Breweries Are Turning Up the Heat on Winter Beer

Winter solstice celebrations can be overshadowed by other bright-and-merry December events. But in 2022, Laura Worley and Wayne Burns decided to shine a new light on the year’s longest, darkest day. The married couple took their Denver brewery’s name, Burns Family Artisan Ales, at face value and built a bonfire outside. They invited customers to gather around crackling flames with strong imperial stouts, barley wines, and plum-flavored winter warmers set to be transformed by the centuries-old German tradition of bierstacheln, or beer spiking. They heated fireplace pokers ’til glowing red, then plunged them into the malty, belly-warming beers.

The stark temperature contrasts created pint-size nuclear explosions, each boiling beer cracking and hissing, residual sugars instantly caramelizing, the billowing foam forming a warm, marshmallowy head. “It’s such a wonderful experience,” says Worley, the managing director. The brewery has since made beer poking a recurring event, especially during fall and winter, and frosty weather can even improve attendance. One winter solstice, when temperatures dipped well below zero degrees Fahrenheit, with super-fine snowflakes swirling like airborne glitter, more than 30 people assembled around the blaze, sipping beer transmuted by steel and fire. “Everyone felt viscerally connected,” Worley says. “It’s another way of getting people closer to their beer.”

The holiday season blends cold and warmth as friends and family amass for festivities, a slate of seasonal cheer that’s regularly accompanied by beer. The warming properties of brawny beers like barrel-aged stouts are undisputed, but sometimes revelers prefer being warmed from within. To attract more customers to taprooms, festivals, and holiday markets, breweries are turning to longstanding European traditions that turn up the thermostat on beer drinking.

Spiking a strong lager with red-hot steel is an essential element at August Schell Brewing’s snowy Bockfest in New Ulm, Minnesota, while New Glarus Brewing produces a barrel-aged stout forthe Christmas market in its namesake Wisconsin village, lighting a fire and offering poked mugs. “People will line up,” says master brewer Daniel Carey. “It’s a sipping beer for those cold days when it’s down around zero Fahrenheit.”

Instead of mulling wine, breweries like the Referend Bier Blendery in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and Dovetail Brewery in Chicago will mull sour ales for steaming-hot taproom service. And during winter’s coldest days, breweries are bundling up to build fires and brew beers with super-heated rocks to create steinbier (German for “stone beer”). “Having that huge fire really does give you this impulse to gather around and just stand in awe,” says Marika Josephson, a co-owner and brewer at Scratch Brewing in Ava, Illinois.

In America, dipping fire-heated metal into burly drinks dates to Colonial times. During the 1700s, the nascent nation started swapping temperate hard cider and beer for intoxicating rum, a sensation sailed in from the West Indies and drunk in doctor’s offices and seaport dives alike. Colonists glugged drams as a cure-all for ill health, a salve for backbreaking physical labor, and greasing the gears of camaraderie at taverns.

The most popular preparation by far was the flip, the demand of which “bordered on a mania and would remain in demand for more than a century,” writes Imbibe contributing editor Wayne Curtis in his book And a Bottle of Rum. Recipes varied, but tavern keepers typically blended strong beer with rum and a sweetener like molasses, before reaching for a loggerhead, a length of iron with an onion-shape head heated in glowing coals. Loggerheads were invented to make tar or pitch more pliable; plunging them into flips lent a bitterness and burnt character beloved by 18th-century drinkers.

The process is similar to bierstacheln … which originated as a method to warm cold beer, traditionally stored in cellars and caves, to a more palatable drinking temperature.

The process is similar to bierstacheln (“beershta-hll”), which originated as a method to warm cold beer, traditionally stored in cellars and caves, to a more palatable drinking temperature. German immigrants toted the tradition to New Ulm, which was founded in 1854 and named after a town in Germany. “When breweries would deliver beer, they would always have a warming stick in the bars,” says Kyle Marti. He’s the sixth generation to run New Ulm’s lager-focused August Schell Brewing, named for his ancestor who founded the operation in 1860.

Fast-forward 127 years, and Kyle’s father, Ted, revived beer poking at the brewery’s inaugural Bockfest. Held at winter’s end, the first Bockfest welcomed 75 attendees to grill bratwurst and drink bock, a strong lager, heated with handmade pokers fashioned from old tap handles and stainless steel. The brewery adrenalized the tradition by dunking red-hot pokers into bocks and, via the Maillard reaction, “caramelizing beer versus just warming it up,” Marti says.

The festivities and poking spectacle steadily caught on, and now Bockfest—held in early March to celebrate the seasonal shift—welcomes between 5,500 and 6,500 attendees to brave and embrace the elements, no matter how low the mercury goes. “It’s almost become a Midwestern Mardi Gras,” Marti says. Now the brewery runs four or five fire pits for the festivities, and some fire tenders bring their own homemade pokers. “It’s almost like a sheath of swords they bring out and set up,” he says.

Acquiring proper pokers can be complicated for the non-blacksmiths among us. When Worley of Burns Family looked to upgrade from fireplace pokers, she reached out to a local Denver ironworker. “They said, ‘You want to do what?’” she says, laughing. “I said, ‘All I need is a long stick with a ball on the end.’” In the end, a friend of the brewery gifted branding irons with a “B” at the tips. “People joke about whether or not we’re going to brand them,” Worley says.

No market void stays vacant, even for a niche tool. Casual Panache founder Kim Nimsgern hit it big with her first product, the Click n Curl blowout brush, but struggled to find a follow-up. “I was just a girl with one good idea,” says Nimsgern of Menomonie, Wisconsin. Sharing beers with pals can spark inspiration, and one day she joined her friend Forrest Schultz, a former chemistry professor, for beers caramelized with his homemade poker.

“You know, there’s nothing like this on the market,” Nimsgern recalls Schultz telling her. This sent Nimsgern down a research rabbit hole, where she discovered that “most people were making DIY versions using rebar or metals that weren’t designed to go from extreme heat to extreme cold.” Her company introduced the 1571°F Beer Caramelizer in 2018, but the tool—its name nods to the average temperature of a campfire’s core—boomed during the pandemic when people began gathering outdoors. “They were looking for something different and unique to occupy their time,” Nimsgern says, adding that breweries regularly buy Beer Caramelizers.

Throughout the late fall and winter, customers can order a “brûléed” version of their sugar-rich beers like a barley wine or an imperial stout.

Outdoor space isn’t a prerequisite for beer poking. Inside its Brooklyn taproom, Grimm Artisanal Ales is equipped with miniature pokers heated on a stand with a blowtorch. “We were trying to find something that would make it more inviting to come to a taproom where we sell cold beverages,” says Lauren Grimm, who founded the brewery with her husband, Joe. Throughout the late fall and winter, customers can order a “brûléed” version of their sugar-rich beers like a barley wine or an imperial stout. (Poking lighter beers like pilsners or IPAs can negatively amplify hop bitterness.)

The process creates a juxtaposition in texture and temperature, warm foam relenting to startlingly cool beer. “It’s almost like hot apple pie and cold ice cream,” Lauren says. The performance of fire creates a communal spectacle that engages every sense. “There’s a certain hush that comes over the room, like everybody’s experiencing the same visual and auditory experience. It’s magical.”

Online or in line at stores, buying holiday presents can be stressful. One antidote is the outdoor European-style Christmas market, a festive shopping experience where customers warm up with glühwein (“glow wine”), a traditional German mulled wine seasoned with lemons, cloves, and cinnamon. At Olde Mecklenburg Brewery’s annual Christmas market in Charlotte, North Carolina, now in its 13th year, the brewery simmers glühwein in massive crawfish cookers, the spices perfuming the market. “We sell an inordinate amount of glühwein,” says chief operating officer Jim Birch, adding that the brewery sold 5,000 commemorative mugs last year.

Glühwein has inspired brewers to spice and simmer beer, too. In the early 1990s, Belgium’s Brouwerij Liefmans created Glühkriek, a spiced (cinnamon, cloves, star anise) and sweetened variation of its cherry-flavored kriek intended to be served at 158 degrees Fahrenheit. “The line is quickly drawn when you compare glühwein and glühkriek,” says master brewer Marc Coesens. First brought to market in 1994, the Glühkriek is now a mainstay at European Christmas markets and after brisk constitutionals. “Glühkriek tastes best after a long walk in the country on a cold winter day,” Coesens says. (The general German term for mulled beer is glühbier.)

Many Nordic nations have versions of mulled wine like glögg, a Scandinavian staple that endures in the Chicago neighborhood of Andersonville, once and always a Swedish stronghold. “I live two doors from the Swedish American Museum, and every year they have a glögg fest where people pull out recipes that have been in their family for generations,” says Jenny Pfafflin, a brewer and the creative and marketing manager at Dovetail Brewery. Six years ago, Dovetail sold DIY glühkriek kits that paired bottled kriek with accompanying spices, including cinnamon and cardamom pods, inspired by a glögg recipe. “Cinnamon’s woodiness plays well with the barrel-aged aspects of our spontaneously fermented beers,” Pfafflin says.

Several years later, Dovetail began bottling pre-spiced glühkriek, and it plans to package it in miniature cans this year. “It’s a perfect stocking stuffer,” Pfafflin says. After Thanksgiving, Dovetail also serves glühkriek in its taproom, delivering a scented portal to simpler times. “We’re tapping into those sensory memories of your parents or grandparents heating up those mulling spices on the stove,” she says.

Instead of dumping the beer, founder James Priest heated the beer to drive off volatile scents, adding honey and spices and creating a new taproom tradition.

Glühkriek can turn disappointment into delight. In Kutztown, the Referend Bier Blendery specializes in spontaneously fermented beers, and a couple early batches didn’t meet the brewery’s bottling standards, leading to unwanted aromatics. Instead of dumping the beer, founder James Priest heated the beer to drive off volatile scents, adding honey and spices and creating a new taproom tradition. The Referend now serves glühkriek at its annual event featuring deconstructed holiday jazz, the reconstituted sour ale “fitting the whole vibe,” Priest says.

The vibes couldn’t have been worse in 2020 when Alex Kurnellas, a co-owner of Imperial Bottle Shop & Taproom in Portland, Oregon, faced a winter without indoor customers due to pandemic restrictions. “It was a big ask to get people to hang out outside and drink cold beer,” Kurnellas says. Kurnellas marshaled his resources, mulled cider, and blasted music, attracting customers for impromptu dance parties. This kicked off GlüBar, a hot-beverage bar serving bourbon barrel–stout hot chocolate, s’mores kits, and creative glühbier drawn from Imperial’s extensive cellars of barrel-aged imperial stouts and sour ales. Drinkers toasted with mulled sour ales inspired by lemon chiffon pie, or imperial stouts steeped with peanuts and raspberry jam. Who needs propane heat lamps? “It didn’t make sense to heat up the outside world instead of offering people hot beverages and heating them from the inside out,” he says.

A typical brew day is a steamy affair of simmering grains and boiling hops. But some brewers are looking to turn up the temperature and turn back the clock by making beer with flaming-hot rocks.

Steinbier is a centuries-old process that once dominated the region around the southern Austrian province of Carinthia, where brewers used wooden vats instead of expensive metal kettles. Approaches vary, but the gist is that brewers heated the mash, or the blend of grains and water, with fire-heated rocks like sandstone, which resists splitting when subjected to dramatic temperature shifts. Steinbier’s popularity dwindled during industrialization’s ceaseless march, and Austria’s last two commercial steinbier breweries disappeared in 1917.

Peter Krammer, the fifth generation of Austria’s family-owned Brauerei Hofstetten, honored the area’s geological lineage with Granitbier, an amber lager made with the local water that’s naturally granite-filtered. Customers grew confused by the beer’s name. Why didn’t it taste like stones? Hofstetten solved that query by sourcing granite rocks from a quarry, brewing a stronger bock, transferring it to stone troughs, heating granite over an open fire, and adding it to the wort. “Caramelizing the sugar before fermentation produces sugar that the yeast can’t ferment,” says Krammer, lending the beer, Granitbock, a pronounced sweetness and distinct roasted character.

At southern Illinois brewery Scratch, brewer Marika Josephson is well acquainted with fire’s effects on beer. The brewery makes beers year-round in a wood-fired copper kettle, and the process imparts a richer color and pleasant caramelization. “I especially taste it in our pilsners,” Josephson says. During January and February, when temperatures nose-dive and business lulls, the Scratch team bundles up to brew steinbier.

Roughly speaking, the brewery schedules one steinbier brew day each week for three straight weeks, brewing around three or four beers at a time for a total of 10 beers flavored with foraged local ingredients like tree bark, black walnuts, or morel mushrooms. Granite rocks, acquired from a Missouri quarry and heated for around three hours, are another native ingredient with nuances. “We’ve learned that if the rocks are a little ashy, you might get a wisp of smoke,” Josephson says. “If you remove the ashes, then you’re getting hot, hot heat and then the instant contact and a little extra caramelization.”

Brewing suppliers don’t stock steinbier-appropriate rocks, so grabbing them can require legwork and learning a new language. The first time Todd Steven Boera, co-founder and creative director of Fonta Flora Brewing in Nebo, North Carolina, headed to a local quarry, workers were baffled by his request. “We were like, ‘We’re looking for football-size rocks.’ And they’re like, ‘Y’all are crazy,’ ” Boera says. (The correct term for loose stone is riprap, he discovered.)

Each year, Fonta Flora does a half-dozen steinbier brew days at its farm brewery. Tending roaring fires and submerging flaming-hot stones in beer is a welcome departure from the daily grind of brewing IPAs according to a production schedule. There’s nothing monotonous about steinbier. “It doesn’t lose its luster,” Boera says.

Craft brewing is miles beyond its shiny-new-toy phase. The line craze for the latest hazy IPA has passed. Festival attendance is sagging. New brewery openings, once anticipated as eagerly as a kid’s wrapped Christmas gifts, might be met with indifference. Another IPA brewery? We already have six in this city. Thanks, I guess. To cynics, modifying beers with fire can seem like another look-at-me spectacle, like blinding holiday lights on a weathered house that’s showing its age. But tinkering with temperature, carbonation, and texture can help drinkers revamp perceptions and find renewed appreciation for beer.

“We have such a hard time convincing people that [bubble-free] beer is a good thing, and people pretty much reject warm to hot beer,” the Referend’s Priest says of glühkriek. “And somehow you combine two things we perceive as overwhelmingly negative in beer, and there’s a place for it.”

GlüBar is now an annual event for Imperial, and August Schell’s Marti regularly runs into people who regale him with tales of attending a bygone Bockfest, sometimes decades earlier. The story “always involves beer poking,” Marti says, followed by fond recollections of drinking the brewery’s beer elsewhere. Lasting bonds are forged in, and around, flames. “That warmth and coziness breeds a connection, which is what beer is all about.”