Name: Santa’s Butt
Style: English Porter
Brewery: Ridgeway Brewing website
Country: England
Region: South Stoke
ABV: 6.0%
How served: 500ml capped bottle poured into a Chimay glass.
My Overall Opinion: Good 
I paired this beer with: nothing.
Tasted on: Friday December 11, 2009.
Note: Ridgeway has a line of Christmas themed beers, such as: Bad Elf, Criminally Bad Elf, Insanely Bad Elf, Very Bad Elf, Seriously Bad Elf, Lump of Coal, Pickled Santa, Reindeer Droppings & Reindeer’s Revolt.
From their website: They said it couldn’t be done, but we did it: Santa’s Butt, the beer, coming to a theater near you for the holidays. It’s a splendid, satisfying Winter Porter at 6% — a souped-up version of the classic Entire Butt Porter that you’ve enjoyed in the past. Everyone wants a piece of Santa’s Butt.
This special porter is made for winter — rich and warming, the way they like it in the North Pole. It was inspired by this famous line from a well-loved children’s story book:
“And Santa sat on his great butt, drinking a hearty brew.”
In case you find that amusing, we hasten to point out that in England ‘butt’ refers to a certain barrel used in brewing — a very large barrel, in fact, holding 108 imperial gallons. Back in the day it was quite a normal thing for a brewery to put its beer up in a large butt for storage.
Still snickering, eh? Get your mind out of the gutter or Santa will skip your house entirely this year.
The illustration for the Santa’s Butt label was painted by Massachusetts artist Gary Lippincott. Go to his web site and buy something for chrissakes. The poor guy works for beer.
This is the 16th of my daily Christmas beer, on my quest for a Christmas beer a day from Thanksgiving to Christmas. There are now only 13 more beers until Christmas!
