A pool cocktail should provide refreshment from the sun's heat and help set the mood for maximum relaxation.

It is that time of year. The days are longer. Temperatures are rising and the humidity sticks to your skin. Mercifully, the pool is open. And the blender is working overtime.

Just like my beer-ordering habits, the cocktails I consume change from season to season. When summer rolls around, tropical cocktails, blender drinks and fresh fruit concoctions rule the day. While a winter cocktail should be designed to ward off the chill, a pool cocktail has to provide refreshment from the sun’s heat and help set the mood for maximum relaxation.

When it comes to summer cocktails, it’s a good idea to take your cue from places on the globe that have summer-like conditions throughout the year. If you are looking for a great poolside libation, take a look at what is being served at Caribbean resorts, in bars throughout Central America and the Mediterranean, or in domestic coastal hot spots like Southern California or Florida.

At SHOREbar in Santa Monica, CA, master mixologist Billy Ray says the view and the smell of the ocean call for “fresh, natural and clean” cocktails. That means substituting ingredients like agave and honey syrup for simple syrup. “Whether it is food or drink, people are concerned about what they are putting in their bodies,” Ray says. “There has to be a spa-like quality to the cocktails. People don’t want us to just crack open a can and dump the contents in a blender with a bunch of ice.”

The changes taking place at the best cocktail lounges mirror many aspects of the craft beer movement. Mass-manufactured ingredients are giving way to handcrafted spirits and mixers that have a farm-to-glass freshness.

“People don’t see what goes into today’s craft cocktails,” Ray says. “The bar staff has to be in early each day making fresh juices, because fresh lemon and lime juice will go bad in four hours. They will oxidize.”

This change in how cocktails are made is altering what we should expect when ordering classics like the daiquiri and margarita. Premade mixers usually contain a variety of flavoring agents and preservatives to extend shelf life. They are convenient and have a place and time. But when a bar staff puts in the effort to use fresh ingredients in a cocktail, there is an immediate shift in flavor and quality. Delicate, natural flavors come forward, and the bartender controls the levels of sweetness and tartness.

Ray points out that ice becomes an even more critical component when a cocktail is being served poolside. Bartenders expect that about 20-25 percent of ice will turn to water through stirring and shaking, helping to dilute the cocktail and balance the flavors. The key to using ice in the summer heat is making sure the drinker has control and does not end up having to either drink the cocktail too quickly or watch it turn to a watered-down mess.

“The key to any cocktail is the ice. It is the most important thing in the drink beyond the spirit,” Ray says. “Great ice is very important. Big block ice cubes are essential for a cocktail in summer. Dainty ice melts very fast if you are in the sun.”

So once you have gathered fresh ingredients and plenty of ice, the question becomes exactly which cocktails you should make. The answer for poolside sipping comes down to personal choice, but the reality is that this is a great place for colorful libations that make the heat melt away.

Nature Conservancy’s Bee Raw Blessed Honeycomb

Created by mixologist Ektoras Binikos of Michael’s in New York

1.5 oz Uncle Val’s Gin

1 oz Solerno liqueur

1 oz lemon juice

1 oz Bee Raw Basswood Honey Syrup

.5 oz egg whites

Bergamot bitters

2 sage leaves

To create the honey syrup, mix one part Bee Raw Basswood Honey with one part water in a saucepan, bring to a simmer and then cool.

Place all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice and shake well. Strain into a coupe glass and garnish with a lemon twist and 2-3 drops of the aromatic bitters.

Peach Ambrosia

Created by Billy Ray at SHOREbar
in Santa Monica, CA.

6 blueberries

1.5 oz Ciroc peach vodka

.75 oz lemon juice

.75 oz lavender syrup

3 drops rose water

Muddle 6 blueberries in mixing tin. Add the remaining ingredients and pack with ice. Shake and strain into an Old-Fashioned glass with ice.

The Swimming Pool

1 scoop crushed ice

.25 oz sweet cream

.75 oz cream of coconut

2 oz pineapple juice

.75 oz vodka

1.5 oz light rum

.25 oz Blue Curacao liqueur

Mix ingredients, except Blue Curacao, well. Pour into wide-mouth glass. Float the Blue Curacao on top.

Fancy Bourbon Punch

Created by Matt Wallace

1 liter Maker’s Mark bourbon

1 cup granulated sugar

Peels of 3 lemons and 1 orange

Juice of peeled fruit

1 liter of strong tea (preferably green tea)

250 ml sparkling wine (club soda can be used for a less-fancy version)

Freshly grated nutmeg

Combine sugar and citrus peels in the bottom of a punch bowl. Muddle together until sugar starts to clump. Let sit for about 2 hours, (while not necessary, this does add a little complexity).

Brew the tea for about 30 minutes, remove loose tea or tea bags, and allow mixture to cool.

Add the juice of the peeled fruit, tea and bourbon, and stir.

Top with sparkling wine just before serving and stir gently. Top with freshly grated nutmeg and serve.

Watermelon Crush

From Southern Cocktails by Denise Gee

8 cups cubed watermelon

1 1/3 cups light rum

1.5 cups orange juice

.5 cup orange liqueur

.25cup powdered sugar

2 oz fresh lime juice

Freeze watermelon cubes for 8 hours. Puree the watermelon and remaining ingredients in a blender until smooth. Serve in mason jars.

Castaway

3 or 4 chunks of fresh mango

z agave syrup

1.5 oz dark aged rum

.5 oz fresh lime juice

Mint leaves for garnish

In mixing glass, muddle the mango and agave syrup. Top with ice and add rum and lime juice. Cover and shake until cold, strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Float mint leaf.

Today, Belgian witbier, bière blanche in French, is among the more popular styles brewed and consumed in North America, and is fully embraced once again by brewers throughout Belgium and beyond. The unmistakable appearance and fresh, bountiful fragrance portends a refreshing, wholesome drinkability.

It has been postulated that the domestication of wild wheat (emmer) and “invention” of brewing were conjoined events some 12,000 years ago, and possibly the impetus for the earliest civilizations. Barley has largely replaced wheat as a brewing grain, but thankfully, not altogether. In more recent times, wheat-centric beers were common from Western Britain to Northeast Europe. Devonshire white ale, Broyhan mumme, lambic, witbier, göse, Bavarian weizenbier, Berliner weisse and Einbecker bock were all popular wheat beers in centuries past. Some of these have vanished, while others have been modernized, and some have even retained their wild, unruly roots.

Witbier evolved as the specialty of Dutch-speaking Flemish Brabant Province east of Brussels. There wheat, barley, oats and sugar beets are grown. The brewing legacy is just as fertile. Witbier breweries thrived in villages, abbeys, cities and farms.

Leuven was the premier witbier brewing city in Flemish Brabant a few centuries ago, but the hamlet of Hoegaarden, where brewing dates to 1318, would become world famous for it. Those brews were made with pale barley malt, raw wheat and oats. Hops were widely cultivated in the region, especially Germany, and the water was perfectly suited to brewing.

It is unknown exactly when witbier acquired its signature spicy character, but it has been part of the profile for centuries. The Netherlands became a prodigious importer of exotic spices after widespread colonization and the formation of the Dutch East India Company in 1602. The witbier style is about 400 years old, so it coincides with that timeline.

Beers flavored with herbal blends called gruit were once the norm in Northern Europe, until those concoctions lost out to hops in most places. It may be that some brewers never saw a reason to eliminate them altogether, using them alongside hops, so a taste for botanical beer never disappeared. At some point, though, exotic botanicals were introduced to witbier. Today, classic witbier is made with a tropical ingredient (Curaçao orange peel) and a temperate one (coriander).

Witbier made Hoegaarden a commercial brewing hotbed for a spell. There were 19 breweries there in 1730 and 38 in 1758. By 1940 there were but three remaining in the village. In 1957 only one brewery remained, the Oude Brouwerij Tomsin. Its doors were closed that year, bringing commercial brewing in Hoegaarden to a sad finale. The brewery’s flagship beer was Oud Hoegaards Witbier, a hometown prototype destined for the dustbin of history upon closure. If not for the nostalgic lamentations of Pierre Celis, who dearly missed his cherished witbier, we’d not be enjoying wietbiers today.

Pierre Celis’ desire to recapture the history and brewing art of his hometown is legendary. The son of a dairyman, he loved nothing more than to relax with a witbier after a hard day’s work. Energetic and enamored with beer, he often helped Louis Tomsin in the brewhouse, next door to his own house. The story goes that while enjoying beers with friends in 1965, Celis vowed to revive witbier. He cobbled together a small brewery (21-barrel capacity) in a cowshed. He modernized a bit from the outdated manual-labor intensive operations of Tomsin, but kept his brewhouse simple and utilitarian.

He fiddled with the recipe for the better part of a year and released his first commercial batch on July 1, 1966, under the auspices of the Brouwerij Celis. His first year he produced 300 barrels, which increased to 250,000 barrels by 1990. The timing was perfect.

The 1960s was a period of great artisanal awakening in the culinary world. Fed up with industrialized food and drink, people turned to more natural, organic items and a rediscovery of traditional, old-fashioned sensibilities. CAMRA was founded on this principle, as was American microbrewing. Celis could not have found a more accepting public for his folksy wheat beer.

He changed the name of his brewery to De Kluis (The Cloister) in 1978, in reverence to the monastic roots of his beer and brewhouse. De Kluis was purchased by Interbrew a few years later, and the name changed to Brouwerij Hoegaarden. In light of those maneuverings, Celis was primed to explore other brewing options.

Celis was fond of the United States, and the blossoming specialty beer industry here loved Belgian beer. He chose Austin, TX, for his new brewery. The water was similar to Hoegaarden’s, and the hard, red winter wheat that he preferred could be grown in nearby Luckenbach. The gleaming, majestic Celis Brewery opened in early 1992. The quality of Celis White witbier was impressive. There is no downplaying the impact that he had on the worldwide scene.

Witbier has traditionally been made with roughly equal measures of Pilsner barley malt and wheat, and, optionally, a small amount of raw oats. The wheat portion is unmalted and raw, never flaked. Unlike some raw grains, wheat converts easily in the mash tun. Raw wheat is unkilned, keeping it lighter in color than malted wheat and giving true witbier an extremely pale, whitish-gold color. The high protein content of wheat and the unfiltered, bottle-conditioned state leaves witbier quite hazy. This also contributes to a fairly chewy, textured mouthfeel for a lower-gravity beer, 4.5 to 5.5 percent ABV on average.

Witbiers present a grainy, cereal profile, less “bready” than German hefeweizens. There is often a lightly sweet/tart complementary background.

Witbier yeast has a fairly neutral profile, though it does share some of the phenolic, vanilla and estery characteristics of Bavarian weizen yeast. Warm fermentation ensures that the footprint of the yeast will be fully articulated, often with notes of plum, apple, peach, apricot or melon. Hop rates are quite low, usually around 15-20 IBU. Hoegaarden uses East Kent Golding for bittering and Saaz for aroma. The bitterness is pleasantly subdued, and the hoppy aromatics herbal and floral. Most witbier brewers follow this general template.

The one thing that sets witbier apart from nearly all other brews is the liberal use of botanicals. Curaçao orange peel and coriander provide a potent but sublime citrusy and herbal nose, playing amiably with the discreet hop, grain and yeast components.

Some brewers personalize these additions, as grains of paradise, pepper, ginger and others are used. It has been surmised that Hoegaarden uses a third spice, but that has been debunked repeatedly, even by Pierre Celis himself. As delicious and quenching as witbier is today, imagine one of yore, with the tartness of spontaneous fermentation and some musty Brettanomyces.

Witbiers are best fresh, as the floral, fruity and herbal notes will diminish over time, but aged, drier ones are also a great pleasure. This is an excellent gateway beer, intriguingly flavorful, yet enticingly mellow. There are numerous excellent examples made by North American micros as well as a dozen or more stellar imports. We can thank Pierre Celis, who died in 2011, for the wealth of outstanding witbiers available today. Brewers were quick to recognize his foresight and genius, and the world was wise to try them. That is witty indeed.

Beyond Beer is what the name implies. No one should cast aspersions at the IPA drinker who also enjoys a chilled Alsatian white. We don’t pronounce judgment on the stout drinker who sips Irish whiskey. The fact of the matter is that craft beer drinkers famously wander from brand to brand. It’s really not surprising when they jump completely outside the beer category.

For most of us, the urge to taste something different is greater at this time of year than any other. Let’s face it, our palates have been through the beer wringer for months. The fall started with Oktoberfest beers, pumpkin ales and doppelbocks. After Thanksgiving, winter warmers and spiced holiday brews arrived. The freezing January and February temperatures found us calling for imperial stouts and barley wines. It is still a few weeks before spring bocks will be ready. It’s OK to admit it: we could all use a little break from beer.

So what do we drink when we are not downing a few pints? Quite a bit depends on the beer styles we normally enjoy and how far we want to go to change things up. Here is a checklist of drinks to try, based on the taste of your favorite brews.

Golden Beers

Pilsner: Fresh, well-made pilsners are bright, refreshing and effervescent. These are often talked about as the Champagnes of the beer world. There are certainly similarities, and you would not be wrong popping a cork on a sparkling wine. A sparkling cider could also be an alternative.

Kölsch: Cologne (Köln) sits along the Rhine River just north of the German wine-growing region. A fresh Früh, Sion or Gaffel kölsch is a clean and crisp drink. A slate-dry Riesling is the way to go.

Saison/farmhouse ales: These beers were once brewed for the enjoyment and fortification of seasonal farm workers. Try substituting a Beaujolais Nouveau, the young wine that was originally made in France as a way to celebrate the end of the grape harvest.

Hefeweizen: There are plenty of different flavors that flow through beers like Franziskaner Hefe-Weisse, and that means you should look for something that is equally flavorful. A classic gin and tonic is a good choice. Be sure to call for a gin that is full of botanicals, like Rogue Spirits Spruce Gin.

Belgian-style witbier: The trailing hints of orange and coriander in this beer style remind me of a top-shelf margarita made with Cointreau or Grand Marnier. You can argue all day about not wasting añejo or repasado tequila in a Margarita, but the recommendation here is to replace the triple sec with one of these two classic liqueurs.

Dark Beers

Altbier or dunkel: Dark beers from Germany and Central Europe are light on the palate, with sometimes either sweet or slight roasted notes. Consider a cocktail option such as a dark and stormy made with ginger beer and Gosling’s Black Seal Rum or a classic old-fashioned.

Brown ale: The roasted, less hoppy cousin of pale ale, this beer should be replaced with a flavorful, yet reserved drink. A cocktail made with Canadian whiskey might be the answer.

Rauchbier: Smoked beers come in a variety of levels of intensity. So do Scotch whiskies. For those who like lighter intensity, blended Highland malts are the way to go. True smoke eaters should try Islay malts, such as Laphroaig or Lagavulin. If you desire wine, try an Italian Amarone.

Porter: Dark and mildly roasted porters are lighter in body than many dark beers. Try a pinot noir if you are into red wines. If you fancy white wines, sauvignon blanc or pinot gris would be a solid choice.

Irish stout: Roasty stouts have a good level of flavor. Ignoring the vast color difference, try a lightly oaked chardonnay. In the spirits world, try an aged sipping rum such as Appleton Estate Reserve from Jamaica or Flor de Caña Centenario from Nicaragua.

Baltic porter/milk stout: Dark, sweet and powerful, both of these beer styles offer loads of complexity and plenty of kick. Often these are end-of-the-evening beers. You can substitute port as an alternative.

Abbey dubbel: When you pop open a Westmalle Dubbel or Rochefort 10, you expect complex, layered flavors. The answer here is a Bordeaux-style red. Many of the best French labels are expensive, so you may decide to look for a California blend.

Hoppy Ales

India pale ale: IPAs are refreshing and can range from floral to spicy. If you think that white wines don’t pack enough of a flavor punch, give gewürztraminer a try. While lighter in mouthfeel, these wines tend to have a spice edge with floral and fruity notes.

Imperial IPA: If you are only satisfied when you dial the bitterness up to something north of 75 IBUs, you are serious about hops. Most often these are brews that are heavy in sticky pine characteristics. You may need to take things in an entirely different direction, but if you want to stay with the same note, there are liqueurs packed with flavor, like Cynar (Italy), Unicum Zwack (Hungary) and Vana Tallinn (Estonia) that might hit the mark. You might also give absinthe a try.

Barley wine: There is nothing shy about the flavor profile of barley wine. You can take this in several directions. If you are thinking wine, an Australian shiraz might be the ticket. But you might want to switch to a spirit. Añejo Tequila is one option, but small-batch bourbons pack a ton of flavor, too.

Flavored Beers

Barrel-aged beers: So much here depends on the base beer and the type of barrel that has been used. If the end result is a decidedly woody character, then go for a rye whiskey like Sazerac Rye or Templeton Rye. If whiskey is coming through, most often it is bourbon. Try to learn which distillery the barrel was from and go in that direction. Woodford Reserve is a worthy place to land if you are not sure.

Lambic, gueuze and other sours: Sour beers are interesting and eccentric beverages. Some cocktails can answer the call, such as whiskey and amaretto sours, along with the sidecar and margarita.

Coffee/chocolate: Plenty of coffee and chocolate beers appear during the holidays and winter months. What is the answer if you just cannot get that flavor profile out of your head? Thankfully, there are a ton of coffee cocktails that most bartenders can make—everything from Irish coffee to a white Russian. In the chocolate category, there are chocolate liqueurs and even chocolate-flavored vodkas ready for mixing.

Fruit lambics: Fruit-flavored lambics have two balancing components: the sour beer base and the fruity sugars. It really depends on which fruit you want to imbibe. Here are recommendations for three of the most popular. Framboise (raspberry): You might be tempted to go in the direction of Chambord-based cocktails, but try to find a bottle of cassis made from black currants (not crème de cassis, which has sugar added). Kriek (cherry): This is a difficult flavor profile, since liqueurs such as kirsch and other cherry-based products don’t capture the fruit profile as well. If you can find a bottle of Travis Hasse’s Cherry Pie Liqueur, use the recipe for a Cherry Pie Tart or Fizzy Cherry Pie and see what you think. Pêche (peach): Look for Poire William or peach brandy. Avoid trying pear liqueur because it will be too sweet compared with the lambic.

Not every beyond-beer alternative will hit the mark. And in some cases you might just want to change things entirely. The fun thing for most beer lovers is that these departures to other beverages only serve to remind us of why we love beer in the first place. It is clearly the most diverse and flavorful drink on the face of the Earth.

In most places, if you wanted a white wine, you had better get ready to enjoy the oaky characteristics of a buttery chardonnay that had undergone malolactic fermentation. There is nothing wrong with a well-made chardonnay. The problem is that America’s fascination with chardonnay, which started in the late 1970s and lasted for 25-30 years, meant that, like the dominant lagers of the post-World War II era, you could have any white wine you wanted—as long as it was a chardonnay.

Diversity in the white wine segment lagged most other beverage categories. Beer, which had its Budweiser-Miller Lite-Coors-Schlitz-Old Style-Pabst Blue Ribbon-Stroh’s period of conformity, long ago shook off its creative cobwebs. Now, thankfully, white wine is no longer a one-note song.

Many wine lists are shifting so that chardonnays no longer dominate. Not long ago I was in a restaurant in the Los Angeles area where I would have expected chardonnays to pack the left-hand page of its wine list. Instead, the list was about 70 percent other white varietals. The chardonnay offering was sufficient to satisfy lovers of that grape, but there was ample room given to pinot gris, sauvignon blanc, riesling, viognier, gewürztraminer, chenin blanc, grüner veltliner and müller thurgau. It was the kind of range of whites that just a few years ago you would have had to go to a wine festival to experience.

“Perceptions are changing about white wine in America. It’s not just for the cocktail hour anymore,” said Gustavo Gonzalez, winemaker at Mira Winery in Napa, CA. “More white wines are being made, and they’re not all being made in a chardonnay style that had become so innocuous.”

Mira is a 2009 startup winery that buys fruit from vineyards in the region. The winery makes three whites: a chardonnay, a sauvignon blanc—both made with 100 percent grapes of those styles—and Admiration White, a blend of 80 percent sauvignon blanc and 20 percent chardonnay.

“I love sauvignon blanc. It has so much to offer as a grape, very aromatic and very fragrant,” Gonzalez says. “It has citrus elements and flower notes. I try to retain that in the wine. Most of it is aged in stainless-steel tanks, but we do age a small amount in oak barrels to help give the wine some density.”

If you want to understand the diversity potential of white wine, you need look no further than riesling. It is a fascinating grape because it grows best in colder, often wetter, conditions: in places like the Finger Lakes region in Upstate New York, the western edge of Germany and near hop-growing fields in Washington where you might expect most people to be beer drinkers. Winemakers have plenty of cards to play when it comes to making riesling, but they also must count on Mother Nature for a successful harvest.

Rieslings can range from bone-dry to syrupy-sweet. Winemakers with the right climate conditions can even roll the dice and produce late-harvest and ice wines using the riesling grape. Residual sugar is one way to determine sweetness, but acidity makes a major difference in the balance of the wine. What is in a bottle of riesling on your store shelf is so confusing that the International Riesling Foundation devised a simple scale for members to use on the back of their bottles to tell consumers what to expect, from dry to medium-dry to medium-sweet to sweet.

Scott Harvey, winemaker and owner of Scott Harvey Wines in St. Helena, CA, makes several whites, including a blend—One Last Kiss—and a Jana Napa Valley Riesling.

“Perceived sweetness does not directly have to do with residual sugar. It has more to do with balance. It’s directly related to acidity,” Harvey says. “Chardonnay is made in the winery. It is bouquet-rich from the yeast, the barrels and the malolactic fermentation. Riesling is made in the vineyard. It is aroma-rich.”

While most chardonnays and red wines gain so many characteristics from barrel aging, many whites only see the inside of a stainless-steel tank. The vineyard soil and that vintage’s growing season influence what ends up in your glass.

If your wine consumption is a steady diet of big reds, my advice is the same that I give to friends who drink only barrel-aged beers, sours and imperial IPAs. I tell them that big and bold has its place, but there are also style and grace in the clean and subtle flavors of a fresh kölsch or well-made pilsner. If your Beyond Beer choice is white wine, go beyond chardonnay and experience something that just might surprise your taste buds.

Barley wine was once a loosely applied designation, and the attempt today to distinguish English and American barley wine stylistically is a valuable reference point for brewers and beer lovers alike. Strong, hoppy ales have an interesting lineage, and we can all be thankful that they have been reintroduced in recent decades. Evocative of strength, barley wine delivers great depth and complexity via extensive maturation.

Current barley wines evolved from strong ales regionally cultivated in Britain, where hops were not a common brewing ingredient until the 15th century. This singular inclusion, and its preservative properties, changed the direction of ale brewing there, leading to the development of multiple stronger, more stable and storable types.
Indigenous British strong ale or beer included Yorkshire Stingo, Scottish wee heavy, and London October beer. All were kept for months or years before consumption, and hops were essential to shepherd the ale through this prolonged period.

At Burton upon Trent, the potent, eponymous Burton Ale became that city’s first celebrated export, predating the more fabled romantic IPA. Burton Ale was a strong, sweet and dark ale. Dry-hopped upon casking, it developed an intricate character during maturation. It was exported east via the Baltic Sea in the mid-18th and early 19th century, primarily to Russia, Poland and Germany. Fortitude and copious hopping were insurance against cask invaders, but also made a beer worth coveting. Among the exporters was Michael Bass, a familiar surname in brewing.

When Russia placed a stiff tariff on beer imports in 1822, the eastward export ceased, leaving quite a back stock of long-in-the-tooth Burton ale back home. It was subsequently made less sweet and more hoppy by prodigious exporter Samuel Allsopp, and it eventually won over the home crowd back in Burton.

Exporters turned their sights from Russia to India, and from Burton ale to India pale ale, and IPA subsequently filled the lucrative export void. Lighter and more highly hopped ale than Burton, it was different altogether. IPA and Burton coexisted for at least another century. Burton Ale faded into obscurity, but never vanished entirely, living on as barley wine, the lees of history leaving a residual footprint on our contemporary strong ale.

The term barley wine was sometimes used during the latter 19th century, mostly as a retail descriptor rather than a style, while brewers usually referred to their strongest ales as No. 1 or Strong. These often topped 10 percent ABV and required maturation to temper the flavors and allow full fermentation, while they garnered lusty, fancied Brettanomyces character from the wood. Cask hops helped thwart unwanted off-flavors. Strong stock ales were often referred to as “old,” or old ale. Burton Ale, Old Burton, old ale and barley wine became interchangeable to some degree, given the whim of the brewer, retailer or consumer.

Bass began using “barley wine” on its label around the beginning of the 20th century. The 1903 label of the North American export Bass No. 1 called it “Bass and Co’s. Barley Wine, The Royal Tonic.” In England, Burton, strong and No. 1 ales became known as barley wine, and the Brett character was largely winnowed out as brewers turned away from wood and implemented modern microbiology techniques.

Fairly popular in England into the 1940s and ’50s, barley wines fell out of favor in the ’60s and ’70s. America, conversely, was in its microbrewing infancy, and barley wine was ripe for the picking by eager artisanal frontiersmen.

Barley wine originally gained a foothold in America in 1840, when Scotsman Peter Ballantine brought a little Burton to his Ballantine Brewing in Newark, NJ. Along with his Ballantine Ale XXX and IPA, Ballantine also brewed bona fide Burton Ale, aged up to 20 years in oak barrels, then bottled and given to loyal customers only. It was last brewed in the 1950s.

Ballantine’s Burton ale is long gone, but it allegedly inspired the modern archetype, Anchor Old Foghorn. Minted by icon Fritz Maytag, Old Foghorn was introduced to the public in 1975, becoming the nouveau prototype. Because it is made entirely with American-sourced ingredients, there is no more significant symbol of the Yanks’ spirit and approach to brewing. Old Foghorn set in motion affection for big beers in North America. Sierra Nevada Bigfoot was born in 1983, and within a few years barley wines were seemingly everywhere.

When the world, especially North America, was introduced to the concept of formal beer stylization, there was often little to draw upon with emerging styles. Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion underscored this realization, followed by the beer judge certification program (BJCP) guidelines. Most beers already had some simple lineage that allowed for classification, but the nascent North Americans brewers were reformulating classics, warranting a separate taxonomic niche.

Strong, nondark beers were especially tough to put on a family tree. Old ale and barley wine were never really different historically, so brewers and beer stylists charted their own courses. Barley wine came to encompass two distinct, or at least allegedly distinct, varieties: the supposedly sweeter, less hoppy English style, and the fully hopped, drier American incarnation. Thomas Hardy’s Vintage Ale and Young’s Old Nick were held up as examples of the former, with Old Foghorn and Bigfoot the torch bearers for the latter.

As North American brewers tended to use their own homegrown hops (and lots of them) and malt, their barley wines were often very bitter and hoppily aromatic, as well as somewhat attenuated. English barley wines relied more on a malty and estery presence, subdued hoppiness and a more vinous, aged profile.

Both substyles rely heavily on light base malt, generally English pale ale or American two-row. The light to dark amber color comes from the sheer amount of malt crammed into each mash tun, slight augmentation with crystal malts (most commonly) or a prolonged boil. The extensive kettle time serves to reduce the wort to proper strength, but also imparts depth and complexity through caramelization and Maillard reactions, creating malty flavors and aromas and a degree of unfermentability. A prolonged boil may even eliminate the need for any character malts.

Obviously, English or American hops would further define the desired distinction, as would English versus American yeast. Patience is a necessity, since fermentation may be long, either due to a surfeit of fermentables and the sluggishness of yeast in the presence of the high alcohol content of the finishing beer, which weighs in from 9 to 13 percent ABV.

Like its forbears, a well-crafted barley wine will age gracefully. In that respect, perhaps the barley corn has not fallen so far from the stalk. Barley wines are particularly excellent for barrel aging, a popular technique among American brewers. It is yet another nod, intentional or not, to the conditioning of bygone strong ale, though mostly it is done now to express woody character or former contents rather than to counteract “staling” organisms.

Barley wine is rarely drunk young, so proper aging is imperative. It must be long enough to smooth out the rough edges and temper the strong flavors of such a behemoth. Archival vertical tastings are very popular among barley wine lovers, so get started on your cellar. Buy them now, and drink them next year or far into the future.

We all have moments of epiphany, and for this scribe, that came with my first glass of Hacker-Pschorr Dunkel. The luxuriant malt flavors, smoothness and exotically enticing dark color were captivating. A well-crafted dunkel, straightforwardly robust with a decidedly Old World character, can stand up to any extreme, flavored or wild brew.

Munich dunkel (dark) is the beer that made Munich famous, bringing that city renown as a brewing nexus that endures today. Dark and bottom-fermented, dunkel seamlessly blends depth, simplicity and richness with the clean contours of lagerbier, all in a bundle of modest proportions.

It was long the brew of the commoners, and ultimately refined less than 200 years ago by a well-traveled brewing bigwig, aided by British ingenuity, moving the style into the modern era while clinging to its history. It bears the generous footprint of the eponymous Munich malt, bready and toasty, and remains a virtual symbol of the Münchener beer.

Monks’ Brew

With a brewing history that dates to 800 B.C., the area roughly enveloped today by Munich, Kulmbach and Bamberg makes what would be considered Germany’s most traditional brews: dunkel, schwarzbier (black beer) and rauchbier (smoke beer). We can extrapolate from these three styles that they evolved from a dark and smoky common ancestor, and a period when all beers were of this ilk.

Munich was established in the mid-12th century along the Isar River as a settlement of Benedictine monks (München is Bavarian for monk). Brewing was a common and revered skill among both monks and citizens. Munich’s beer evolved because of its agricultural larder, cool climate and proximity to the Alps, where cold storage (lagering) in the caves of the foothills had been shaping the Munich style of brewing since the 1400s.

Dunkel, which may have existed as a recognizable type, was further refined and protected by the rather misunderstood and oft-cited Bavarian Beer Purity Law of 1516, more commonly known as the Reinheitsgebot. This law was declared by Duke Wilhelm IV and Duke Ludwig X of the royal Wittelsbachs, who ruled Bavaria from 1180 to 1918. They were powerful, heavy-handed rulers who influenced commerce greatly. The law declared that beer could be made only with malted barley, hops and water (and later yeast, which at the time was considered a divine blessing). It helped ensure high quality, but also buoyed the livelihood of farmers and brewers.

The exclusion of wheat and rye parceled those grains for bread making. Wheat was also reserved for royal brews, the rulers being rather smitten with weizenbier (another saga for another column). So the law, whether intended or not, help to distill and define distinctive Munich beer. Add to this a firm grasp of bottom-fermentation and lagering techniques, a 500-year history of hop cultivation, the terroir of local ingredients and maltings and a remote and mountainous location, and we can see how a distinct and early beer “style” took shape.

Though undoubtedly there was some tweaking of the dunkel template after the law was introduced, it would not be until the 1830s that the final touches would be put on the style. The peripatetic and ever-inquisitive brewer at Spaten, Gabriel Sedlmayr II, son of the owner, made several trips to Britain to study its brewers’ methods, and especially their innovative malting technology.

He observed the production of pale malts, made possible by using coke as fuel, and came away duly impressed. His genius was not in trying to duplicate the pale malt back home, but to use these methods to cure his specific Munich malt more cleanly and with greater brew house efficiency. He was able to create his toasty, dark base malt with expert precision, leaving the Munich dunkel style intact and better than ever. It is the malt we home and professional brewers still know today as Munich malt.