The Great Outdoors: Beers to Enjoy while Camping

Chad on August 19, 2023

The traditional camping season might be winding down, but many of us will no doubt still be hitting the trails, pitching tents, and sitting around campfires well into the fall months. When I was a kid, camping meant buying and eating way too much candy while reading comic books. Now it means enjoying a great beer around the campfire (I can neither confirm nor deny whether it still involves candy and comic books). Any beer can be a camping beer, of course, but here are some suggestions for cooling down after a hike or warming up around the firepit.

Cooling Down

Hiking or camping in the dog days of summer can be a sweaty endeavor, and a lighter beer can be the perfect refreshing treat when you’re taking a break from activity.

Nocterra Brewing’s Trail Break Lager is a classic Munich helles with a twist—it’s hopped with Saphir for a pop of citrus on the finish. This 5.2% ABV lager from Ohio was inspired by one of the best-known hiking trails in the country.

“The can label is a very specific color of blue modeled after the blue blazes on the Appalachian Trail,” explains Nocterra marketing manager James Knott. “Most of the blazes are white if you’re doing a through-hike, but the blue blazes represent side hikes, which are often good places to take breaks. When I think of Trail Break, I think of the end of that long hike. You set up camp, sit around the campfire with your fellow hikers, and talk about your day and life in general.”

Our wild spaces are nothing without pollinators, and the best-selling Honey Kolsch from Rogue Ales in Oregon celebrates our buzzing companions with a kiss of wildflower honey in a crisp and gentle 5% ABV package. Sipping this beer outdoors reminds us that we share this earth with every living thing. Those flowers beside the trail are there because of pollinators!

two tall boy canned beers with perfectly poured lager beer

Jade Mountain’s Shaolin Light Lager is brewed within sight of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, and its name is a reference to a unique climb taken by the founders. The brewery started out as a tea shop in southern China before moving to Colorado and launching the brewing operation, and still incorporates many Asian ingredients such as tea, Buddha’s hand, and squid ink. It’s this super light 4% ABV beer that has the brewers’ hearts, though.

“We did a lot of unintentional hiking in China,” says co-founder Sean Guerrero. “The Shaolin Temple is right on top of the mountain. The only way to get up there was on foot. Shaolin is our brewer’s beer.”

Warming Up

There’s something about a campfire that pushes a comfort button deep in the human brain. When combined with a perfectly toasted s’more, a fire is as cozy as it gets. But what if you want your s’more in liquid form?

High Water’s Campfire Stout from California is a 6.5% ABV stout brewed with graham crackers, molasses, vanilla, and toasted marshmallow. The beer won gold medals at the Great American Beer Festival in 2014 and 2016 and isn’t so strong that you can’t enjoy it on the warm summer nights outdoors.

Idahwild stout beer with flaming marshmallow on top

Idawild Brewing in Idaho takes a similar approach for its 5.3% ABV Fireside S’mores Stout. Brewed with lactose, Tahitian vanilla, chocolate wheat, chocolate malt, and cinnamon graham crackers, Fireside was dreamed up on a camping trip to nearby Ponderosa State Park.

“We were camping and having s’mores and I was drinking a stout,” says co-founder and brewer Matt Nader. “That’s when I decided to brew a beer like this.”

If you want to combine the smokiness of the campfire with a light, crisp beer, seek out Live Oak’s Grodziskie. This Polish wheat ale brewed in Texas weighs in at only 3% ABV, but the 100% oak-smoked wheat malt packs the evocative character of the campfire right in the can.

Hitting the Trail

If you’re hiking or doing strenuous outdoor activity, you might want a break from alcohol altogether, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy the flavor of good beer. Self Care’s non-alcoholic beers are brewed by Three Magnets Brewing in Washington. Self Care describes Scherler as the “Easiest Non-Alcoholic Premium Shitty™ Light American Lager,” but goes on to clarify they mean that in, you know, a good way. Pack some Scherler in your cooler or backpack and skip the buzz while still enjoying a familiar style.

Perfectly poured allagash beer with 4 pack tall boy cans

Many breweries brew beers as direct tributes to the lands that surround them. Allagash’s From Maine with Love series is a great example. The beers in this series are adapted from pilot batches based on employee recommendations, so while every batch is a completely different style, all of them serve as love letters to the great state of Maine. No. 27, which came out this spring, is a lager loaded with botanicals.

“The idea is a remake of a beer called Spaghett,” says Brett Willis, head of communications, describing a cocktail made by adding Aperol and a squeeze of lemon to a popular macro lager. “No. 27 is a light lager with a bunch of botanicals added to it: rhubarb, red cinchona, angelica root, and gentian root. It’s a quintessential Allagash beer brewed with local malt and local flaked corn.”

Willis says a lot of folks at Allagash enjoy the outdoors, and the brewery gives back to help preserve wild spaces.

“One of the most tangible examples is the Appalachian Mountain Club,” says Willis. “They have a Dark Sky Park that is so non-developed, there is almost no light pollution at all. We help them with maintaining that designation.”

Short’s Spring IPL is brewed in partnership with Pure Michigan, and the brewery describes it as “a lager we hopped to heck.” The 5.1% ABV beer is brewed with all Michigan ingredients and serves each year as a reminder that summer is around the corner.

Recognizing Our History

No matter where you’re camping or hiking in North America, it’s important to pay homage to the land’s original habitants. While land acknowledgements seek to recognize the crimes of our colonial past, Shyla Sheppard of Bow & Arrow Brewing in New Mexico wanted to go further in bringing attention to whose land we live on.

The Native Land beer project is a collaboration that can be brewed at any participating brewery. This Mexican lager is brewed with heirloom blue corn at Bow & Arrow, but Sheppard has encouraged breweries to use corn native to their own regions when brewing their version. Wherever it’s brewed and enjoyed, the beer serves as a reminder of the original residents of the land, and our own responsibility to both the land and our fellow humans.

Head into the outdoors and enjoy one of these great camping beers the next time you’re in the wilderness!

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New Realm’s big summer move? Booze.

Chad on August 17, 2023

New Realm’s distilling arm ramped up big this summer, launching spirits in both on and off-premise retail.

So let’s get real about New Realm Savannah. The location brought New Realm Vodka and a line of RTDs into the world that to this day are still doing quite well. And yet, despite high hopes for the city covered in Spanish moss, there were a plethora of factors that constantly worked against it. New Realm had to take an “L” on Savannah but the spirits program wasn’t done.

New Realm Brewing appeared out of seemingly nowhere in 2018 with the largest opening brewing capacity in Georgia’s history (around 20,000 barrels). They blew through that capacity in just months, and not long after, the brewery found itself with a second location in Virginia Beach. After making such an aggressive mark on the beer world, naturally, the spirits world was next. That’s where Savannah, Georgia, came to be.

Back to Atlanta.

Inside New Realm’s Atlanta brewery was a small barrel room used mostly for barrel-aged beers. It morphed in a little event space for private parties or the occasional beer dinner. That’s where New Realm resurrected the spirits program, putting in a whole new distillery, after selling the Savannah still and buying a new hybrid still. Kevin Ford, Master Distiller, with a previous history at Buffalo Distillery heads up the program, and just like New Realm’s beer program, lightning is striking again.

Here in summer 2023, a craft distilling program that once seemed ancillary to New Realm’s vision is front and center. Anything subtle about New Realm Distilling can be considered a thing of the past, with Ford running the show. He’s a pretty humble and down to earth distiller who has basically cannonballed into the deep end of the booze pool in Atlanta and beyond.

“We really didn’t want to do this the way it’s been done before.”

If you want to source bourbon for your own program, most of it will come come from one of three different distilleries. To Ford, that would be basically checking boxes. “Same juice, different bottle. That didn’t sit well with me,” he says. So while New Realm’s 100% in-house bourbon ages, New Realm did something a little different – sourcing bourbon from small, younger Texas and Kentucky distillers and blending it at home. The result is a bourbon blend with hints of toasted walnut and brown sugar that hit the market initially in April 2022. New Realm’s 100% in-house bourbon is aging as you read this. 

Looking into the barrel

Vodka. Gin. Rum. Agave.

Vodka is fairly easy and quick to make, which is why almost every burgeoning spirits program starts with it. Incidentally, New Realm Vodka sells extremely well at the Atlanta location. Rum, Gin and Tequila are a little more complicated if you want to do it right. Craft beer brewing is a constant exploration, so why can’t distilling be as well? 

The goal is to be a little different. That meant not buying liquid and relabeling it. “That’s back to checking boxes,” Ford says. Kevin started with a standout legacy Jamaican rum producer, then distilling Savannah-made molasses and blending.

Producing tequila proved to be more complicated however, since the spirit is protected. If you want to call it tequila, it has to be made in Jalisco, Mexico. In the U.S. it’s fairly common for a small distiller to buy bulk agave syrup and ferment it. “It’s just not good that way, so we pushed in a different direction,” Ford says. “We were going to do this the hard way by growing our own, but in the end we found a Mexican based producer that grows Blue Webber agave and roasts and extracts it for us,” he adds. New Realm distills it in Atlanta, creating a spirit as close to authentic tequila as possible.

Introducing the “Cask Series” 

Spirits are a lot like beer. You need that limited release that piques interest. In this instance, it’s less of a customer hook and more of a playground for Ford that will constantly change. This newly minted series uses specially sourced barrels like Oloroso Sherry and Madeira to create uniquely finished bourbons. 

Only half of the volume from these barrels has been bottled (in honor of the brewery’s 5th birthday).  They have then been refilled with the flagship bourbon and racked away again for a while. This solera method guarantees this specialty series will constantly change.

Selling Faster Than We Can Sustain

“Vodka is our number one seller in Atlanta, and bourbon at Virginia Beach, and it’s all selling faster than we can currently sustain,” Ford says. It would seem after the last two years of drinking to survive, folks want to spend their money on good liquid. New Realm is distilling at both Atlanta and Virginia Beach but is currently on the hunt for a full-scale production facility in the southeast. “It’s crazy to work at a place where the sky’s the limit,” Ford adds. “New Realm is happier making things the hard way as long as it’s good.”

This summer might be the “summer of spirits” for New Realm, having now expanded their vodka and bourbon and other spirits offerings beyond the brewery/distillery walls. It was something the New Realm had always planned to do when the time was right.

Recently, we asked New Realm co-founder Carey Falcone about the spirits distribution expansion. “It all happened a little in reverse,” he says. The demand was there before we went big with it, where I thought we would launch and build demand.”

Time works in your favor sometimes. It certainly does for whiskey.

[See image gallery at beerstreetjournal.com]

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