Let’s play word association:
Spring? Asparagus.
Summer? Vacation.
Fall? Color.
Winter? Beer.

Beer? Yes, beer. And not just any beer: Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. This is easily the best of the winter warmers (seasonal winter beers high in alcohol and dextrins) that is produced in America.

What makes this beer so great has nothing to do with its impressive stats:
OG 16° Plato, 6.8% EtOH, 62 IBU, 20 Lovibond. No, what makes this beer great is its all-out assault on the drinker. It grabs all of your senses at once and doesn’t stop until you’re done.

This is a big beer in every way. When you pour it into a glass (and you do, don’t you?) you can smell the Chinook and Cascade dry-hopping filling the room, with just the slightest undertones of 2-row and Caramel malts. The head is rocky and proteinous – you just know that there is going to be a Belgian lace all the way down that glass. The color is that of a garnet – deep red from the Caramel malt and what you suspect is a pinch of roasted barley that didn’t make the ingredient list. Let the aroma loose, swirl that beer around in the glass. Just be careful not to lose any beer.

As you put the glass to your mouth, the dry-hopping seems almost overwhelming – maybe too big. But then you taste it and you realize the brewmasters were drawing you in like easy prey. The hop profile is almost all aroma, with a fantastic balance of sweet maltiness and Chinook hops – some of the bitterest in the world. You won’t even notice the traditional ale aroma from the yeast, because the Sierra Nevada Ale Yeast is the cleanest example of Saccharomyces Cerevisiae in the world. You get past the flavor and you realize the beer just feels…big in your mouth. Substantive. That’s the extra long-strand carbs (maltodextrin and dextrins) left in the beer to make Celebration Ale even more huge. Winter beers are traditionally big beers because at times they were the only foodstuff available, and one could live for a while on a case of Celebration Ale. You’re finishing the glass, and with every swallow you get the sweet note of malt sounding clear as a gunshot in the night.

Maybe, just maybe, you’re a fellow beer geek. Maybe you’ve brewed a few batches yourself and know that those beer stats mean more than, “This is one hell of a beer for Friday’s party!” Maybe you know that a sixteen-degree beer with 60+ units of bitterness and almost 7% alcohol means that you can put a case of this in the basement and in five years it will be smoother than a prom queen’s thighs. Maybe you even know that you can haul a six-pack of this beer from Ashland, OR to Kansas City, keep it in the back of your Jeep for three years. And maybe you’ll open one up 10 years to the day that you bought it, find that the aggressive hoppiness has mellowed out like your asshole college roommate and what you now have is a vintage beer. If you’re smart, you’ll put that last bottle leftover from Friday’s party back in the basement and let it sit for another 10 years. It’s that good.