That way the consumer really gets taken on a tasting adventure-either with a group in a night or by themselves over the course of the season.” The Clown Shoes team takes the ‘advent calendar’ approach and creates a lineup of 12 different unique beers. “For the Harpoon team, the approach is always to ask the question ‘what mix would you want to bring to a holiday party with friends?’ For the UFO team, it’s about finding something that beer drinkers and non-beer drinkers alike could enjoy. But their Clown Shoes pack is a wild mix of twelve different beers, ranging from the Barista Breakfast Brown Ale and Mango Farm IPA to crushers like Advent Party Crasher Imperial Stout and One Man Holiday Belgian Quadrupel Ale.ĭan Kenary, co-founder and CEO of the brewery, explains why each pack is different. Mass Bay Brewing, in Boston, does three different holiday mix packs-the Harpoon Wintry Mix (with the old-school spiced Winter Warmer that they’ve been making since the early 1990s) and the unfiltered wheat UFO Northern Lights have three cans each of four different beers. Some brewers still hang it right out there with full-on variety. People can look at that and say, ‘there’s two beers I don’t like, I’m not buying it.’ And people wanted more than one bottle of each type, so we went to six different beers.” “But you don’t want to be too far out there and 12 beers today can be risky. “It’s to show people what we can do,” Matt said. Matt has backed off from that kind of variety in acknowledgment of a changed market. Beer lovers would eagerly await for the special lineup and buy several packs to get more than a taste of something rare, like the Saranac Stout. Back in the day, Saranac’s 12 Beers of Christmas pack actually contained 12 different beers-some of which you couldn’t get any other time of year.

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