![\"Sam](\"http:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/OHC_review_holiday_porter-300x225.jpg\" "\\"Sam")
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Hi gang!\u00a0 It’s been a terribly long time since you and I have discussed some dark beers and I am about to change that right this minute.\u00a0 You know that I am:<\/p>\n
1. A sucker for a really tall and dark beer.<\/p>\n
2. A sucker for holiday and seasonal beers.<\/p>\n
Thankfully my husband is also the same way so when he loaded the Sam Adam’s Winter Classics case into the grocery cart, he knew he would get a two thumbs up from me.<\/p>\n
The Winter Classics pack is awesome and if you see it, totally buy it!\u00a0 You won’t be sorry.\u00a0 However, I’m only going to chat you up about one of the beers in the pack: Sam Adam’s Holiday Porter.<\/p>\n
Oh Sam, you had me at Holiday Porter.<\/p>\n
The porter looks exactly the way a good porter should look.\u00a0 It’s dark, pours smooth, and has a lovely creamy head that contrasts nicely with the dark coffee color of the beer itself.\u00a0 The head also lasts a good while, which in my unprofessional opinion, indicates a pretty decent thicker style beer.<\/p>\n
So far so good!<\/p>\n
The smell of the beer is not one of your typical porter.\u00a0 It smelled a lot more robust and heavy.\u00a0 I’m not sure if that makes sense, but it’s the best that I can come up with.\u00a0 Maybe heavy isn’t a good choice, perhaps hearty would be better to use here.\u00a0 Because it’s a holiday porter you would think that it would contain some holiday spices but it’s more about the style of brewing, the barley, and the hops used as opposed to seasonal spice.<\/p>\n
I like porters a lot and prefer to drink them during meals or with snacks.\u00a0 Both times that I’ve had this porter have been with food and it pairs nicely with just about whatever you want to throw at it.\u00a0 The most recent occurrence, I paired this beer with some spicy food.\u00a0 I wanted to see how it would hold up against the heat and if that would affect the taste at all.<\/p>\n
This beer held up extremely well and paired, to my surprise, perfectly with the spicy food.\u00a0 The porter didn’t loose any of its flavor to the spicy food and it also helped to cool the burn from the spice.\u00a0 Porters tend to have a bit of a bitter finish to them, the spicy food seemed to tone down or cancel out the bitter finish to this porter.\u00a0 The porter also did not over power the food nor did it sit heavy in the stomach.<\/p>\n
I recommend only giving a slight chill to this porter, it is not something you want to drink super cold.\u00a0 I think it’s best at just cooler than room temperature but this is just my preference.\u00a0 Taste test it yourself and see what you think.<\/p>\n
The one downside so far is that I can only find this beer as part of the Winter Classics pack which means there are only two of them in the pack.\u00a0 I have yet to find a six pack or case of the Holiday Porter.\u00a0 I am very bummed out by this because I would like some more!<\/p>\n
If you can dig on porters, I would recommend checking this beer out.\u00a0 It’s a nice seasonal brew that will leave you toasty and full of holiday cheer.<\/p>\n
Happy Holidays!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hi gang!\u00a0 It’s been a terribly long time since you and I have discussed some dark beers and I am about to change that right this minute.\u00a0 You know that I am: 1. A sucker for a really tall and dark beer. 2. A sucker for holiday and seasonal beers. Thankfully my husband is also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4KYWa-2B1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9983"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9983\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foodembrace.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}