12 Brews of Christmas–Day 1: Boulevard Nutcracker Ale

With Christmas Eve just 12 days away, a full range of winter seasonals are now making cameos on store shelves and tap walls near and far.

Today, to celebrate the beers that are warming us this winter, we kick off our new series “The 12 Brews of Christmas.” As the name suggests, in addition to our regularly scheduled blog posts, we’ll be posting each day between now and Christmas Eve, highlighting a different winter seasonal that’s making us feel festive.

Our first featured beer in this series, Boulevard’s Nutcracker Ale, is a wet hopped winter warmer that balances toffee, malty goodness with a little spicy helping of Magnum, Cascade and, most prominently, Chinook hops. Brown sugar and molasses give this brew a bit of sweetness to round out the hop kick.

Nutcracker Ale is available in 12oz bottles and on draft in November and December. This narrow window works in the beer’s favor considering it’s wet hopped, though it does leave us feeling wistful for its winter arrival during the other 10 months of the year.

-Caroline

It should be noted that while we know The Bruery releases a new Christmas beer each year as part of a 12 year series, and many 12 Beers of Christmas tasting events are held around the country, we thought this was a somewhat, relatively, sorta-kinda original idea to feature our top 12 winters seasonals on our site. Oh, but a cursory Google search revealed that CraftBeer.com already did, Boston.com already did it, and hell, Simpsons probably already did it, so they definitely deserve a shout out. Now, since Christmas is a time of tradition, we’re throwing our picks into Santa’s hat as well.