Brewer’s Advent Calendar 2019
Jesse and I were quite intrigued when we saw that our local Costco was offering this Brewer’s Advent Calendar. If you’re familiar with Advent calendars, they have a series of boxes or compartments that you open, one a day, starting December 1st until Christmas. In this case, it’s a big box of beer, and each compartment holds a 16.9oz can of German beer.
As it so happens, both of our birthdays are in November, and our wives got together and bought a couple of these as gifts.
The Calendars are produced by Kalea, “a young team of beer nerds from Austria and Germany”, and contain “24 cans of unique German beer that is not available in regular retail stores”.
Our plan is to have a weekly post with a roundup of the beers that were in the compartments for the previous week, and we’ll link to those posts here.
We had read some misleading information out on the internet about these advent calendars, so we wanted to get the facts about this one out there. Primarily, someone said that all the beers are brewed by the same company, and labeled differently, which is not the case at all, unless the box and website are misleading us. To be fair, maybe that happened in the past, but not this year.
Kalea is collaborating with independent craft breweries only. No beers from any multinational brewery is included in this pack. Each beer is unique and filled into the can especially for this calendar. Because most of the breweries in Germany do not have a machine for filling cans Kalea has organised the transport of the beer from one brewery to the other in order to fill them into cans.
Kalea Brewer’s Advent Calendar Website
Today is December 1st, which I’ve been anxiously awaiting, so let the fun begin!
I’ve tried to enjoy these beers but as a professional brewer and certified cicerone, I have to admit the vast majority of these beers are subpar. These beers do not meet the strict standards put out by the major breweries in Germany. I detect serious flaws and off flavors on most of the beers, I feel like the Kalea group has some sort of deal in which they buy subpar beers in Germany then market them to unwary American buyers.
I have to say, that wasn’t our experience with the 2019 calendar. That being said, we missed out on this year’s calendar, but my only complaint last year was that they were all so similar. Granted, a fair number were of similar styles. What kind of flaws and off flavors were you picking up? I’m wondering if mishandling of the package might have been a cause.