Here we are, suddenly, on the other end of Christmas. Did you have a good one? Were you able to see your family, either safely-distanced in person or through some video chatting service? Was Santa kind to you? Regardless of how you spent the day (or if you celebrate it), I hope you had some fun. I hope that you got something nice, even/especially if you gave it to yourself.

Me? I had a good Christmas. I gave a lot of really great presents and got some of the best gifts I've ever received. It was a fun day, and I'm excited to settle in with tonight's beer, the final beer of the holiday season and the last one I'll be doing up on the blog in 2020. This beer took me by surprise--I found it by sheer luck in a local bottleshop. I didn't know it was releasing, nor did I know it even existed.

Can you believe that Christmas is tomorrow? Seriously. Christmas--it's tomorrow. I still can't quite wrap my head around that. This year's been awful. Regardless, the holiday season's been good to me. Were I one to sit and count my blessings, I'd have a lot to be thankful for. 

Today I'm celebrating that with the oldest beer I've featured on the blog. This bottle's eight years old (that's as old as Purrl!). It's a Belgian Christmas beer (imported from Belgium by Shelton Brothers, Inc.). I have every reason to suspect that this'll be a decadent treat. Ho ho ho here we go.

Today's beer is another special treat for me--it's the second of two Christmas beers I wasn't sure I'd be able to track down. See, New Holland announced their third Brewer's Best series beer in early November. That beer is Holiday Ale. While you could preorder it for local pickup, there was no mention of any distribution.

Two weeks ago, after failing to find the ale at a local bottleshop, I hopped on the brewery's beer locator and saw that the beer was nonexistent in my neck of the woods. I shrugged and cut my losses--I figured I had enough beers for the blog's holiday season.

All this to say that I was shocked when I found the beer at that exact same bottleshop last Friday. I grabbed a four-pack and headed directly for the checkout with it. Now, four days later, I'm ready to crack into a can. Here we go: New Holland's Holiday Ale.

Today we have a treat: This is the priciest beer I'm consuming this holiday season. The 12 ounce bottle I'm about to break into ran me $6.39. It's a BBA version of Bell's Christmas Ale, which I drank and wrote about here (that's the new recipe that Bell's uses by the way, which they're still holding strong to here in 2020).

I won't lie to you--I was ecstatic when I found a single bottle of this being sold. This is one of two beers I'm doing this season that I didn't think I'd be able to find, so stumbling across this bottle in the wild was exciting. Let's get to it: Bell's Old Fashioned Holiday.

Are we seriously at the second Christmas beer of 2020? Yep, strange as that is. This year's really sprinted right passed my ability to comprehend the flow of time.