The World's Most Extraordinary Beer? Samichlaus
Dec 23 '04
The Bottom Line Samichlaus is coming to town.
I still remember the first time I saw Samichlaus in a liquor store in Waltham, Massachusetts. Brown Derby Liquors, was it called? I can't recall. It was, after all, about ten years ago. I snapped it up without hesitation and without examining the bottle. I wasn't quite so beer savvy back then as I am now, and I didn't realize that a beer such as this could actually improve with age.
When I got home, Ilovingly gazed at my prize find. It was about four years old. Could I still drink this stuff? Would it be ok? I didn't want to spend Christmas dead, after all. Well, OK, as I recall I was drinking it in July. But there was still a Christmas on the way. So, I called Phoenix Imports, the guys who brought the beer into America, and they put me right through to President George Saxon. I was pretty impressed. Beer enthusiasts will know George from his beer reviews for All About Beer magazine.
George assured me the beer should be quite drinkable, and he was right. It was delicious, big and malty with warm alcohol and fruity notes of raisin. I've been hooked on Samichlaus ever since. But there’s one small problem, you see. Back in the late nineties, the Swiss brewery that produced Samichlaus, Hurlimann, was acquired by a larger brewer (Feldschlossen).
That concern did not see the wisdom of continuing production of Samichlaus, and so discontinued it, much to the chagrin of beer lovers around the world. In this case, though, you just couldn’t keep a good beer down, and so in 2000 Samichlaus was resurrected by Austria’s Schloss Eggenberg brewery. And all was right with the world again.
Samichlaus is a special beer, brewed with the Christmas season in mind but perfect for aging and imbibing year round. It is a lager beer, and a very potent one. At 14% alcohol by volume, this was once advertised as the “strongest beer in the world”. It has not held that distinction for some years, and instead is now proclaimed by the brewery to be “The world’s most extraordinary beer” and “perhaps the rarest (beer) in the world”.
I am not sure about either of those claims, but I can tell you that this is a truly extraordinary brew, if not the most extraordinary brew. Though it has slightly less alcohol, I find that EKU28 has more character. Still, Samichlaus has a mystique about it. Brewed once a year on December 6th, St. Nicholas Day, it is aged a full ten months before it is bottled. My Samichlaus, for example, was brewed on December 6th of 2002, bottled in 2003, and drunk by me in 2004.
Samichlaus pours to a tawny amber brown color with a light and creamy head formation and a nose full of sweet malty aromas. Hurlimann produced both a pale and a dark version of Samichlaus; Eggenberg’s version is the dark. The palate hits you with a ton of dark malty flavors from the get go: sweet molasses, toasted nuts, a hint of chocolate. There’s a touch of fruit, too.
Samichlaus is very lightly carbonated, and in texture is sticky and syrupy. It’s sweet, much more so than I remember Hurlimann’s being. The finish is full of warming alcohol and lingers sweet on the tongue. This is a very complex beer, indeed, best for sipping at or just above room temperature. It’s great before or after dinner, though not with a meal in my opinion.
At $4 for a 11.2 ounce bottle, Samichlaus is not inexpensive. But it’s not so outrageous as the also recently revived Thomas Hardy’s Ale, which fetches $7 for a 7 ounce nip bottle.
EPINIONS CRITERIA:
Overall Rating: Four and one half stars.
Beer Rating: A Must-sensational.
Weight: Full Body
Flavor: Sweet
Complexity: Complex
Price: $3.99 per 11.2 ounce bottle
For more on Samichlaus, see Tom Carr's excellent review in which he compares a bottle of the Eggenberg to a bottle of Hurlimann. Also, MartyDX is well worth reading.
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