Favorite Beers of 2023

Join me for a look back at my favorite beers of 2023! You can also listen to my year-end episode below, and then I’d love to hear your own favorites from this bizarre year!

Scratch Single Tree: Hickory

We said goodbye to 2022 and toasted the new year at midnight on January 1st with Scratch Single Tree: Hickory. The bright tartness that announces the beer diminishes slowly to reveal warm, rich hickory wood and leaves. The acidity recedes to the shade and undergrowth and halos the complexity of this most evocative of woods. I can’t think of a better way to have greeted 2023.

Zebulon Original IPA Circa 1840

Zebulon Artisan Ales in North Carolina is consistently taking on some of the coolest brewing projects, and their effort here to brew a beer similar to some of the first true India Pale Ales of the early 19th century is a great example. The beer is brewed with 100% Maris Otter malt and East Kent Goldings hops, fermented with a Burton yeast strain, and aged for a year in oak with Brettanomyces. The result is fascinating.

First off, the beer is startlingly clear. It almost shines in the glass. The aroma balances bready malt with light minerality and acidity and a touch of earthy funk. On the tongue it’s very bitter (160 calculated IBUs), but an old world bitterness without the palate-filling quality of PNW hops, and a more planty, tea-like flavor to the hops. The combination of bready malt, high attenuation, and subtle Brett funk makes the beer read almost Belgian. Beyond bread, white pepper and pear pudding show through. It’s widely understand Orval Trappist Ale is a Belgian adaptation of older English Pale Ales, and you can see the relationship clearly here.

I want more of this.

Wren House Black Excellence

My friend Tyler Cagwin at Nostalgia Chocolate sent me this beer, as it was brewed with his cacao. This Imperial Stout is a three-way collaboration between Wren House, Brewz Brothaz, and Eastern Market Brewing, and features coffee, cacao, and vanilla all from Africa—a celebration of Black excellence, which this beer definitely is.

The aroma leads with fresh and spicy coffee and dark milk chocolate with a touch of roasted grain and a hint of a mild dark fruit—dates, perhaps?—coming in behind. The coffee is more restrained on the palate and blends in with the chocolate, with the vanilla in support. The body is dry but ample, and there’s some gentle roast acidity that’s just enough to accentuate the hop and roast bitterness without jumping out. There are some mild fruit notes from the cacao. This really is excellent.

Rabid Morningstar DIPA

Rabid’s hazy game is on point, and they deserve more hype for their demon-named hop monsters than they get. Morningstar is all juicy tropical fruit in the aroma—sweet honeydew and cantaloupe, overripe mango—with just a hint of diesel. The flavor adds a bit of grapefruit zest and just enough bitterness to balance it all out. There’s only so much you can say about an excellent Hazy that hasn’t already been said, but there’s only so much you need to when it tastes this good.

Yellow Springs Haiku to Ninkasi Japanese Rice Lager

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in early March we hung out on the Yellow Springs patio sipping Haiku to Ninkasi, their excellent new Japanese Rice Lager with cascade hops brewed for International Women’s Day. The beer is brewed in collaboration with Urban Artifact—who brewed a separate beer called Suzy & Jane—and benefits a women’s scholarship to the Cincinnati State Brewing Science program. The beer was amazing—crisp and snappy with floral hop notes and a bready but light malt foundation. Perfect for sipping in the sun on an early spring day.

Warped Wing Pilot Series Dusseldorf Altbier

I spent some time at Warped Wing’s downtown taproom on a sunny April afternoon before an evening event I was leading across town and had their gorgeous Pilot Series Dusseldorf Altbier. The Pilot Series is for small batch, draft only beers, and give Warped Wing’s brewers a chance to brew classic styles that might not sell well enough for packaging. The beer poured a beautiful burnished copper color, and the impression of malt sweetness up front is whisked away by moderate bitterness and a dry finish. Toasty, mildly spicy. Perfect.

La Trappe Quadrupel

I forgot how good La Trappe Quadrupel is. Our favorite local beer bar, The Barrel House, had this on and we got it in on a flight on a lovely spring evening. It’s perfect. This was the last beer we had on the final night of our last trip to Belgium several years back, and I need to have it more often. So good.

Noble Beast Piwo Godziskie

There is something magical about a 3.5% ABV beer that’s packed full of flavor. Grodziskie is a weird style—light, crisp, and…smoky. Made with smoked malt but with a lighter toucher than Bamberg’s Rauchbier, Grodsizkie or Gratzer is as easy drinking style meant to be consumed in volume, but nonetheless packs a wallop of flavor. This was my first round in Noble Beast’s beautiful taproom at the beginning of a fun afternoon with friends. I want a beer like this around all the time.

Masthead Far from the Tree

This 14.3% beer is an Imperial Stout aged in a single apple brandy barrel blended with maple Wheatwine. I wrote in my notes , “caramel and raisin and apple, oh my.” Milk chocolate and caramel-covered raisins with a glaze of maple sugar. Not too sweet. Not hot. So good.

Hailstorm Prairie Madness IPA

A perfect old school Midwest IPA. The 2017 GABF gold medal American IPA offers pine, orange peel and pith, and candied grapefruit with sticky malt holding it all together, but it’s not too sweet. 2009 never tasted so good.

Tripel van de Garre

Down an impossibly narrow alley in Bruges, Belgium, sits De Garre, a little bar whose house Tripel has an unofficial three-round limit. At 11.5% ABV, it’s both potent and palliative. This used to be the only place in the world to get it—and where we first tried it—but it can now be found here and there at America’s best beer bars. On a sunny May day in Chicago we spent some time in Hopleaf, a Belgian beer lover’s heaven, and holding the de Garre glass and taking that first sip of this powerful beer just felt right. It felt like we’d gone farther than Illinois to get it, for sure.

Fuzzyline Matcha Latte

Every summer we visit friends in northwest Indiana, which means we’ve gotten to know a lot of the breweries up there over many years of visits. This July we stopped in at Fuzzyline in Highland and I fell hard for this Matcha Latte beer with matcha, lactose, vanilla, and honey. Sounds like a mess, but it’s brewed with restraint and a thoughtful eye from concept to finished beer. It doesn’t have to be what you’d order, but they nailed what they were going for, and I had more than one.

2018 Fifth Street Brewpub Barrel Aged Pappy Schmidion Damme

This Belgian Dark Strong Ale aged in a Pappy Van Winkle barrel was a bit hot when it first released in early 2018, but time had treated it well when we opened it with a friend on a later summer evening this year. Fresh caramel and vanilla with some sweet bourbon supported the core notes of the beer: fruit tape and rummy baked brioche French Toast. Most beer shouldn’t be aged. This one is proof of concept that a few really do benefit from it.

Yellow Springs Sunwave White IPA

There just aren’t enough White IPAs being brewed these days. It’s one of my absolute favorites, and I’ll order one whenever I see it, which is rarely. Fortunately, Yellow Springs brews one called Sunwave every summer, and I passed a lovely Friday afternoon in August enjoying a couple pints of this 6.2% ABV beauty. A soft but structured body, moderate bitterness, and a lovely balance of citrus and gentle spice.

2015 Brooklyn Black Ops

When we visited Brooklyn Brewery’s taproom in Williamsburg in September, I couldn’t resist ordering a bottle pour of 2015 Black Ops. This was one of the best cellared Imperial Stouts I’ve had. It hadn’t lost the body and gotten hot, which is usually what I run into. An impression of dark chocolate-covered pine needles with some resilient oak and gentle bourbon.

Fieldwork Watermelon Pulp IPA

One of the weirdest-but-best beers I had at GABF was Fieldwork Watermelon Pulp IPA. It’s exactly as advertised - lots of watermelon pulp and rind in a citrusy Hazy IPA. Weird but bright and delicious. If this were available near me, I would drink it all summer long.

Deschutes Hachimatsu Mai Honey Rice Lager

Hachimatsu Mai might have been my favorite beer I had at GABF, an incredibly bright lager brewed with puffed jasmine rice, Chilean Ulmo honey, and almost no hops. Flavors of toasted brown rice, violet candy, and honeycomb, and a quiet bouquet of other florals flitting in and out. My notes in my tasting journal started with, “f— that’s good.”

Cerebral Vanilla Rye Here Be Monsters

The Denver Rare Beer Tasting is a fundamental absurdity. You’re handed a tasting glass and given four hours to try as many unbelievably rare beers as you want, many of which would command three- or four-digit price tags on the secondary market and have hype geeks salivating. And you don’t taste most of them, walking right past tables of beers you’ll never be offered again, because there’s just too much to try. Cerebral’s liquid tribute to the vanilla orchid stood above the rest for me.

Radiant Luxurious Potential

This Black Forest Cake-inspired Bourbon Barrel-Aged Imperial Stout weighs in at 14.0% ABV and is brewed with a blend of Tanzanian Kokoa Kamili and Fijian Rakiraki cacao nibs from Chocolate Alchemy as well as Comoros and Tahitian vanilla beans and montmorency cherries. The final beer is blended from Woodford Reserve 15 year and Weller 12 year bourbon barrels. Some alchemy of the ingredients gave the impression of rum- and maple-soaked raisins covered in dark milk chocolate, with vanilla and a hint of coconut (likely from the cherries and oak). Despite its heft, it finishes just dry enough to make you want another sip. My notes finished “This is how you do it.”

Third Eye & Narrow Path Mounds of Importance

This collab between Cincinnati-area breweries Third Eye and Narrow Path is built on Third Eye’s former gold medal Milk Stout Higher Purpose and uses Narrow Path’s uniquely toasted coconut. And it’s absolutely glorious, and won silver in the Collab category at GABF to prove it. 

Allagash Foliage Report

This is an “Autumn Ale” for marketing purposes, but it’s actually a classic Belgian Dubbel, and one of the best I’ve had in a while. Toasty grain and a mulled mix of prune and plum that just smells Belgian. Full on the tongue but light on the finish. An impression of sweet fruit leather that files down into bready, toasty, grain with a dry finish. Gently mouth-warming after a few sips. This is perfect.

Raven The Morrigan Dry Stout

While we mostly drank traditional lagers in Prague, we couldn’t resist checking out the country’s growing craft scene. On a rain-soaked evening wandering through the maze of Old Town we finally found our destination, U Kunštátů, a beer bar in a 12th century building offering an extensive bottle list of 21st century Czech craft. We grabbed a 750 of Plzen’s @pivovar_raven Morrigan Dry Irish Stout and sat under a large umbrella in the courtyard as rain hammered the canvas and lamplight glinted off the wet cobblestones. The beer was perfect for the moment, which is all we can ever ask a beer to be.

Klosterbrau Rauchbier

Among the many well-known breweries in Bamberg, Germany, Kolsterbräu was not one I was terribly familiar with before doing research before our recent trip. It's a bit out of the way—it takes several zigs and zags from the main pedestrian routes through the town's maze-like streets and alleys to even find it—but the search was worth it. I ordered their house Rauchbier—what else for the first pint in Bamberg?—and it was lovely. It's not the standard Rauchbier built on Märzen bones though. It's quite dark, like a strong Schwarzbier, with a bit more bite. A touch of licorice and dry chocolate flits in behind the savory/sweet smoke. We paired it with apple streudel in the late morning on our first day and it was perfect.

Weyermann 50 Smoky Pale

Weyermann Specialty Malts has a pilot brewing system and they offer a lot of unique beers from the system in their shop as a way to demonstrate what their malt can do. It’s such a cool idea, and an opportunity to taste some really unique beers, like this Smoky Pale Ale using citrusy American hops and smoked malt.

Schlenkerla Weischel

The best-known brewery in Bamberg is Schlenkerla, and it was definitely worth the hype. The space is rustic and cozy despite the crowds, and we enjoyed getting to try one-offs that never make it to the states, such as Weischel (a beautiful cherrywood-smoked Rotbier with toasty caramel and soft, sweet wooly smoke notes) and Erle (an alderwood-smoked Schwarzbier).

You can also read about my favorite chocolates and beer & chocolate pairings as well. Happy holidays!