Anchor
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Our Special Ale 2007 and 2015
20170101
We start our year—every year—with the same beer, the current version of Anchor’s Holiday Ale. We buy two magnums and save one for a comparison the following year. At 11:30 PM December 31, 2015, we poured the 2015 and 2014 and just after midnight entered our first beer of the year. It was a home run to lead off the game.
For years, the Anchor brewers took the original rather simple brown ale recipe and added one ingredient. We don’t know when that became such a logistical nightmare that they changed policies, but it seems to us that some of the more recent changes have been less incremental than they used to be.
The 2015, which, sorry, you probably can’t find unless you get lucky on Craig’s list, seemed a particularly significant digression from the usual suspect spice bucket that hundreds of breweries have copied, intentionally or otherwise. This version is nuttier and sweeter, with some chocolate and even a hint of Reece’s Pieces by the aftertaste. Just a hint of tart fruit circles in the background, but I’ll be darned if I can tell where it comes from.
Because we had dropped the magnum rather than the New Year’s ball in 2014, we had to reach farther back into our vault for a comparison. We hosted a tasting at the Washington’s Brickskeller Saloon Anchor brewer Mark Carpenter led us through a decade of vintages, so the seven year gap didn’t seem to us to be out of place. We were reminded of how much licorice/anise had been in the beer for a while. The 07 version seemed to have more of the usual suspects, more licorice and more of the deep dark fruits than the 15 version. The seven years in the vault could explain some of it, but not all of the difference— the chocolate notes we found this year just weren’t there seven years ago.
I write this post just before New Years 2017. Tomorrow’s Beer of the Day will report the differences we find in the 2015 and 2016 versions.
Ellie and I wish you a wonderful 2017. It’s a great time to be alive if you love good beer!
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