From the Beer Writer: Marketing really resonated with me in my youth. Living in an age of cartoon series’ built to market action figures, transforming robots, brands of candy, video games and all sorts of other things, I was not in the minority. But there aren’t many kids out there so in-tune with and fascinated by marketing that they spend hours designing their own catalogs of made-up product-lines, print-ads for their own dreamt-up magazines and even stamp-books selling subscriptions to said magazines. Clearly, I belong in the profession I ended up in. I realized what marketers were doing and marveled at their ability to captivate people to the point where they could alter their ways of thinking in meaningful ways. One thing I always thought was pretty interesting was how Coca-Cola used old Saint Nick and, later, computer-generated polar bears, to make its flagship soda a perceived mainstay of Christmas. To this day, I know tons of folks who pick up Coke in its limited-edition holiday-packaging every year and crack an old-fashioned bottle on Christmas Day. Now that there is some powerful marketing and an improbably successful outcome for Coca-Cola. Where am I going with this, you ask? Well, if you are one of the many red-blooded, marketing persuaded Americans who has memories of enjoying a cold Coke come the holidays, Santee’s Finest Made Ales has the beer for you. Finest Made Fruit Cake Brown Ale is an ambitious beer built to come across on the palate like fruitcake—not the gross kind littered with machined jelly candies, but one baked on the home-front with real fruit…and lots of it. Brewmaster Rey Knight rehydrated dried hoshigaki persimmons, dates, raisins, cranberries, pineapples and mangoes using dark rum, and added them to a brown ale along with candied ginger, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, nutmeg, toasted hazelnuts and house-made Maraschino cherries. To me, the resulting 6.5% alcohol-by-volume beer tastes, not like a fruitcake (though, once it warms a bit, the presence of the baking spices and dried fruit becomes much more prevalant), but oddly enough, a lot like Coca-Cola. Thanks to some Madison Avenue marketing maven, that tastes awfully Christmas-y to me; about as much as fruitcake. It’s a nostalgically welcomed taste-experience that goes well with the holiday season.
From the Brewer: “We brewed a brown ale for the holiday party we held in our tasting room, and wanted to have some fun with some things we don’t do that often. In this case, that’s fruiting and blending of beer. Our ‘iron-brewer challenge’ was to not use any of the extracts that we see so readily available, and do something with all-natural ‘real ingredients’. We settled on a fruitcake challenge, because fruitcake is a love-it-or-hate-it item at a lot of holiday gatherings. We wanted liquid fruitcake, and we used all the ingredients we would put into a fruitcake, minus the flour and eggs. We chose the brown ale with its toffee malty backbone for the base, then layered in all the macerated fruits to create a full-bodied beer with a touch of sweetness and candied-fruit notes that could capture the essence of fruitcake in a glass.”—Rey Knight, Owner & Brewmaster, Finest Made Ales