Five festive beers to help raise your holiday spirits
Last week, for the first time in my life, I bought a whole pomegranate.
My face must have showed immense pride. I would have shared this achievement with the grocer as they typed in the code — 3440.
Alas, I used self-checkout.
The purchase of the pomegranate has been part of a personal challenge to eat more seasonal fruits. Up until late November it had been all apples. Now it’s pomegranates and satsuma mandarins.
Before I continue, this is not a column about healthy snacking; it’s a column about holiday drinking, specifically festive beers.
Around Christmas, you see the market’s gamut, from the bold, timeless, warming ales to the gimmickiest peppermint, eggnog, hot chocolate amalgamations, still loveable amid their shtick.
We eat fruits of the season because they’re the freshest available. Holiday beers are fresh in a different sense: They represent a brewer’s imagination, capturing flavors and feelings of the moment or recalling images, tastes and smells brought forth just this time of year by tradition and nostalgia.
Unlike with wine, I don’t aim to pair these brews with particular foods, though you may find they blend in quite well with your Christmas dinner. I would rather them based on the memories playing anew in my head, even those from far before I could legally drink.
Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. — ‘Celebration’
This roundup has to start with an American classic, a celebration of the hops that helped launch this craft beer thing, and an IPA that, with its ruby red label depicting a cozy, snow-covered log cabin, rings in the holidays.
For 42 years, the pioneering California brewery Sierra Nevada has put out
‘Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!’
In the show, the deceased but wide awake Maitlands are encouraged by Beetlejuice, an outrageous phantom trapped in a kind of purgatory, to haunt the old Victorian house in Connecticut they had just bought and planned to renovate and start a family in, but instead died in after a sudden accident. They’re hoping to scare off a family that’s now bought the house and are moving in, including goth teenager Lydia, who is grieving for her recently deceased mother, Lydia’s neglectful father, and Delia, with whom Lydia’s dad is already secretly engaged. As if that all wasn’t crazy enough, thanks to Beetlejuice all sorts of madcap mayhem is about to ensue.
The musical — which ran on Broadway, with a break for the pandemic, from April, 2019, to January, 2023 — is an adaptation of the 1988 movie “Beetlejuice” directed by Tim Burton with Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis as Adam and Barbara, Wynona Ryder as Lydia, and Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse, pronounced “Beetlejuice.” The film developed a longstanding cult following. Will Burton said he is no relation to Tim Burton. “I wish I could say yes. Just the fan relation — I am a fan of Tim Burton.”
He watched “bits” of the movie “Beetlejuice” when he was child, “but I was so scared by bits of it ... Watching it