Sixpack Sez

Jan. 1, 2010 | Raise a toast to the new year with a bubbly brew

Champagne? More like sham-pagne, if you ask me.

Every New Year's Eve, it's the same ol' swill: overpriced bottles of sweet, fizzy wine posing as a drink worthy of celebration.

Three hundred sixty-four days of the year, none but the most pretentious palate touches the stuff. But flip the calendar, and — pop! — we're shooting corks and slurping the bubbly like we're Fred and Ginger in "Top Hat."

Well, stick the cork back in.

Champagne is rich people booze, priced to pinch your wallet hard enough to make you think you're buying something special.

Dom Perignon at 200 bucks a bottle? The grapes are no different from those of regular wine, and it's no harder to make.

Champagne's dirty little secret is that it's actually fortified wine, just like Thunderbird. The grapes from this region north of Paris aren't sweet enough to produce a suitable amount of alcohol, so the Frenchies dump buckets of sugar into the casks before fermentation.

Even then, there's no guarantee the bottle is actually drinkable. You have to wait 'til some pedigreed wine-sniffer gives it the thumbs up.

Normally, I don't waste this much space bashing another alcoholic beverage — you know, choose your own poison. But in the beer-drinker's world, it's about time we found a superior malt-based beverage to ring in the New Year.

One option is an unusual style unfortunately known as Biere de Champagne. It's made the same way as regular beer, but after bottling, the beer is refermented with a secondary dose of Champagne yeast.

The bottles are aged on their sides, tilted toward the cap to allow the sediment to settle. Over months, they're twisted firmly to loosen the sediment from the sides (a process called riddling or remuage). Finally, the bottle necks are exposed to a cold brine mixture to flash-freeze the liquid so that a small block of sediment is expelled (disgorgement).

The result is a clean, sparkling, bubbly beer that drinks much like Champagne.

Indeed, the two best-known makers of Biere de Champagne have unabashedly drawn a parallel between their products and that rarified grape juice.

DeuS (Brut Des Flandres) makes such a big deal about the similarities, the Bosteels brewery goes to all the trouble of shipping the bottles to the Champagne region, where they're conditioned side by side with the real thing. The original DeuS label looked so similar to the famous Dom Perignon, Bosteels was compelled to redesign it under threat of a lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Landtsheer once called its Malheur Bière Brut the "Veuve-Clicquot of the beer world" 'til it, too, was reportedly forced to back down.

The problem with Biere de Champagne is cost. Bottles may run up to $40, and I'm not convinced the flavor is worth the price.

There are cheaper, equally flavorful Champagne-like alternatives, however.

Brooklyn Local 1: The yeast is filtered after fermentation and the beer goes into the bottle completely flat. New yeast is added, along with a dose of sugar, and the beer is refermented to produce a highly carbonated treat with flavors of peach and rum; 750 ml bottle, $10.

Allagash Fluxus: An unusually flavored ale made with Belgian pilsner and rye malts and spiced with yarrow. Thanks to refermentation in the bottle, it's sparkly with a crisp hops bite; 750 ml bottle, $18.

Cantillon Vigneronne: Tart, dry, with a touch of grape from the muscats added during maturation. The pop you hear when you uncork the bottle is the product of spontaneous fermentation, a process the imbues this gueuze with a unique, funky aroma and flavor.

Miller High Life: They say it's the Champagne of beers; $6 a sixpack.

-30-