Boulevard Nutcracker Special Reserve

Welcome aboard. Nutcracker is indeed still being made and should be hitting shelves soon.

 

aww man... you edited? It wasn't called Nutsack after all?? Seriously though.. Nutcracker is very easy to get around these parts. My local packie actually had a point in July or something where they had a big sale on all of the Nutcracker they had left over. So worry not, you will surely find some quite soon. And in the mean time, drink all of the Bourbon Barrel Quad and Collaboration No. 4 you can get from Boulevard.

 

Huh. I've been a big fan of Nutcracker for years. Lived in Iowa and Indiana until recently, so always had ready access to Boulevard. But I never heard of Nutsack until this thread. (That's a horrible name for a beer, btw, but I'd still love to try it)

Doing a little bit of googling, it looks like Nutsack is rare, probably only found on draft. It looks like they sell it at the brewery and then at special tapping events, and so bars that are in good stead with Boulevard might get a keg here and there.

So, basically, you have to get lucky to find it. Sorry I can't be of more help. Hopefully someone can give you better info.

 

I know for a fact that Nutsack won't be produced this year, and I don't believe there are any plans for it to be produced in the future.

For those who are curious, Nutsack was a beer that was made using the drippings from the hop bags that were used to wet hop Nutcracker when it used to be a wet hop ale (read as: every year before this year). This year, Nutcracker is not a wet hop ale, meaning there are no hop bags from which drippings can be captured to make Nutsack.

Sorry OP. I share your pain. There was a thread today about this on a local KC beer Facebook group I'm in associated with.

 

How big are these bags they use? we talking like 50 gallon trash bag size? It must take a lot of them to be able to get some kegs of "drippings."

 

I'm sure @TheJermis could probably shed more accurate light on the process. I don't think the beer is made 100% of the drippings, but I do know that it is (was) super limited and crazy time intensive, which is one of the reasons they stopped producing it.

 

man... that sounds delicious. I thought it was a typo when he said "Nutsack." I would so drink that. So Nutcracker is a Winter Warmer and Nutsack is some sort of super hoppy WW?

 

In the past, we've hung bags of wet Chinook hops in tanks and transferred Nutcracker Ale on to them for dry hopping. This year, we made a switch and made Last Splash, a beer featuring wet Nugget hops, and didn't wet hop Nutcracker Ale. Instead, Nutcracker Ale is heavily dry hopped with Chinook pellets. We'd always supplemented the wet hopping with pellets in the past so it's not a huge flavor difference, really. What's missing is a slight grassy/green note, but we feel that the hop flavor is much more pungent and, as a result of not using wet hops which fade quickly, the beer has a better shelf life and is a better example of what we intended for a longer period of time. Before though, when Nutcracker Ale was wet hopped, we'd allow the bags to hang in the tanks for a couple of days after filtration. Beer would drip from the hop bags and we would keg that off by hand and call it Nutsack as it had dripped from the hop sacks for Nutcracker Ale.

 

Interesting to know. Nutcracker is one of my favorite winter seasonals, and I've had it a couple times this year and it's great as always, but I did notice last year's tasted almost like a hoppy tripel to me and this year's was more like a sweeter IPA. Either way, I dig it.

 

Nutcracker Ale is still very much dry-hopped. It's just not dry-hopped with wet hops. As far as any style differences go, it's the exact same base beer, just different dry-hopping methods.