Delightful Beers I Enjoyed in 2023
If you subscribe to my weekly newsletter, you know that most weeks I offer a beer recommendation. (If you don’t subscribe, why not? It’s free! Note the handy form above.) These weekly recommendations certainly make it a lot easier for me to figure out what I drank and what really impressed me in the previous year. It also helps me see what caught my eye, and whether any trends were emerging.
As usual, my drinking followed seasonal patterns. Lots of malty, strong, or dark stuff to start the year, transitioning into IPAs and then lagers, then back into IPAs and back into strong, malty and dark—with the usual wild cards thrown in along the way. In broad categories, this is what it looked like:
Look closely and you’ll see that some of those categories are a good deal narrower than others. For example, the pie slice for West Coast Pilsner (a razor-thin style) is nearly as wide as the slice for “light ales” (as broad as Lake Michigan). So yes, 2023 was the year I drank and was impressed by this excellent emerging beer. I also drank as many IPAs as dark ales, which surprised me and is certainly not in keeping with American drinking habits.
Below is the complete list of recommended beers for 2023. It’s not a comprehensive list, though; I definitely had other great beers that for whatever reason didn’t find their way into the newsletter. For example: Breakside made a fresh hop double IPA with Talus hops that I loved; I had some great beers at Pivotal in Bristol, RI; Chicago was stocked with winners; and Whitney Burnside made a bunch of cool beers at Grand Fir (ULMO honey kolsch was probably my fave). And the list goes on. I enjoyed many excellent beers in my travels and I couldn’t recommend them all. Still, the list is a good indication of what impressed me.
The List
These are listed in the order I recommended them (and if you’d like an illustrated guide to some of these choices, my annual year in pictures post will assist you). If I have any regrets, it’s that there are so few foreign beers on the list, which is clearly a fault I need to remedy in 2024.
My Favorites
No human can do more than offer their favorites. Pretending the beers you sampled were in any way representative is either delusional or grandiose. That doesn’t mean, however, that any one blogger, toiling in the salt mines for twelve full months, won’t encounter some truly exceptional, novel, or unusual beers. I am pleased to say that despite all the negative beer news in 2023, considered from a purely liquid perspective, it was a banner year—the finest since well before Covid. Not everything can be measured in dollars and cents (or red and black), and if we focus our attention solely on what we found in our glasses, the year was a winner.
Here are five beers that demonstrate the point:
Fracture West Coast Pils. For me, ‘23 will go down as the year West Coast pilsners arrived. They were a revelation, and a perfect halfway point between two of my favorite styles. Fracture exemplified the style. It looks like a pilsner in the glass but smells like an IPA, with lush tropical fruit wafting off the glass. Both fish and fowl when it reaches the tongue, you find that the bready malts and crisp drinkability are present, but the hopping—often stiff in European pilsners—accents the qualities with the taste of American hops. It’s not a Frankenstein’s monster of mismatched parts, but rather a truly exceptional if unexpected harmony. Fracture didn’t make my top ten list this year, but look out—it’s a brewery to watch.
Fort George Tide Land. This is another clever beer I discussed more than once last year. A blend of barrel-aged and session stout, it brings all the flavor elements of barrel-aging into a beer that you can pint after pint. It tastes incredibly rich and lush, but doesn’t weigh on the palate. It is by far my preferred way of enjoying the vanilla and butterscotch of an American whiskey barrel—particularly on a cold winter day.
Kings and Daughters Queens and Sons Soft IPA. That’s a mouthful!—in more ways than one. There is no such thing as a “soft IPA,” though this description tells you precisely what you’ll get. Brewer/co-owner Kyle Larsen spent a few years in England, where he developed a facility for understatement before returning to the U.S. Soft IPA is hazy and deeply aromatic, but it’s also gentle and, well, soft. It’s also just 5%, which gives it the same sessionability of Tide Land—nice in a style that usually demands sipping rather that hearty swigs.
Skydance Fancy Dance. I think I’ve given this Oklahoma City brewery enough press since I visited in the summer, so let me just note that this half-hazy, uncategorizable IPA was one of the best hoppy ales I’ve had in years.
Sacred Profane Dark. The small project of veteran brewers (and spouses) Brienne Allan and Michael Fava produces just two beers, a pale and a dark, and the latter sustained my family through Thanksgiving. It harnesses all the techniques of a Czech brewhouse to produce layers of flavor and depth in a beer you’d swear is at least 25% stronger than its actual heft (4%). It’s one of those rare beers that tastes better after two pints and one, and then the third pint tastes even better still. The brewery refuses the (C-word), but pardon me for noting that this is perhaps the absolute essence of Czech brewing.
Those were the faves of my faves. In service of enlightening your fellow drinkers, consider this an open invitation to name your beers of the year in comments.