Christmas Beer ─ The Cheeriest, Tastiest and Most Unusual Holiday Brews

Christmas beers, also known as Winter Warmers, are a tradition dating back at least 2,000 years, with the ancients making highly intoxicating brews to celebrate winter’s Saturnalia. This brewmaking evolved into a holiday celebration when medieval monks, the world’s first professional brewers, pulled out their finest ingredients to produce soul-warming styles for the occasion. Today brewers continue the custom, either with centuries-old recipes or newfangled concoctions with spices and herbs, enabling thirsty beer fans to put aside their everyday favorites each winter and deck the halls with the world’s most flavorful ales and lagers, brewed especially for the holidays.Beer expert Don Russell taps into holiday cheer with a look at the world’s best—unusual, exotic, rich, one-of-a-kind brews—detailing the styles and flavors that will leave beer lovers in a froth. From Smuttynose Winter Ale to Santa’s Butt to Troegs Mad Elf to Left Hand XXXmas, there’s a beer for everyone, even a Hanukkah beer, He’Brew Jewbelation. Including funny tales and trivia behind the beers, homebrew recipes and food recipes with Christmas beer as an ingredient, and instructions for building and cellaring your own vintage holiday brews so you can enjoy Christmas 365 days a year, Christmas Beer will put even the most curmudgeonly beer drinker in the holiday spirit. Cheers!

Don Russell is one of America’s leading beer writers. His award-winning "Joe Sixpack" column appears weekly in the Philadelphia Daily News, and he is the host of "Joe Sixpack’s Happy Hour" on WPHT-AM, Philadelphia’s number one talk station.