Pour Man: Warm up to big beers in cold days of winter

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Seek out a big beer such as a barley wine or brown ale, but take it slow. They are meant to be sipped and savored.

BIG BEERS TO TRY

Alpha King,
Robert the Bruce

Anchor Brewing Co., Old Foghorn

Goose Island, King Henry

McChouffe Revolution Brewing Co., Fair Warning

Shmaltz, He’Brew Jewbelation

Sierra Nevada, Bigfoot Ale

The Lost Abbey, Lost & Found

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Updated: March 9, 2012 8:03AM

It’s time to go big with your beer. Wrap up in a scarf and trudge out through the cruelest weather of the year in search of big, flavorful, potent, warming beers.

There is a time for crisp lagers and refreshing, low-alcohol ales. But at this time of year I’d much rather have a baked potato than a strawberry, and my beer choices usually align with my food choices. A big ol’ barley wine is the last thing I want to drink in August, but I had one the other night, a Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Ale, and it was beautiful, full of malty sweetness but balanced by pleasant, bitter hops.

Goose Island’s King Henry is another cold weather soother, a barley wine aged in Bourbon barrels and slowly offering up rich flavors of caramel, toffee and oak. The best pairing I can think of with a glass of that brew? A crackling wood fire. But if you must pair food with it, try some meat grilled on that fire, or some blue cheese. Skip the salad.

Barley wines, like Bigfoot, King Henry and Anchor Brewing Company’s legendary Old Foghorn, are beers — not wines — from first to last drop, despite their deceiving classification. Some have hints of wine flavors, and most have alcohol levels approaching or entering wine territory (8 to 15 percent), but the comparison goes no further than that. Barley wine is beer, cold weather beer, big beer.

You know your beer is big when it comes in a little glass — like the McChouffe I cherished sipping on the second-to-last night of 2011. McChouffe is a strong brown ale and it’s as soothing as a wool stocking cap. I sipped mine out of a snifter, the same glass a bartender would use for brandy or Cognac. Such a cute little glass, and such a huge, flavorful beer.

I like to sip these big beers and feel their warming effect. Obviously they don’t all have to be barley wines, despite the fact that barley wines are among the biggest of big beers. They don’t even have to be dark. Anything that makes me slow down and savor will do the trick.

You won’t see me guzzling the Lost Abbey’s Lost & Found, or even taking full mouthfuls of it. I’ll be pursing my lips and making it last. It’s not like it needs to stay ice cold. And too much of it at once can send me into a dull zone — a very happy zone but a dull zone nonetheless. I try to stay one step ahead of powerful beers by staying one sip behind.

Those beers that people describe as “Really good but you can only drink one or two of them in one sitting”? That’s what I’m talking about here. Soothers. Warmers. Even though they’re chilled, they warm you as they go down.

So often we think of beer as a thirst-quencher, a warm-weather accessory packed in ice and always ready for us. There is nothing wrong with that scenario, and at this time of year I sometimes dream about those ice chest days that lie ahead. I dream of reaching down into a churning tub of ice-thick water and extracting a soaked bottle through a cacophony of clinks and whooshes. I dream of claiming my cold summer beers, again and again.

Until then, I let the beer come to me. I ask bartenders for recommendations on barley wines, strong ales, cask ales — anything that will fill me up and slow me down. I watch them pour with care, and then I sit patiently and listen to what the beer has to say to me. It’s usually something warm and generous and calming.

I watch and listen one or two more times and then I’m satisfied. I might head home at that point or keep the evening going with a nod of thanks to the big beers and a welcoming hello to a few little beers. Either way it turns out well.

What big beers teach you in this discouraging cold is to slow down, let things come to you, feel the warmth and be good with where you are right now.

Michael Austin is a Chicago free-lance writer. E-mail thepourman@suntimes.com.