Winter Warmer - Garrison Brewing (Canada - Nova Scotia - Halifax)

Winter Warmer - Garrison Brewing (Canada - Nova Scotia - Halifax) 6.5%

Smells roasty, sticky and like caramel. A dark amber in a glass, a little like burnished wood. Very strong flavour, sweet with a somewhat floral spicy punch and fairly bitter with cloves but also with a hops flavour that is ever so slightly (and pleasantly) green.

Not an ale for the faint of heart but perfect for a curling up with during a dark winter's night. Would be a great drink to serve at any Yule, Christmas or New Years Eve party and would also make a great stocking stuffer for that beer lover on your list.

Truly a great winter style beer, I'm not surprised at all it brought home a Silver Canadian Brewing Award in 2009.

1664 Blanc (France - Strasbourg)

1664 Blanc (France - Strasbourg) 5.0%

This wheat beer is flavoured with plenty of extra additives including just plain old glucose syrup. However at first blush the colour is right, cloudy and a white gold; its aroma is a fun appetizing mix of grapefruit, other citrus fruits and a passion-fruitlike smell that may be from a mix of citrus and coriander wheats are known for. The flavour is actually quite nice, it's fruity like the aroma, there is malted wheat as well as bitterness (it is a real beer after all) and spice in there too.

I can imagine drinking a lot of these would result in a splitting headache the next day (especially since it's 5.0% rather than nearly all of the other flavoured beers out there) but these would be great on a patio in the summertime. It's also a beer that non-beer drinkers could enjoy.

A really cool blue glass bottle and a stylish, though simple, bottlecap. This one is definitely worth a try, hopefully it doesn't get pulled for being released in the winter when it would be better suited for the summer.