It’s that time of year again. The first snowfall of the season has come and gone. The leaves are falling off the trees. Pumpkin Spice Everything is omnipresent. In just one more week, little ghouls and goblins will be walking the streets in search of Halloween candy.
Those readers with little witches and warlocks at home may be resigned to another year of walking the streets with the little ones in tow, watching with a mixture of glee and an ominous sense of soon-to-be regret at the coming sugar high from the annual haul of candy.
Before we get down to the proper question of what type of booze is appropriate for Halloween, let’s take a moment to consider this special day’s humble beginnings.
Ireland is widely considered to be the birthplace of what we now call Halloween. Back in the day of the ancient Celts, there was a festival called Samhain that was the biggest and most important holiday of the year. The Celtic calendar set the beginning of year at November 1, signifying the end of the summer harvest, and beginning of winter.
In addition to this day marking the end of the year, it was also the day that the souls of all the people who had died that year journeyed to the Celtic otherworld. It was on this day that all manner of faerie, spirit, and spook was about, so the villagers would light bonfires to guide the dead to the next world.
Everyone concerned was pretty happy with the status quo, until those pesky Catholic missionaries started showing up to convert the pagans. The Catholic church declared the pagan holidays to be evil, and tried to replace Samhain with All Saints Day in the 7th century.
The powers that be tried to force those stubborn pagans to celebrate All Saints Day on May 13 for a while, then moved it to February 21, but it wasn’t until that clever Pope Gregory struck upon the brilliant idea in the year 853 of setting Christian holy days to coincide with the existing pagan festivals. With that, All Saints Day, also known as All Hallows was moved to November 1, with the previous day being known as Hallow’s Eve, which was eventually shortened to Halloween.
A few hundred years later, the church added All Soul’s Day on November 2, another day to honour the dead. All Soul’s Day is mostly celebrated in Latin-based cultures, with Mexico being perhaps the obvious example, with their three-day festivals starting on October 31 and running until November 2.
Large-scale emigration of the Irish (descendents of the Celts) happened during the Irish potato famine in the 1840s , bringing the Halloween traditions to North America. Today, Halloween is celebrated several countries around the world, but it’s by no means worldwide – France didn’t start celebrating Halloween until 1996.
In honour of the Celtic origins of Halloween, I decided to brew up a batch of Black Irish Lager, as dark as a witch’s heart and twice as bitter! Since homebrew beer takes time to ferment and condition, I started in the last week of September, and it was ready to go into the kegerator a week before Halloween.
There were not a lot of Black Irish Lager recipes at my local home brew shop, so I started with a clone of the not-very-popular Guinness Black Lager malt bill, then doubled up the hops to make it extra bitter.
Tradition at casa de Nick is handing out solo cups of Halloween homebrew to the grown-up escorts of the little ghouls and goblins making the trick-or-treat rounds.
If you are not blessed with a homebrew setup at home, you can find a local dark brew that is black as a witch’s heart in the Meridian Black Lager from Chestermere’s very own Township 24 Brewing.
With plenty of coffee and smoky notes on the nose from the roasted malts, the Meridian Black Lager is made in the Schwarzbier style, which is rarely seen on this side of the Atlantic, much to my chagrin. Medium-bodied with a robust hop bitterness to balance the sweetness of the malt, it finishes with a lingering smokiness that has me popping into the brewery regularly for growler refills.
Have a safe and spooky Samhain, but remember not to fly your broom home if you’ve been indulging! And don’t forget to raid the kids’ candy stash after they go to bed!
