryness.

Eventually the malt sweetness fades leaving the smokiness to welcome a heightened hoppiness which was a bit spicy and boosted the dryness a tad. But the finish wasn't extreme with only moderate bitterness. There was a fair amount of Schaumhaftvermoegen left in my glass with a few scattered patches accompanied by the odd foamy streak.

Although hans macgruber doesn't have quite the crispness that I find in the Vienna-style lagers from established lager breweries, I think they did a damn fine job. The smoked and unsmoked malts are like Yin and Yang – (more or less) in balanced. And not only did the smoke come in moderate doses, it also didn't evoke bacon very much. It tasted like smoke. I also thoroughly enjoyed how the carbonation and hops worked together to add some counterpoint to the maltiness. Everything finds harmony in hans.

A most worthy entry in the Summer of Rauch 2016.

Junk food pairing: With medium malty body and 5.4% A.B.V., hans macgruber is no lawnmower beer. But it is happy to be paired with food. Go with some Old Dutch Ripples Bacon Cheeseburger Sliders potato chips.

No More Oak Oppression: Heart of Oak by the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company

The Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company began in 1867. Over the years it developed into a prosperous regional brewery. In 1988 it went from craft to crafty before such a distinction was ever thought of when the Miller Brewing Company bought it. In the mid-90s the brewery began to establish its reputation of the maker of beers that taste like Froot Loops/Fruity Pebbles, a bit of renown that remains today. Berry Weiss was introduced in 1996. Ten years later came Sunset Wheat with its big Tang-y orange flavor. The following year saw Summer Shandy hit shelves and the brewery has since made its fortune with shandies. In 2012 the brew went national and by 2014 accounted for 50% of the brewery's business.

Having achieved such great success with Zima: The Next Generation with a new flavor of shandy seemingly introduced annually (watermelon is next), it's easy to forget or not even know in the first place that Leinenkugel brews more than fruit-flavored concoctions. Microbrew fans are attracted to the Big Eddy series of high octane and intensely flavored beers. But Leinies has been (relatively) quietly rolling out beers that are neither fruity nor imperial. For instance, they introduced a new winter seasonal a few years ago called Snowdrift Vanilla Porter which I found to be horrible but gave us a new annual IPL which is pretty good.

This past summer Leinies introduced a new beer as part of its Autumn Explorer Pack called Heart of Oak, an "oaked Vienna lager". Aging beer on oak to imbue it with the wood's distinctive flavor is a fairly new trend in microbrewing and not particularly widespread although it is gaining in popularity. How did Leinenkugel's foray into the world of arboreal aging turn out?

Heart of Oak pours a beautiful amber hue. The beer was clear and adorned with a big frothy head that was…ecru. There were a lot of bubbles going up the glass. I found the aroma to be quite inviting with the mellow earthiness of the oak coming up front with a bit of bread behind it as well as some malty sweetness that was plum-like to my nose.

I realized that, while I've noted the oak, I've not said anything about the Vienna lager. We here in Wisconsin are blessed with three amber lagers that are either Vienna lagers or are based on the style: Sprecher Special Amber, Capital Wisconsin Amber, and Wisconsin Brewing Company's Golden Amber Lager. The first two have been around, to the best of my knowledge, since the 1980s and are cornerstones of Wisconsin microbrewing. Wisconsin Amber seems to trail only Spotted Cow as the top Wisconsin microbrew to be found in non-microbrew establishments around the state.

The style dates back to around 1840 and one Anton Dreher, a denizen of – quelle surprise – Vienna. I'm not sure that anyone knows what his beers were like exactly but I tend to think of the style as being a lighter take on the Oktoberfest/Märzen. The emphasis is on the malt but the Vienna lager isn't quite as malty as its Bavarian cousins.

My aside aside, it was the oak which really stood out in the taste. While it didn't have the forest-in-a-bottle taste of Atom Smasher you couldn't miss it. But the oak's relatively moderate flavor didn't hide the malt which had a nice Maillard reactiony breadiness. There was also a little bit of malt sweetness that tasted like stone fruit to my palate. A hint of vanilla was subtle but its sweet-yet-savory flavor worked well with the oak and malt while carbonation added a little bite and some dryness. Lastly there was a bit of peppery "heat". I have no idea where it comes from but it's that same kind of "heat" that Capital's Autumnal Fire has but milder in this case. It tastes less like pepper than it does alcohol but Heart of Oak is not a big beer. Perhaps this is just my tongue tasting hops in an odd fashion or some such thing.

The beer finishes dry but moderately so. The oak flavor lingers a bit as does some carbonation. As they slowly dissipate, they're replaced by a mild astringency and an equally mild dose of grassy hop bitterness. Schaumhaftvermoegen consisted of two large splotches.

Heart of Oak benefits greatly from having just the right amount of oak. It complements the malt rather than overpowering it. The brew had a smooth mouthfeel and a medium-light body that belied its 6% A.B.V. which I think of as being rather high for the style. I also liked the dry bite given by the carbonation. All those bubbles helped balance the flavors here.

I thoroughly enjoyed this beer. It has a clean lager taste yet it has a complex set of flavors led by the oak. It managed to walk a fine line between being light & refreshing and hearty & warming. My only complaint is that it is generally sold as part of a variety pack that includes one of Leinenkugel's ubiquitous "shandies".

Junk food pairing: Heart of Oak pairs best with crackers and cheese. Try some Cheddar 'n Bacon Easy Cheese on Vegetable Thins or Cheddar Easy Cheese on Chicken in a Biskit crackers.