Before anyone says otherwise, I am doing a Märzen this Oktoberfest season. Hell, that's this post is about! See? Last time I said I was more of a Märzen guy, so here it is. Märzen.

The specific Märzen we're looking at today is Wolf's Ridge's Oktoberfest. It's been a few years since they've graced the blog. I know they can do great stouts. How do they handle this fall staple?

And here we are. Like I promised in this month's first post, I've saved the biggest beer for last, which is especially fitting as I crossed the 50,000-word NaNoWriMo finish line this morning (go, me!). Today, we're taking a look at a special beer from one of my original favorite craft breweries (has it really been two and a half years since they got screen time on the blog? Wow, too long).

Nestle in, friends. Grab a strong maple beer of your own. Throw another log on the fire against late-November chill. Tonight, we're going big and heavy. Tonight, I'm drinking and telling you about Dogfish Head's Wake Up World Wide Stout.

Two things: 1) You really didn't think I'd let the entire month of January slip away without providing a proper post, did you? 2) Did I really go through all of 2022 without discussing a single MadTree beer on the blog?

Good for all of us, then, that I have a remedy for both those things. Here in the bleak, chilly late days of January, I'm turning to a MadTree classic to officially ring in 2023 for John Likes Beer. That's right, I'm drinking an aged bottle of Coffee & Vanilla Bourbon Barrel Aged Axis Mundi (Axis Mundi henceforth).

November really threw me for a loop. I didn't get to finish Maple Month here on the blog, nor did I finish my 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo. I took tasting notes for the final beer I was going to post about and snapped the necessary pictures for it. However, I didn't care for the beer and, because of how hectic the end of the month was for me, I decided not to actually make the whole post.

This weekend I plan on getting to the Christmas beers I have lined up. As such, I thought it best to provide you with all I have of that final maple beer. Without further ado, here are my pictures and unedited/unrefined tasting notes on Timber Ales and The Seed's imperial maple coffee stout, He Who Walks Among Monsters (that's an Untappd link):

November is my favorite time for a beer. See, maple's my favorite beer adjunct. It's so versatile: it can bolster ABV, it can add sticky sweetness, or it can introduce a savory flavor. It's quintessentially North American and, for me, autumnal.

It's finally that mystical time of year, when the fabric of the veil begins to wane and the nights grow all the cooler, darker, and longer. I've spent the better part of today at my favorite Oktoberfest celebration but I'm always ready to revel in the murkier parts of the the Halloween season.

As such, we have the blog's first pumpkin ale of the season: North High's Farm Hand. How is it? Let's find out.

This beer is the one I'd originally lined up to drink for this year's Christmas in July. See, shortly after Christmas last year, I found myself (as one so often does) in a local bottleshop. They had Wolf's Ridge's Holiday Series two-pack discounted to $15 or $20. I snagged one, figuring I'd drink a bottle for this Christmas and the other for X-mas in July.

Well, as you might know, I drank something else, something a little more unexpected, for that July post. Instead, I figured I'd sit on both beers until this December. Since it's this December now, and I have a weekend off and both beers still to drink, the time's come to break into that pack. Here's the first: Gingerbread Cookie Clear Sky.

We've come now, to the ending of the current blog season. This is the final beer of 2021's Maple Month. I purchased this bottle on November 27th, 2020. I've had it in my cellar for nearly a year.

This beer, this Maple Month's swansong, is, of course Goose Island's Bourbon County Brand #4 Special Stout (I'll refer to it as #4 from here on out). I picked this up nearly a year ago knowing that I'd crack into it for this evening's post. Let's see if cellaring it for a year's paid off.

So, that fall feeling I've had for the last few post is now a thing of the past. We've seen scorchers every day for the last week(ish), and we'll see scorchers for days yet to come. I'm trying my best to look beyond the heat--leaves are still falling, the autumnal aroma of decaying leaves flits through the air, and pumpkins abound.

It's still October, after all. Halloween's three weeks away (and, boy, do I still have beers and beers left between now and then). We're moving forward, hoping the chill and the spooks of the season catch up to us. Today, we're striving for this with Ithaca Beer Co.'s Country Pumpkin.

The cool weather just keeps on a-coming! This morning when I came out to read on my porch (I'm working on Rateliff's The History of the Hobbit) I had to throw on a long sleeve shirt to stave off the bite of chill in the air. It was great. I knew from the exact moment I sat down to open up my book that I'd be tackling the next Oktoberfest post. Sometimes things just fall right into place.

Luckily I had the second beer of the season in my fridge already, just waiting for the moment I'd need it. That beer's Brink's Brinktoberfest. Let's see how it's drinking on this fine late-summer evening.

This is a beer that I found the day I heard about it. A month or so ago, I saw a bottleshop I follow on social media post about it. Intrigued, I resolved to pick it up if I ever happened upon it in the wild. Later that day, I found it in a totally different bottleshop while I was heading home from work. And now here we are.

The beer is R. Shea's Twitchy. I see on the brewery's website that they add another word to the name, but it's not a super good word (and one that I think we should work to de-normalize) so I won't be including it here. Nor is that word anywhere on my can. I figured I should address that early on in the post. 

Anyway, this might just be the biggest (ABV-wise) beer I drink this season. If it's not, it up there. Let's get to it.

Can you believe it's finally Christmas in July? 2020's been a whirlwind of a ton of different stuff but at least it's all going by super quickly. Today, though, is a day for me to slow down. I'm celebrating the day with a beer. Tonight, I'll be watching a Christmas movie, listening to some Christmas records, and breaking into one more Christmas brew. If you want to see what that second beer is, you'll have to follow along on my Untappd.


But, I can get into a bit about today's first Christmas beer now. In fact, I'll give you a whole post about it. Sure, the temperature might be pushing 90° right now, but I'm happy to be out on the porch with a beer I remembered to grab in February before it was all sold out. That beer, by the way, is Illuminated Beer Works' War on Xmas, a spiced holiday stout. Again, it's nearly 90°.

If there was ever a beer I 100% intentionally aged, it's this. I mean, to be absolutely fair, I've intentionally aged a lot of beers over the last handful of years. But a beer aged in hopes that it'd drink better than it did fresh? Yeah, this is the only one in that category.

Lottie's just a fixture of this bottle shots now.

Since we're still under a Stay at Home order here in Ohio (or, I guess now it's a Keep Ohio Safe order?), I'm still chugging along with my Tales from the (now dwindling) Cellar series. In light of that, today's entry is a special offering from MadTree's venerable Funk Series: Sequoia's Gift. Let's get into it.

Did y'all have a nice Valentine's Day? Michelle and I went out to dinner, came back, had a drink (beer for me, wine for her) and went to bed. It was uneventful, sure, but it was pretty much my ideal Friday night.


Well, we did all of the above while swinging by a bottle shop between dinner and coming home. The goal was to purchase her wine (which, if you read that first paragraph, you'll know was a successful in that endeavor), but I also was looking for a little something special to write about today: Listermann's Kris, a cheetah beer (it's pretty well documented on the blog and on my Twitter that I'm a big cheetah supporter). I was lucky enough to find it, packaged with its companion stout, Remus. So, today, I'm drinking them both and presenting my thoughts on them to you. Let's get to it.

That beer, if the above image and title of this post didn't give it away, is Brewery Huyghe's Delirium Noël. It's all foil-wrapped painted glass adorned with a Santa hat-wearing, ice-skating pink elephant. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited for it!

Each year I look forward to a very specific beer here on the blog. That beer sees an annual release, but the recipe is never the same. I started drinking this stuff with the 2014 offering and now, five iterations of it later, here we are with 2019. I'll not mince words with the intro--it's probably best to get into it. Today's beer is Anchor's 2019 Christmas Ale.

It's a rainy night here in east-of-Cincinnati, middle-of-nowhere Ohio. I'm sitting inside (my posts over the last few months have all been typed on my front porch, meaning that this post is the first to actually mark how the changing seasons are affecting my habits) while good, spooky music pours out of my speakers.


The beer open and on the coffee table before me is the biggest yet for the season: Kentucky Pumpkin Barrel Ale. It's tantalizing, and I cannot wait to tear into the brew. So, let's have it.

It's a Sunday morning. Father's Day morning, to be exact. It's sunny here in middle-of-nowhere east-of-Cincinnati, Ohio, but the ground is still drenched from some heavy storms last night. I was going to try to mow before Michelle and I head to her family's Father's Day thing, but now that's not possible.


But, hey, when life gives you lemons, right? See, I kind of lucked out here. Yesterday was the second anniversary of Braxton Labs and, in celebration, they held a shindig and released a new stout for the occasion: French Toast. I ducked down to KY after work and grabbed three four-packs (two for me, one of a buddy of mine). Instead of hanging around for the whole party going on, I came home with aspirations of doing a post on the stout when time allowed.

And wouldn't you know? Time's allowing for that right now. So, here we go. Braxton Labs' French Toast.

Merry Christmas! Okay, I know Christmas was yesterday, but humor me; I was incredibly ill. But, I'm feeling better now (finally) and celebrating by nestling down with a very special ale.

You may recall exactly three years ago when I said that Thirsty Dog's 12 Dogs of Christmas was my favorite Christmas beer. Between then and now I've tried a lot of Christmas brews, only a portion of which have made it to the blog. Shockingly, 12 Dogs has remained my favorite; it's what I consider to be the pinnacle of the style, and is the beer of which I consume the most each November and December.

Tonight, I'm hoping to de-throne it. I've known that Thirsty Dog offers a Barrel Aged variant of the stuff for a while now (a place near me had, until early October this year, two giant $50 bottles of it) but I've never found it packaged in a way that was easy for me to purchase and consume. Until this year. That's right: Barrel Aged 12 Dogs of Christmas is back and in twelve-ounce bottles. I cannot wait to get my first taste of the stuff.