PINtPRESSEssayJ-dag, Friday 6 November 2026 · Beer history

The First Friday of Christmas

A thousand years of Christmas ale, from a Norwegian king who made it compulsory to a San Franciscan who, as far as he could discover, had the only real one in the world.

At 20:59 tonight, Danish time, one minute to nine and not a minute before, Tuborg’s Julebryg goes on sale across Denmark. Carlsberg Danmark announces the date and the minute itself. Their staff put on blue elf hats and work the nisseruter, the elf routes round the bars. This year the classic blue hats come with zebra-striped ones, and water elves hand out Tuborg Squash as an alcohol-free alternative. It is called J-dag, and it has run since 1990.

It is the sixth of November. The pumpkins have only just gone in the bins.

If anyone gets to say when Christmas beer starts, J-dag makes a better case than most. It is one evening, announced to the minute, and starting early carries a penalty.

videnskab.dk has Tuborg’s snow scene introduced in 1979, on a Christmas postcard for ordinary Grøn Tuborg, and becoming a label only in 1981, when the beer it now announces was launched. The postcard was drawn by the advertising man Peter Wibroe, who a few years later turned it into Tuborg’s cartoon Christmas advert.

Tuborg class it as a strong seasonal pilsner at 5.6%, chestnut brown, and list liquorice in the ingredients between the glucose syrup and the hops. It appears on one named evening and then, in their words, goes on summer holiday until the next Christmas.

J-dag was modelled on Beaujolais Nouveau. In Lex, the Danish national encyclopedia, Finn Graversen and Caroline Nyvang credit it to Thomas Tingstrup, then a product manager at Tuborg, who stood at one of the late-1980s gatherings for the newly released Beaujolais Nouveau and wondered why Danes were not waiting on the new Christmas brew instead.

From its launch in 1990 until 1998 J-dag fell on the second Wednesday in November and the first bottles went on sale at 23:59. Lex has it moving to the first Friday, and to 20:59, in 1999, partly under pressure from the country’s schoolteachers, who had been meeting high absence and little engagement the morning after. Carlsberg’s Jens Bekke told NPR’s Sidsel Overgaard in 2012 that bars tapping early generally get turned in by their own customers and go on Tuborg’s blacklist, which means that next year they get the beer a day late.

When we looked at Untappd’s page for the beer this morning, the twenty most recent check-ins ran back to 30 October and none of the venues was British: Villa Natklub, Dartlogen Bøvs, Klods Hans, Íslenski Barinn, Självfallet på Råå, and a run of kitchens, the beer carried home from a Brugsen or a Kaufland. The check-ins before tonight include supermarket purchases drunk at home, and Bekke’s account concerns bars tapping early.

Three nights in seven days. This is the third of three posts.

Norway, about 934

Brewing Christmas ale was a legal duty. Haakon the Good, who ruled from about 934, was bringing Christianity to a country that already had a midwinter feast and was not about to give it up, so he bound the new Christmas to the old jól. Snorri has him making it law “that Christmas should start at the same time as for the Christians, and that every man should brew from one measure of malt, or else pay fees”. The later Gulating law set the price: miss a year and you owed the bishop three marks, and miss three winters running and you forfeited everything you owned.

The pagan toasts were to Odin, for victory and the king’s power, and to Njord and Frey, for a good year and peace. The Norwegian for celebrating the season is still drikke jul: to drink Yule.

Charleroi, 1896

The beer historian Roel Mulder went through the archives and found nothing older than 1896. What Belgian cafés were advertising as Christmas beer was imported British beer: the oldest mention he found runs in the Journal de Charleroi on 20 December 1896, and by 1911 Liège was selling Allsopp’s of Burton as “Scotch-Ale Christmas-Bier”.

Belgian brewers began making their own after that, and Mulder dates the first imitation to 1903, when a brewery near Charleroi tried to sell its ordinary triple as a bière de Noël.

Other ways to pick the day

Samichlaus is the extreme case of a beer that is a date. It is brewed once a year, on 6 December, St Nicholas’s day. The Swiss brewer Hürlimann first brewed it in 1980, and Eggenberg Castle Brewery in Austria later acquired the brand.

Great Lakes of Cleveland pick a Thursday in October for their Christmas Ale First Pour, which they call the unofficial kickoff to the holiday season in Cleveland. The brewpub doors open at eleven, the first keg goes on at half past after a toast to the season, and they take no reservations: first come, first served.

San Francisco, November 1975

Fritz Maytag brewed a Christmas beer because he had gone looking for the tradition and could not find one he counted. By his own account in David Burkhart’s The Anchor Brewing Story (Ten Speed Press, 2022), it was, as far as he could discover, “the only real Christmas brew in the world at that time”. It had “recently disappeared, I think, even in Scandinavia, where it had lingered”.

He knew his own country better than that, mind. The new beer was conceived as “not anything at all like Ballantine’s Burton Ale, Koch’s Holiday Ale, or Noche Buena”, Burkhart writes, so Maytag knew other brewers made something for the season. He just did not count any of them as the real thing. America had Christmas beer before Prohibition, and more after repeal: the beer writer Tom Acitelli dates Miller’s Christmas Special Beer to the mid-1930s. In the same piece, Don Russell says that a few years after Prohibition most states banned references to Christmas or Santa Claus, so, he reckons, the Christmas beers became Holiday ales.

Maytag’s October 1975 tour of English breweries had begun at Young’s of Wandsworth, who brewed Winter Warmer. A winter beer is not a Christmas beer.

When Boak & Bailey went back through Frank Baillie’s Beer Drinker’s Companion of 1973 they found winter ales coming out in November and December and, as far as they could see, exactly one beer in the country with Christmas in its name: Shepherd Neame’s, in a bottle. By the Good Beer Guide published in 1986 there were around ten to count.

Reviewing that new British crop in What’s Brewing in December 1986, Danny Blyth found the strong dark Christmas beers were not spiced. Maytag reached spice by way of his own wedding. Bridale, the beer he brewed for it in 1987, was a spiced version of the 1986 Christmas Ale recipe, and the Christmas Ale was spiced from then on.

What he wanted was a Christmas beer of his own, so he brewed one, then changed the recipe every year and kept each one secret, putting a different hand-drawn tree on the label each time, drawn for decades by Jim Stitt.

Lewes, early 2000s

And in the early 2000s a Finnish beer club, Olutseura Olviretki, sent a certificate to a brewery in Lewes, because Harvey’s Christmas Ale answered the beer described in Seven Brothers, the 1870 novel by Aleksis Kivi, Finland’s national author: “strong”, “dark red”, and good for “a slight dizziness in the brain”. The beer writer Will Hawkes tells that story.

Tonight at 20:59, Denmark takes its turn.