A year ago I taunted the idea of a beer advent calendar heavily without remorse. Well, one year hasn't changed me a bit: there will be no self-made nor bought beer calendar with a beer to drink for each of the first 24 days of December 2017. I'll probably enjoy a beer now and then during the month, but they probably aren't so called calendar beers. Occasionally they can be, but that's pure coincidence.
In addition to the commercially available foreign beer calendars (like Mikkeller, To Øl, Saveur Biere, Boxbeers and so on), the one and only Finnish beer shop Pien put together its own beer calendar, that became an instant success and originally sold out very quickly. Despite the cold facts:
- Every bottle has max 4,7 % abv beer -> Question: How about the flavour?
- All 24 bottles are from different Finnish microbreweries. -> Question: How about the quality?
- The beer calendar cost 119 €, i.e. approx. 4,96 € per bottle. -> Question: How about the value for price?
But let's not judge before we know. The fellow blogger at JaskanKaljat will open the calendar doors and rate each beer every day until Christmas Eve. Jaska's blog is in Finnish - so learn some Finnish, perkele!
 |
| The one and only true American beer calendar? |
Instead of buying the Pien or any other commercial calendar or putting together/making someone put together one of my own, I carefully selected 24 good to great brews from the blog's backlog. The backlog has grown ridiculously long during pretty silent last months, so having an artificial beer calendar is a way to clear it up quickly. The beers in the calendar have been savoured during this fall (August - November), so the calendar could be called "Best of Fall '17" collection.
I don't recommend anyone to drink the beers that pop up in the blog on a daily basis, since the beers are somewhat strong (always over the magical Finnish 4,7 % abv barrier - many times hugely over the magical barrier), and at least I consider drinking one that strong beer daily for 24 days in a row as one form of alcoholism. So, if you like my choices, please save your liver and at least some of the beers for later. If you don't like my choices, stick to the bulk lager you're used to.
That's it for now. The fun starts tomorrow.
Ölbeat
Wise people see beer advent calendars as utter crap. Understandably, some might interpret them as "adults' way of preparing for the season". My advice to those adults, who really need to "tune up for Christmas all December and even October-November" and "let the Xmas spirit flow to every corner of the home and to the neighbours, too", goes: Eat shit and...
Ozzy Osbourne: Bark at the Moon (YouTube)
From the 1983 album Bark at the Moon, the song was written by Ozzy Osbourne, Jake E. Lee and Bob Daisley.
