The University of Idaho Argonaut

There’s a rule of thumb when it comes to seasonal beer, says Marv Eveland.
“The colder the weather, the darker the beer,” he says.
Eveland is the head brewer at M.J. Barleyhoppers, Lewiston’s only microbrewery, and has been a homebrewer for decades.

Right now, Barleyhoppers offers a Steelhead Stout, which Eveland has brewed with true espresso extract. He received a recipe for a similar brew, he says, and decided to refine it with the addition of espresso.
“In the Puget Sound area, people love their espresso coffee,” he adds.
Seasonal brews on tap in Moscow include Pyramid Snowcap, Sam Adams Winter Lager, Widmer Brothers Snow Plow,

Redhook’s Winterhook, Kona Pipeline Porter and Alaskan Winter Ale among many, many others. If you go to the Moscow Food Co-op, you’ll find such gems as Rogue Yellow Snow (a winter pilsner), New Belgium 2 Below, St. Peters Winter Ale, Full Moon Winter Ale, Oak Aged Yeti Imperial Stout and Lagunitas Cappuccino Stout — to name a few.
Winter brews come out in force when the weather gets colder, and won’t go away until the daffodils start poking from the ground.

“It gets cold so people want to drink dark beer,” says Julie Gardner, who has worked in the beer and wine industry “off and on” for six years and is currently the wine and beer buyer for the Co-op. “It warms you up.”
Breweries start releasing porters, stouts, oak-aged lagers, chocolate-infused ales, coffee-flavored cream stouts — “things that make you think of warmth, heaviness.”

Though in the next two months a new batch of seasonals will spring up, Gardner says, “Winter beers are still in full force right now.”
Asher Weinbaum, a barista at Bucer’s Coffeehouse and Pub, uses the microbrew selection there to encourage people to try new things. Bucer’s selection isn’t large, but it does change with the seasons.

“I always enjoy a nice stout for winter,” Weinbaum says, adding that Bucer’s generally offers a pumpkin ale or a hard cider in the autumn and a lighter beer in the summer, along with their Alaskan Winter Ale and 2 Below for the winter — though the 2 Below was just switched out for New Belgium’s Fat Tire Amber.

Longtime Garden employee Deanna Robbins has noticed the winter beer trend. Darker, heavier beers come into rotation on the tap, and people start ordering porters and stouts.

“It’s not like the good old days when you got Bud for 25 cents a glass,” she says. Today beer drinkers know what they want and are willing to pay a little more for it.
BeerAdvocate.com, a community for self-described “beer geeks,” has as its motto two words: Respect beer. The community the site has become since its founding in the mid-‘90s aims to support the beer industry outside the mega-breweries, educate and empower readers to learn and share beer experiences, and “put the respect back into beer.” And BeerAdvocate.com isn’t the only site of its kind.

Jason and Todd Alström, the brothers who founded the site, started their advocacy for the brew as homebrewers, similar to many beer enthusiasts — including Eveland.
Eveland notices that homebrewers tend to go for microbrews rather than mass-market domestics, and use a night of drinking as a learning experience to refine their own recipes. Homebrewers are generally more knowledgeable about what goes into good beer, and can speak to its qualities and characteristics much as a connoisseur of wine can.

“There are a lot of similarities (between the beer- and wine-loving communities),” says Gardner. “The people who like specialty beers are really, really into beer,” she says, though she has noticed that beer-lovers are generally more open to trying new types, techniques and styles than wine-lovers.
Even though the Pacific Northwest is a nexus of the microbrewery movement, Eveland still thinks mega-brews like Miller and Coors have a place in the beer-drinking vocabulary. While microbrews are more for the gourmet, he says, for most people, cheap beer opens the door.

“It gets people curious.”