For the first week of the year here in Austin, it’s cool enough that lady snow and I don’t have to worry about turning on the air conditioning, which is one of my favorite things to happen every year. It’ll be at least a couple more weeks before I have to accept the necessity of using the heater, but in the interim, I’ll be getting my warmth from alternative sources: blankets, sweaters, hugging cats, and strong beer. There’ll be the usual imperial stouts and barleywines and double IPAs, all beers in the English line of American brewing that I love so much, but today I want to talk about the German style that’s made the world’s biggest beers possible: the eisbock.

Kulmbacher Brauerei claims to have invented this style by leaving a barrel of bock outside one winter night. They removed the ice from the barrel, and what remained was a darker, stronger, and more intensely flavorful beer. (As far as I’ve been able to discover, there’s no good reason to doubt either Kulmbacher’s claim to originality or the particular origin story they offer.) Commentists in the Pacific Northwest in particular may find aspects of this story familiar; Deschutes explains its previously-decennial-and-now-maybe-semidecennial release Jubel as the fruit of a stolen keg that the thief abandoned to freeze in the winter. In each case, freezing was quickly adopted as an intentional process; Kulmbacher Reichelbräu Eisbock today is frozen in its lagering tanks and reduced before bottling, while Deschutes freezes its six-pack seasonal Jubelale every (whatever equation they’re using in Bend, OR to determine this) years, reduces it, and ages it in Oregon pinot noir barrels for a bit.

Now, nothing in the world of beer is ever not taken to the extreme, but the eisbock process in recent years has been subject to such abuse as to overshadow even the IBU arms race. For a number of years, Brewdog of Ellon, Scotland and Schorschbräu of Gunzenhausen, Germany competed to see who could remove the most frozen water from a beer and thereby make it the strongest. They pushed 50% ABV and maybe exceeded it. Brewdog named a beer Sink The Bismarck and then named another beer The End Of History and packaged it in 12oz bottles themselves packaged inside taxidermied roadkill. None of the things I’ve just said are jokes. It was a crazy, crazy time. Nor do I even mean to suggest that I disapprove. I fucking love innovation in beer, extremes in beer, competition in beer. There are, nevertheless, some real risks in the kind of repeated freeze-concentration we’re talking about here: flavor gets concentrated, and so does ethanol, but so do fusel alcohols, the nasty-ass molecules that make hangovers worse, and methanol, which is insignificant in ordinary beers but really nasty when you’re getting a lot of it. But: despite all this, the race for the strongest beer was fun as hell. I don’t even know who holds the title now, to be honest. I think the last time I checked in, some altogether different brewery had surpassed both BrewDog and Schorschbräu.

Let’s come back to Kulmbacher’s original eisbock, one of my favorite German beers. There’s not a lot to compare this to; first of all, it’s a lager, where virtually all other high-gravity beers are ales. It pours a dark, dark, brown with garnet highlights. The head starts strong on an aggressive pour, but quickly fizzles out due to a pretty high alcohol content at 9.2% ABV. It’s sweet, fruity, and full in both flavor and body. I get raisins, plums, good banana bread, molasses, and maybe a bit of vanilla. It’s not port-like in a strict since, in the way a lot of barleywines and old ales are, but I think people who like a good port will find a lot to like here. The sweetness is balanced not so much by hops as by alcohol, but it doesn’t tip over into the unpleasant low-level burn that signifies excessive alcohol paired with insufficient flavor. You can’t drink this quickly. You won’t need to. It’ll keep up with you.

lady snow says: It’s molasses-y. Like blackstrap molasses. It’s like a porterbock. This kind of makes me want to go tap trees for maple syrup in Vermont. And yes, I know molasses and maple syrup are two different things.

tl;dr: Sweet, rich, warming. You should get some of this, sometime in the next three months or so. It’s a fairly expensive six-pack at $14 or so, but if you’re not sure about it, in my experience a lot of places will sell singles. But I think this is a beer with broad appeal. It doesn’t have any detectable hop flavor and it’s essentially just a stronger version of one of beer’s most approachable styles, the classic German bock.

Grade: Do not freeze before buttchugging.

make it snow is an alot of beer who wants to thank The Right Reverend Electric Mayhem for making the obvious-in-hindsight move to rename this feature “Commentist Beer Barrel” last week. He woke up at 8 this morning to drink some good Central Texas pino grigio with lady snow, then drank three Kulmbacher Eisbocks while writing this review. His cats passed out as a result of mere proximity. He’ll be alot of fun in the open threads later!