Hot Stuff: How Breweries Are Turning Up the Temperature on Winter Beer | Imbibe

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.

For Imbibe, I look at how breweries are forging businesses through fire.