I’d already written about celebratory homebrew (that wasn’t so celebratory), so for the holidays I decided to go with something more reliable, albeit less historic: giant beer bottles. My picks were arranged, in the paper at least, from smallest to most monumental. Fin du Monde, a house favorite and plenty punchy, seems featherweight compared to Stone’s Double Bastard, which comes in a three-liter totem, complete with a padlocked swing-top cap. You know, so you can’t sneak in a midnight tipple. I thought about sabering off the cap, like they did in the Times, but I didn’t want to waste a drop. This is beer, after all, not Champagne.

Wintertime in the Midwest demands a warm breakfast. Waiting for your oatmeal to boil is a life-and-death situation, almost. You feel like Shackleton watching the sun come and crack the ice. Sometimes more so, if you have errands to run and left the car out of the garage.

Seventeenth-century drinker and diarist Samuel Pepys preferred a pint and some gossip to morning oatmeal—he took his breakfast at the bar. But come winter, even he took it warm. With butter.

So meeting in my way W. Swan, I took him to a house thereabouts, and gave him a morning draft of buttered ale; he telling me still much of his Fanatique stories, as if he were a great zealot, when I know him to be a very rogue.

Buttered beer isn’t my cup of tea, so to speak, so I mulled it. The nutmeg is perfect—beer gets bitterer, boiled, and you need some spice to mellow it. Just go easy. You have a long, cold day ahead.

Oktoberfest is over. First on the list of things most people don’t know about Oktoberfest (what the lids on steins are for, what a Märzen is) is the fact that it ends on the first weekend in October. Time to start training for next year.

Märzens, the official beer of the festival, brewed in March and aged cool until the fall, are still for sale, though. Here are the best of the Fest.

My high school drama teacher loved Goethe (whose didn’t?) and so I avoided both of them. I didn’t know Young Werter was a beer snob. He got sick in law school and recovered, the story goes, with Schwarzbier. Tipsy and atrophied, he became a writer instead. Some bottles of Köstritzer have a picture of him on the label, pensive, opulently hatted, sudsy glass Photoshopped into his hand.

Follow his example: Drink black lager. I picked the best in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal.

My editor at Bon Appetit asked me to write about cooking with beer. I decided to make a day of it, starting with beer jelly on beer bread. The bread, an Irish soda bread with stout instead of buttermilk, was OK, kind of greenish, but toasted beautifully. The jelly was bitter and too lemony, but people seemed really interested in how I made it. You don’t hear about beer jelly every day, I guess. I read somewhere that it’s popular in the Czech Republic, though. Anyway, the secret is: I made beer Jell-O.

Boil some beer with, say, ginger and a little sugar, mix in gelatin, and pour into jars. Since I used gelatin instead of pectin, the jelly liquifies when it gets warm—so eat fast, especially if you spread it on toast. I’ve tried beer (and bourbon) in more traditional jellies with little luck so far. The water content screws things up.

Beer in breakfast wasn’t a total success, but I have higher hopes for my next experiment, for the WSJ: beer for breakfast.

I’ve been known to fire up the grill on Christmas, so for me, outdoor cooking knows no seasonal bounds. Still, summertime grilling, and drinking, are institutions, at least in newspaper food sections. And so I wrote about them.

First, for Bon Appetit, I subjected a friend’s dinner party to the spectacle of beer-can chicken. When I say use indirect heat, I mean it. Beer will bubble out of the bird, and all over the coals. One trip to the fridge, and your chicken’s on fire. It’s a spectacle, like I said.

But what to drink while aimlessly poking the grill? I stocked the Wall Street Journal‘s ice bucket with lighter fare (a Dortmunder, a pale, a saison), the all-rounder Brooklyn Brown, and, for those whose burger is naked without bacon, a smoky rauchbier. I even got to drink some Hennepin on camera while Skyping into the Journal‘s afternoon news show. When you’re serving beer-can chicken, lingcod, steak, sea urchin, and roasted prince mushrooms, it’s good to stock a versatile bar.

My Wall Street Journal story on session beers got a bit of flack from people arguing that “true” session beers must be less than 5.0% ABV. As evidence, they cited their own blog manifestos. The 5.0 argument is, at best, supported by a dubious CDC definition of a “standard beer” as 5.0% ABV, and at worst, totally arbitrary. There’s nothing standard about craft beer. The average ABV rating of all 30,000 beers on Beer Advocate is almost 6.0%. No brewer I’ve ever talked to designs so-called session beers with any such guidelines. If the brewers don’t care, why should you? Arguing that a delicious 5.1% beer can’t be called a session beer, but a 5.0% one can, is a waste of precious drinking time. And session beers, if they’re about anything, are about drinking.

I wrote about mixing beer in this month’s GQ, but it’s been going on for ages. In eighteenth-century England, savvy drinkers ordered half-and-halfs or three threads: old, stale beer livened up with some fresh from the brewery. (Porter started out as one of these mixes.) Flemish brewers carbonate their gueuze the same way, adding a bit of new beer to a flat batch of sour lambic to wake up the old yeast. Beer aged in barrels is almost always blended because each cask ferments a little differently. When a smoked beer by Boulder’s Avery Brewing Company lost its edge after sitting too long in a rum barrel, they made an extra-smoky batch to mix it with. Germans—lest you think them Reinheitsgebot-thumping purists—mix their beers with Coke and banana nectar.

Beer cocktails are getting common, but beer blends are still underground. “We hide our blends on the other side of the menu,” Avery’s taproom manager Phil Vaughn says. “Not recommended, but not discouraged,” according to North Coast’s vice president Doug Moody. “Don’t tell the brewers,” warns an anonymous source at Cleveland’s Great Lakes. Fine, we get it: Craft beer is perfect straight up, but a little alchemy can go a long way.

Some blends to try:

Belgian Strong Golden + Pilsner
Wheat + Scotch Ale (or just Scotch)
IPA + English Pale Ale
Russian Stout + Pale Ale
Saison + Mescal
IPA + Rye Whiskey
Wheat + Lemonade
Brown Ale + Port
IPA + Espresso (We learned about this at Founders in Grand Rapids, where our Midwestern favorite MadCap Coffee made just such a blend.)

But beer is booming there — Italy had 65 breweries in 2000. Today there are 279. That’s not as explosive as the biggest spike in American craft breweries (200 opened between 1993 and 1994) but it’s something. Both booms produced some sub-par beer, but the difference with Italy is range. A flooded market forced American craft brewers to specialize; Italian brewers are making weird stuff right out of the gate.

I asked Sam Calagione what it was like collaborating at the new Eataly brewery with Teo and Leo, the brewers at Baladin and Birra del Borgo, guys who brew with stuff like kamut, myrrh, and ginger.

“We picked fresh thyme in the hills behind Leo’s brewery, threw it in the brew kettle. I put a jalopy brewery in my truck and drove up to Boston, met the guys at a nondescript warehouse, and fired up some test batches. It all happened in person, over pasta and good beer. Teo doesn’t even use email.”

Leo does. He wrote to me that brewing with Sam went like this: “When I was brewing with Sam I was telling to Sam the idea and Sam went crazy for that!” That’s about how it works in our house, too.

Here’s a peek at our coffee-beer tasting at the Ritual roasting plant. Note: a Chemex is the absolute worst way to serve beer.

We are still deep in the spit-cup experimental stage, but on the right track. Still, after the tasting, the entire Ritual crew retreated to City Beer Store for a palate cleanser. Tough crowd.

Stay tuned for updates and recipes.