Three Christmas beers to drink for the holidays

If the stress of the holidays turns your mood from festive to furtive, there are many craft beers that can help restore your holiday spirit — maybe too many. Most of the more than 5,000 craft breweries in the country are making a specialty beer for the holidays. But don’t get overwhelmed by all the choices. Instead, turn to the classic holiday beers — the brews that have graced tables at holiday feasts for decades.

From traditional Belgian Christmas ales to brews from the pioneers of American craft beer, there’s some bottled holiday cheer for every taste. Here are three of the most tried-and-true brews to help banish those Scrooge-y blues:

St. Bernardus Christmas Ale

Belgian brewers love to concoct special ales for the Christmas season, and they’re often boozy — sometimes approaching wine strength — and graced with fragrant spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg and clove. The festive bottle of St. Bernardus, which features the brewery’s trademark smiling monk sporting a jaunty Santa hat, is comparatively restrained. Brewed since 1946, the strong dark ale is refined and complex. Yeast-derived spice and fruit aromas lead to a velvety body rich with the flavors of toasted malts and Belgian brewing sugars. At 10% alcohol, Christmas Ale is robust, but the alcohol is in balance with bready, spicy flavors.

Widely available at beer retailers, the cork-finished 750ml bottles of St. Bernardus Christmas Ale are about $13, and they’re a great alternative to yet another bottle of Beaujolais when visiting friends and family this holiday.

Anchor Christmas Ale

Predating even the “microbrew” nomenclature, Anchor’s annual Christmas Ale has been made since 1975, and each year the San Francisco brewery puts a slightly different beer in its eye-catching bottles. Also known as Our Special Ale, the brew strikes a balance between malt complexity and hop character with none of the cloying sweetness or assertive spice flavors that are all too common in Christmas beers. This year’s batch is deep brown with a fluffy tan cap of foam and a distinctive hop presence that recalls pine trees and pithy citrus. It’s a quaffable brew, with just 6.5% alcohol, that’s a great match for rich holiday foods, and it’s the rare Christmas beer that doesn’t overstay its welcome after one glass. It’s widely available in six packs, and 1.5 liter magnums complete with gold foil wrapping for around $25.

Sierra Nevada Celebration

Christmas ales don’t always have to be about dark malts and spices, and the 35 year-old tradition from Sierra Nevada is the hop-lovers’ answer to holiday brews. Based around freshly harvested hops from the Pacific Northwest, Celebration is both complex and mercurial. In the first weeks after bottling, the Cascade and Centennial hops provide an intense floral and orange zest aroma, but these higher hop notes soon fade. But instead of going flabby and unbalanced as a typical hop-driven IPA would, Celebration develops a rounder flavor that leans on the off-dry malt body. It’s simply one of the best beers made in America today, and you can find it everywhere from the grocery store, to Target, to beer specialty retailers — often for less than $10 a six pack.

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