From ale to stout, Houston brewers have your holiday beers covered.
Some local brewers go traditional, others keep things fresh with unique takes on stouts and more
Houston is not a place for generalizations. With 2.3 million residents and 8 million ways of doing things, America’s most diverse city can be hard to get your arms — or even a Beltway — around.
Take our holiday beer scene, for instance. The flavor notes and styles of beers being produced by an ever-growing roster of local breweries at this time of year are as wide and varied as the holiday traditions celebrated across the city.
At Buffalo Bayou, brewers offer two takes on gingerbread. The first, Gingerbread Stout, is both self-explanatory and and traditional — with notes of nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and gingerbread cookies. The second, Feliz Navidad, is like you took that first concept and said, “But make it Houston!” The stout has all the homey spices from the original, but it’s aged with ancho chiles.
“This is a very traditional time of year,” said Bart Watson, chief economist at the Brewers Association, a Denver-based trade group for small and independent brewers. “If you look historically, darker beers have been brewed this time of year. I think we get a bunch of seasonal cues, and that lends itself well to those types of styles.”
But if you think that will give you insight about what other Houston brewers are doing, think again.
At Karbach, brewmaster Eric Warner said coming up with a new incarnation of its holiday red ale Yule Shoot Your Eye Out is a perennial highlight.
“We’ve done a lot of things over the years, and we like to keep it fresh and different,” Warner said. “This year, we’ve made a recipe that is kind of an amber, maltier beer. And we added candied orange peel instead of dried orange peel, which a lot of people will do. The candied peel adds a little more sweetness, and kind of a richness. We really liked it.”
No surprises there. The holiday beer is usually the biggest hit of the year at Karbach.
“Our Yule Shoot Your Eye Out brand is the most asked about beer by far on email,” Warner said. “We get people from halfway across the country emailing about it, asking how they can get it.”
The fact that no two vintages are alike adds to that demand. But Karbach certainly didn’t invent that idea. Warner points to the folks at Anchor Brewing in San Francisco, who began producing the first American holiday beer since Prohibition back in 1975, as the geniuses behind the genesis of a perennially unique beer. (This year’s 44th incarnation has a variety of malts, with notes of banana bread.)
Still, not everyone takes this approach.
“We aim for consistency,” said Aaron Inkrott, brewing operations manager at Saint Arnold. “That way, when Christmas Ale comes out again next year, consumers can come back to it, and that’s why they love this beer.”
Saint Arnold’s Christmas Ale is the uncontested godfather of holiday beers in Houston, first appearing in November 1995. And though many brewers experiment with a wide variety of added ingredients in their holiday offerings, Inkrott notes that Saint Arnold makes it a point to use only four ingredients.
“I like to take on the challenge of how creative we can get with limited ingredients,” he said. “And our mixture of malt and hops that we use creates this great fruit and spice characteristic. And our house yeast kind of ties it all together.”
It’s a departure from a lot of the brewery’s other beers. But people go crazy for it every year.
“We make a lot of dry, crisp, refreshing beers, and the Christmas Ale is very different,” Inkrott said. “I get subtle spice, like cinnamon and nutmeg. And there’s a rich, dark fruit character. But it’s not an aggressively heavy beer, so you can drink a couple and not feel bad.”
Karbach and Saint Arnold are, obviously, the two largest operations in town. And that has a lot to do with their well-honed holiday offerings, with which many smaller breweries just can’t compete.
Jennifer Royo, co-founder at the Katy-based No Label Brewery, said “it’s hard to sell holiday beers because after the holidays it’s done with. We like to do winter beers that still last after Dec. 25.”
Instead, they push their always available Elda M Milk Stout because stouts do so well in December.
Same goes at Eureka Heights, where the crew keeps its spiced milk stout, Moo Caliente, on tap all year long. Still, co-founder Casey Motes notes that they create limited-run beers on nearly a monthly basis.
“At Saint Arnold, they make sure they’re running out of Christmas Ale on Dec. 26, and then they have the next seasonal, White Noise, following right behind that,” Motes said. “But for us, a batch is a lot of beer. We don’t want these to linger out there.”
Last year, around this time, Motes and his colleagues departed from what everyone else was doing, opting to release a limited run of a big, higher-alcohol IPA called Palate Fatigue.
“It was super fruity, very tropical,” he said. Not exactly what comes to mind when you think “winter beer,” but it’s not outside the realm of reason to think it could be 80 degrees on Christmas Day here in Houston. And with no seasonal cues on the can, no one will feel like it’s dated when they spot it in a grocery store on New Year’s Day.”
Eureka Heights sold through one batch last year, and it’s brewing a double batch this year, out in mid-December.
“I like that not everyone’s doing a big, spiced beer,” Motes said. “There’s options.”