Brewery – Christian Moerlein
Beer – Shiver
Style – Chai Porter
ABV – 5.6%
IBU – 15 IBUs
A creamy body, pleasant notes of chocolate, and a dominant malt flavor is balanced by our chai spice blend, consisting of: cardamom, coriander, cinnamon, clove, black peppercorn, and fresh ginger. The spices are steeped to make a chai tea that we infuse into the beer after fermentation. An easy drinking porter, with a pleasant spice finish for a time of year when the nights are getting longer, and we all start to get a little shiver from the cooler air.
We first got our hands on this beer when we showed up at the Lager House for our live show back in January of 2015. It was on draft there as a sort of test batch, and I have to say that I sort of fell in love with it.
Christian Moerlein for a long time was known for their traditional German Style beers that they brewed, after all, they are named after the brewery that was started by German Immigrant Christian Moerlein in Over The Rhine way back in the mid 1800s. They’ve got some history behind them.
But how do you take a history like that and still exist in a world like we’re in today? After all… we craft beer drinkers don’t like to settle on one beer, or one style for very long. Heck… we even demand that new styles keep getting created. That’s exactly how you do it if you’re Christian Moerlein. You play to the strengths of tradition, while still creating new stuff that gets people talking.
Like Shiver.
My Thoughts On Moerlein’s Shiver Chai Porter
This beer has a hard time hiding the fact that it’s not so normal. As soon as the liquid starts hitting your glass you can smell the great chai spices in the air around you.
Taking a step back, though, you are greeted with an inky, black, beer. A foamy head of tan bubbles sits on top, and if you can’t smell anything… you can assume it’s just your run of the mill porter, ready for your winter imbibing.
But a whiff gives it away. Cinnamon, cardamom, licorice and ginger aromas dance all around you. It’s the same smell you get from a warm glass of chai tea.
But it’s not tea… when you taste it it unlocks a whole other world of flavor. You get a brilliant underlying bread and chocolate flavor that pushes the chai spices into a whole new space in my mind. I get a warm bread image in my head. Like something that’s just out of the oven, full of flavorful spices. This is stunning when you pair it with a chilly afternoon… and I can only imagine that there are a lot of food pairings that are going to be excellent with it.