Chicagoist's "Beer of the Week:" New Holland's "Beerhive" Trippel

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Sep 24, 2010 8:30PM

For obvious reasons, there was no "BotW" last week. Which wound up being a good thing for this week's installment, actually. I had some questions about this beer that only a brewmaster could answer.

New Holland's "Beerhive" is a Belgian trippel brewed with local honey and ginger. How local is the honey? Much of it comes from the hives of one of their brewers, a man by the name of "Farmer John." According to brewmaster John Haggerty, they'd been wanting to brew a beer with honey for a while, as both that and the ginger add a spice to the beer not found in standard trippels.

Instead of Belgian ale yeast, however, Haggerty told me that New Holland uses a Chardonnay yeast for fermentation, similar to their Envious barrel-aged ale. "We found the chardonnay yeast reacts to the honey better than a standard ale yeast," Haggerty said. "plus, we wanted to be a little bit different." carbonation on Beerhive is different, depending on how it's served. Bottles are bottle conditioned, while the draft version is forced carbonated. Having had both, I prefer the draft, with its sparkling effervescence. Bottles of Beerhive are at any local liquor store worth its license.