Gift that keeps on giving, well, keeps on giving

I mentioned in my June 25 post that my wife got me a cool gift for Father’s Day this year in the form of a three-month gift membership to “The Beer of the Month Club,” aka, “The Great American Beer Club.”

As a member of this “unique mail-order club,” I get to “embark on an expedition to capture the rarest and freshest microbrewed beer.” As part of the club, you receive a 12-pack of four different types of handcrafted beer in 12-ounce bottles from small craft breweries around the country. Also included in each shipment is an entertaining and informative monthly newsletter, “Beer Expeditions.”

I received my second shipment of beer a few days ago. Just like the first shipment, it arrived on my doorstep, neatly packaged with care in a large cardboard box. (Inside the box, the beer is craddled in an egg-carton looking contraption that also resembles the drink holders you sometimes get in the McDonald’s drive-thru.) The beer arrives unrefrigerated, so I put the whole box in the frig for a day or so before sampling any of them.

This month’s package contained three bottles of four different kinds of beer – two kinds from the Uinta Brewery in Salt Lake City, Utah and two from the Virgin Islands St. John Brewers in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Uinta Brewery beers were Solstice Kolsch Style Ale and King’s Peak Porter. The featured beers from the Virgin Islands St. John Brewers were Island Summer Ale and Liquid Sunshine Belgian Style Ale.

I sampled the Virgin Islands Brand Island Summer Ale first, and it was pretty good. Brewed and bottled by the Shipyard Brewing Company in Portland, Maine for St. John Brewers, it’s a “soft, easy drinking, top-fermented ale that has a remarkably clean, crisp finish. This one, still expressiveness and complex, has the perfect personality to pair with tropical foods, grilled chicken and seafood.”

(I’ll have more to say about the Virgin Island St. John Brewers in a later post. The history of the company is interesting in itself, but more on that later.)

“The Great American Beer Club” is one of many such clubs administered by Clubs of America. They have similar clubs dedicated to international wines, fresh flowers, hand-dipped chocolates, gourmet pizza, fresh fruit, premium cigars and gourmet coffee. For more information about Clubs of America, visit their Web site at http://www.greatclubs.com/