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Category Archives: Ontario Craft Beer Week

OCB Week Beer and Food: Fanny Chadwick’s

June 21, 2012 12:54 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

As Ontario Craft Beer Week continues on its merry, slightly lumbering way, I find that the events that I’m most interested in are the ones that deal with pairing food and beer. I suspect that this has to do with the fact that we don’t get enough of this in Toronto at the moment. There are, of course, any number of restaurants that serve good beer and good food, but there’s not always that much in terms of designed pairings.

Even beerbistro, whose menu exists for that purpose, theoretically, has beers sequestered into various groups based on their properties: robust, sociable, assertive, extroverted, yielding and, of course, manic. It’s a little like a Meyers-Briggs chart. That works relatively well as a baseline for pairing, but what I really want to see is a specific dish paired with a specific beer. I want to see someone play with a specific set of flavours.

I admit that it’s not the kind of thing that can often be done outside a beer dinner.

On Monday night, Harbord House had their third OCB Week beer dinner with Great Lakes. Since I’ve been covering this event for the last couple of years during OCB Week, I figure that at this point, it’s just become tradition. Harbord House always surprises me a little bit, mostly because I hear about it less often that I feel like I ought to. I get there maybe twice a year, but I’m never disappointed.

As per usual, the Great Lakes beer dinner at Harbord House was hosted by David Bieman and featured a wide assortment of their beers. At $50 a seat, I feel like it was the most affordable of the beer dinners on offer this week and it proves to be good value for money year after year.

Some of the pairings worked better than others, as is always the case during a four course dinner. The starter beer was the OCB Farmhouse Ale, which is a collaboration between Amsterdam and Great Lakes. It’s a very tasty beer. The difficulty is that it was served before the first course, which was a Poached Pear Salad with spiced pistachios, chevre, baby arugula and a maple balsamic vinaigrette. The pear salad was served with Great Lakes Green Tea Ale, but I feel as though the better pairing would have been the starter beer, if only because the lingering bitterness of the arugula would have worked with the sting of the Farmhouse yeast.

Poached Pear Salad.

While some pairings are obviously going to work (strawberry chocolate cheesecake and Harry Porter and the Bourbon Soaked Vanilla Beans), others surprised with their quality. Cooking mussels in beer is not a new concept, but the Moules Frites served as a second course were surprising because I usually see mussels cooked with wheat beer. Cooking them with a Saison, No Chance With Miranda in this case, is sort of revelatory because the flavour is more complex. If you serve them with the same beer, you get two versions of the same flavour, experienced slightly differently.

The other venue I visited for beer and food pairing was Fanny Chadwick’s. I’ve only been to Fanny Chadwick’s once before, but the impression I got was that it somehow eludes being on the radar as a destination in Toronto. I don’t know how that’s possible, because I’m convinced that they serve the best burger I’ve ever eaten. It might be the house made pickles that make it, or possibly the general high quality of the ingredients. I’ve been to BQM and Holy Chuck. I think Fanny Chadwick’s blows them out of the water.

One of the reasons I like Fanny Chadwicks is that it manages a retro diner kind of feel without being kitschy.

The event that they’re hosting for Ontario Craft Beer Week is simple: Flights and bites.

Fanny Chadwick’s usually have 12 Ontario Craft Beers on tap, which is a huge number for a restaurant that might seat 40. For the purposes of the Flights and Bites event, they have come up with unique food pairings in appetizer sizes that work with, and are made with, a specific beer on the menu. Most often, this kind of attention to detail comes with a set menu during a beer dinner. This is a la carte beer and food pairing at a very high level for an extraordinarily good value.

It’s like chess in beer terms.

Flying Monkeys Stereo Vision is paired with Deep Fried Asparagus. Stereo Vision is apparently meant to be a hoppy Kristalweiss, although that combination is esoteric enough that I would not have been able to guess the style. The Stereovision is used in the batter for the Asparagus and then again subsequently in a reduction drizzled over the Asparagus consisting of shallot, honey, and citrus zest. The acidity of the reduction picks up the grassiness of the Asparagus and prepares the palate for the hoppy kick of the Stereo Vision.

Great Lakes Orange Peel Ale is paired with Pulled Pork on a Buttermilk Biscuit. I am, generally speaking, just about done with Pulled Pork, as it gets served everywhere. This is an interesting twist on it, however, because it’s not a heavily vinegared Carolina Pulled Pork or a saucy Texas pulled pork. It’s practically a French treatment of the dish, which incorporates the Orange Peel Ale in the braising liquid along with thyme and what I think may have been sage. Sort of a Porc Tiré, if you get my meaning. For all that it isn’t heavily sauced, it retains its moisture and plays off the citrus character of the Orange Peel Ale.

Pulled Pork, seconds prior to demolition by a hungry blogger.

The most successful of the bites is the Wellington Arkell Bitter Chick Pea Patty served with Caper, Olive and Habanero Tapenade. The reason it works as well as it does is that it is extremely subtle. Arkell Bitter has a caramel backbone that persists on the palate as you make your way through a sip. In the case of the Chick Pea Patty, every component plays off this backbone: The slight nuttiness of the chickpeas, the salt from the caper and olive, the heat from the Habanero, even the acidity from the carefully considered slice of tomato. It’s one of those rare pairings that leaves you contented without knowing exactly why. Extremely balanced.

Wellington Arkell Bitter and Chick Pea Patty

There are other bites, of course. There’s the Muskoka Mad Tom IPA Chili Cheese Fries. There’s the Mill Street Organic Beef Liver Pate and Avocado Dip. There are Rainbow Trout Fish Cakes topped with Beau’s Lug-Tread Lagered Ale Air.

10 Point IPA Ice Cream. Odd, because you tend to perceive the hop character as it melts in your mouth, leaving a strangely earthy perfume. Good, though.

Did I mention that a flight of samples is $6.75 and that most of the bites that go with those samples are under $5.00?

Look, I really like beer and food pairing, but my observation is that not everyone has the desire to sit through a beer dinner. Sometimes you want the care and attention that goes into a beer dinner in a much smaller format, and that’s what they’re doing at Fanny Chadwick’s during OCB week. You want a dish that someone has put a lot of thought into that will teach you something about food and beer and won’t cost an arm and a leg? This is the best place to go in the city this week.

In fact, even if you’re reading this after OCB week, you should know one thing. This is the only restaurant I have ever been to where a waiter set down a vegan dish at the table next to mine and I looked at it covetously. It’s that good.

 

Posted in: Beer and Food, Ontario Craft Beer Week ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

Ontario Craft Beer Week 2012

June 18, 2012 4:11 pm ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

It’s the week after Father’s Day and that means that it’s time once again for Ontario Craft Beer Week. OCB Week is now in its third year and the number of events that are available has jumped pretty considerably from last year. It’s a jump that seems conceptually tied to the near 50% year over year increase in sales that the OCB participants continue to experience at the LCBO. Craft continues to be popular and OCB Week is, in part, a celebration of that fact.

In fact, the sheer preponderance of events has to do with the fact that the stage for craft beer in Ontario continues to grow. The number of venues where it’s possible to serve interesting beer has increased steadily since I started writing about beer a couple of years ago. When I started, there were a relatively small number of people writing about beer in Toronto. Nowadays, you can’t swing a dead cat without the risk of blinding a scribbling inebriate. It’s as good a time as any to reflect on the changes that are now possible as a result of this growth.

To begin with, I feel as though I should address something of a controversy that existed in the leadup to OCB Week. When the events were initially listed on the website, there was a claim that there were 350. The majority of these were Mill Street events and they lasted all week. Usually, these involved taking over a pub and serving a sampler flight of Mill Street beer with some cheese.

Chris Grimley pointed out that these made up the majority of all events across the province, even going so far as to use a helpful chart. Mike Warner pointed out correctly that these events cluttered the events page and made it difficult to find anything. The OCB have helpfully, and I think wisely, fixed this problem by streamlining the events section of the website. It is now easy to find something that you would like to go to. To be honest, as I was doing an initial run through the events a couple of weeks ago, it was not unlike hacking your way through a jungle, dragging your canoe behind you.

Kreegah bundolo.

Let’s reflect on this for a moment, shall we? The fact that Mill Street is even able to support this many events is not something that could have been possible in previous incarnations of OCB Week. They’ve basically got 14 locations in Toronto where there are sample flights and cheese pairings.  There are 20 locations where they’re doing this outside the GTA.

I think that part of the reason this drew so much ire from bloggers is that these are not seen as marquee events, or even as being particularly interesting events. It’s beer and cheese. I mean, if you’ve been around the beer scene a while, you’ve seen beer and cheese pairing events. It’s the kind of event that would make a particularly hard bitten blogger jump about while satirically yelling “yippee-skip.”

Sometimes, we forget that we’re not really the audience.

The entire point of OCB week is to spread the sales of craft beer across the province. I almost typed message there, but that leans towards evangelism. We’ll go with sales. Believe it or not, the vast majority of people out there are going to find a beer and cheese pairing at a reasonable price pretty gosh darned impressive.  It doesn’t do to forget that the increased availability of one offs and tap takeovers and all of the other stuff that we’ve come to view as inevitable is all funded by actually selling beer.

That 45-50% year over year increase at the LCBO? That’s because craft beer is finding a new audience and that’s because of straightforward introductory events. It’s also why the market now supports this many people writing about beer. The industry is drumming up interest.

That said, I am glad that they streamlined the search function. I practically sprained my mouse wheel from scrolling.

Over the course of the week, I’m going to be attending a number of events around Toronto despite the looming heat wave. This year, I’m attempting a novel approach. Rather than attempting to cover all of the marquee events, I’m adopting a back to basics approach of attending only events that I actually want to attend. In previous years, I’ve tried to go everywhere and do everything with the result that I tend to end up on Thursday morning of Ontario Craft Beer Week with a debilitating amount of writing to do and an anorexic wallet.

This year, I’m using OCB week as an excuse to go places I haven’t been to or places I enjoyed briefly but have not been back to. I’m just going to go out and have fun. You know: Like people who don’t have a blog.

Posted in: Ontario Craft Beer Week, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged:

Filling in the Blanks for Ontario Craft Beer Week 2011

July 12, 2011 12:23 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅


You may have noticed that the old bloggity blog has lain fallow these two weeks. There’s a good reason for that. June was busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest, and my plan of trying to cover events every day during Ontario Craft Beer Week was not quite as easy as it seemed at the outset. I mean, if anything tells you how feasible the craft beer movement has become in the province, it’s the fact that OCB week organically grew into a ten day beer festival. I suspect at this point that if there were just an organizing website that would list events, you could probably continue indefinitely. Sure all the brewers would pass out from lack of sleep on day 23, but that’s a small price to pay for success.

What this means is that I’ve got two weeks of blogging to catch up on, and I figure that rather than scrapping the whole thing in order to get up to speed on current events, I’ll condense days six and seven of Ontario Craft Beer Week into a single post.

Let me preface these two posts by saying that Garrett Oliver was in town for those two days. Originally I was going to write a little bit about that, but there was no way that I could do it that wouldn’t have come off as fan-boy boot-licking toad-eating; just the worst kind of hero worship. It’s probably warranted, but my impression is that if there was ever a dude who was secure enough to not need that kind of praise, it’s Garrett Oliver.

I will therefore limit myself to the following paragraph, which will sound like a Bill Brasky story:

We’re supremely lucky to have that guy as an ambassador for craft beer. He’s poised, gracious, funny, intelligent and a snappy dresser. I got to tour the beer store with him as his rep explained the situation in Ontario. Garrett had everything figured out in about four minutes, right down to deducing the fact that with a burgeoning craft beer movement, there had to be some kind of online backlash (all I could add was that we were working on it). I have not seen a lot of people able to pull off a blue gingham/tattersall shirt, especially amongst the beer community in Ontario where a bowling shirt is considered overdoing it. The man wore cufflinks to a cooking demo and managed not to dirty his French cuffs. In short, it’s pointless to talk about being impressed by him because if that’s not your default reaction, you’re deranged.

Day Six: Bar Volo House Ales Takeover

This event was really interesting for me, because I was there for the first brew day Bar Volo had: Caustic Commencement Saison. I still have the sticker from that brew on my banjo case. It’s amazing to see how far they’ve come over the course of a year. While it took a while for the nanobrewery to get off the ground, they’re now producing beer at a really good clip. Some of them are pretty darn good, while some of them miss the mark. I’ve tried a lot of the beers there over the last year, because for a while they were mostly getting broken out for special events. I don’t think that there’s been anything world shaking to come out of the House Ales project yet, but that’s not really the point.

It’s early days yet, and the whole thing is kind of a journey. To me, the best part of the House Ales project is that it functions as a kind of crossroads for brewing in Ontario. Ralph Morana doesn’t often get credit for this, but all you have to do is look at the way the community connects around Bar Volo because of the often collaborative nature of the beers on offer. During any given week you’ll have Bim from Dieu Du Ciel or Fred from Charlevoix in there, brewing up a storm. He’s worked with Iain and Bartle from Amsterdam, Lackey from Great Lakes. Not to mention Flying Monkeys, Biergotter and St. Andre. Plus, Jon Hodd, who works there, is turning into a force to be reckoned with.

Because most of the brews are envelope pushers (“Black Saison” said Garrett. “Is that a thing?”), you end up with brewers going in to try them. It results in increased communication throughout breweries in Canada. That’s a pretty useful function, if I’m honest. Volo used to be my local, what with cheap pints on Mondays and a fantastic group of regulars. These days I mostly get there for events, which is a shame since you never know what’s going to be available from one day to the next.

The only downside is that with the ambitious new direction, the crowd in there has changed fairly significantly. It’s much younger. I mean, how often do you see Stefan from Dieu Du Ciel spin a DJ set? The prices have gone up somewhat. I feel like I’m verging into “get off my lawn, you darn kids” territory if I complain about those things, so I’ll just suggest this: Volo has never been static. It started as an Italian restaurant nearly 30 years ago. No one could have predicted that it would become a craft beer place, let alone one of the best in the world. The continued innovation is not trading off the old atmosphere or ambiance. Continued innovation is a hallmark of the place, and it’s no surprise that it has begun communicating that progress across the Ontario brewing scene both through collaboration and by acting as a nexus for the industry.

Day Seven: Session 99

I’m going with the extreme short form here, since this is turning into a novel.

The organizers of the Session festival learned from last year. They learned that the festival needs to be in an accessible location. They learned that the location they choose needs to have an open layout. They learned that rioting in the streets will prevent people from drinking beer, which seems counterintuitive when you think about Vancouver.

Jed did a heck of a job putting together something that felt more like a party than most festivals do. Cooking demos, easily available food, a cigar lounge, and enough space to stretch out in all helped with this atmosphere. I don’t know if the venue ever reached capacity. I was worried initially, since it looked pretty empty two hours after the kick off, but it picked up significantly and I think that everyone enjoyed themselves.

The main stage was a nice touch. A little bit of spectacle is good at a beer festival, since it tends to keep people from having nothing to do but drink. After a couple of hours of milling around sampling things, that can lead to a number of problems. On the other hand, people tend to behave themselves if you’ve got a circus strongman kicking around. The thought process is “Oh hey. That dude just bent that rebar into a heart with his teeth. Maybe I should just chill out over in the corner for a while.”

I was surprised to see that Spearhead won best brewery. I think it’s a triumph of their marketing rather than their beer, but I can’t fault them for that. It’s a part of the game that they excel at. I know people who think that they shouldn’t have won since they’re contracting out of Cool brewery, and therefore are not actually a brewery. I have to point out that it was a publicly determined vote, and that the public doesn’t care about that stuff. The semantics of the thing are only crucially important to industry people. Besides, you can’t enforce authenticity in a free market, neither can you argue from the standpoint that you should be able to without being disingenuous.

Good for them, says I, for not downplaying the role of marketing in their business plan. It worked for The Spice Girls. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s hard to argue with a gold record.

Posted in: Ontario Craft Beer Week ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

Ontario Craft Beer Week 2011 – Day 5

June 24, 2011 12:55 am ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

Eventually, if you write for a paper, you get to the point where you’re a z-class celebrity. You’d have a long way to go to reach the dizzying heights of an Abe Vigoda or Don Knotts, but people invite you to do things. I was invited to be the special guest at the Beermen vs. Food event at BQM Ossington.

Now, I’m something of a food network junkie, so I’ve seen a huge number of episodes of Man vs. Food. I think it’s a terrifying glimpse into the gluttony that’s only possible in North America. On the other hand, I can’t stop watching the thing because the host is pretty entertaining and the challenge sections are on par with a trainwreck. You can’t look away. Will Adam Richman finish the 7 pound burrito from hell? Will he be able to finish a pound of wings slathered in “STUPID SAUCE” within 15 minutes? The spicy tuna roll challenge? A steak the size of Montana? Will Adam Richman pass away from a cardiac arrest before the end of the fourth season? The answers are no, yes, no, yes and only time will tell.

Rob “Stuntman” Morra (ask him to do a stuntman for old time’s sake next time you see him at a bar) asked me whether I’d be interested in coming down and taking part in the challenge. After all, it was the main attraction for a charity event. Cameron’s and Beau’s pints were 5 dollars all night long and a dollar from each pint was going to Second Harvest. It’s a charity that delivers fresh surplus food to people who need it. I won’t comment on the irony of a burger eating contest to represent that charity. I probably don’t need to.

So, I trekked down to BQM, Survivor blasting “Eye of the Tiger” through my headphones. The prize for this one was basically bragging rights, which as we all know, are more important than trophies and continued existence (at least in parts of the south).

Let me introduce you to the competition:

Rob "Stuntman" Morra, displaying his silverback-like facial appendage.

Rob Morra is with Beau’s. You may know him from various beer events in the Toronto area, or from his victory at the 2009 All-Toronto Beard competition.

Jason Ellsmere suspiciously eyes the camera, sideburns swaying in the breeze.

Jason Ellsmere is from Cameron’s. His sideburns are truly majestic. Not as majestic as, say, a bald eagle swooping through a rainbow, but they’re on par with those of many alt-country rockers.

Jason Rees. Porkmeister General.

Jason Rees is a professional BBQ guy. His website is here. He’s a bottomless pit of hunger, potentially driven by Skynet.

Saeed. Smiling because he knows what the kitchen is about to unleash.

Saeed is the owner of BQM, and an all around nice guy.

Glenn. Because every eating contest should have a skinny underdog.

And then there was Glenn.

So, we sat there, gathered around the long table, but none of us really knew what the challenge entailed. Even Rob, who was instrumental in organizing the thing didn’t really know. The first sign that there was obviously something amiss was when the server brought out shots of Campari. “To open your esophagus. It’s an aperitif,” he said.

Campari. Great. Thanks for that early warning sign.

That’s a bad sign, incidentally, when you need liquor to prepare to eat something.

We sat there, determining exactly how it was going to work. Fortunately, there was a Cameron’s side of the table and a Beau’s side of the table and the decision was made that we would go three at a time. We had just about settled this when the burgers came out of the kitchen.

Oh dear god why??!?!

What you’re looking at there is a Double Riverside burger. The Riverside burger has Bacon, mozzarella, BQM BBQ sauce, onion ring & garlic aioli. That sounds good, actually, except for the fact that in this case, you get two of all those things on one bun. And you can put your stereopticon away, because that’s two of them. No one wants to speculate exactly what the calorie content of that behemoth is, let alone what it might be for two of them. I certainly don’t want to know.

And so, after some searching for a cell phone with a stopwatch, the Cameron’s team started in on their burgers.

Jason Ellsmere decided on compacting the burger down as far as possible. Saeed decided to pace himself and picked away at a level of one burger, working his way through to the second one. Jason Rees, cybernetic porksmith that he is, decided simply to try and get bacon into every bite.

Can you believe the showboating going on here?

We all sort of knew that we were in trouble when Rees decided to pause to take a phone call. Probably someone calling to tell him the location of Sarah Connor. He finished at 7:58 after taking the time to tell them he’d call back when he finished the second burger. Jason Ellsmere finished somewhere in the 14 minute range, while Saeed tapped out upon nearing the completion of the second burger.

Now, I’ve never eaten competitively. But, like I said, I’d seen Adam Richman do it a lot. He usually plans out a strategy in order to beat the clock. The Beau’s side of the table went with this concept. Rob Morra decided to tackle both burgers at once from the top down, leaving the last patty and the buns until the end. It’s a good idea, but unsound since you’re leaving all the carbs for the end. That can be a slog. Glenn, uh, well Glenn just sorta decided to brute force the thing, but eventually tapped out citing the protein bar he had had just hours before. I opted for the same top down approach as Saeed.

Now, two double Riverside burgers is something like two and a quarter pounds of food, with about 24 ounces of that being protein. I was going along pretty good. I had the first burger down in four minutes and I looked like I was on pace to beat Rees. And then, about halfway through the second onion ring on the second burger, I started to hit the wall. Rob Morra also looked to be doing pretty well up until the six minute mark. He hit a much larger wall. I finished at 11:23 and Rob finished somewhere around the 28:00 mark.

Now, I have learned two things from this challenge:

1)      All of the contestants have what Gorilla Monsoon would have called intestinal fortitude. Except for Jason Rees, who is actually some kind of burger eating cyborg from the future that comes fully equipped with Call Waiting.

2)      I’m never, ever, nerver, eneveler doing that again. Even now I can feel the meat coma setting in, but before the meat coma come the meat sweats. This is actually a thing. Go ahead. Google it. Ugh. Unpleasant, yes?

Congratulations to all involved, except for Jason Rees who is, as I mentioned, from the future and therefore knew that he would win and therefore does not need our pathetic hu-man congratulations. Hopefully, we will have helped people who need food to eat. Hopefully, Jason Rees will not show up at their door in a leather jacket and force feed them a double Riverside burger.

Posted in: Ontario Craft Beer Week ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

Ontario Craft Beer Week – Day Three

June 23, 2011 3:34 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

Let me tug on your coat about something.

A lot of the time, the craft beer movement is defined not so much by the drinkers as it is by the brewers and the people who write about beer. You’ve got a lot of different beer bloggers and columnists and legitimate experts talking about what makes a good beer, or whether a brewery is going downhill. Sometimes, the discussion can get pretty heated. It has done in the states recently. There’s an ongoing flamewar about Session beers (beers under 5% alcohol which can be consumed in quantity over several hours). While that might set the course for trends in the immediate future and bring to light some previously underappreciated offerings of very high quality, it’s an extremely localized form of beer appreciation.

I’m not here to talk to you about that. I’m not even here to talk to you about beer nerds who are looking for the rarest of beers. I’m here to talk to you today about people who actually go out and drink whatever high quality beer is available and enjoy each others’ company.

It’s only over the course of the last four or five months that I’ve become aware of a group called the Toronto Beer Lovers. It’s an interesting group for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that these aren’t folks who are involved in the craft beer industry. These are just people who like good beer and aren’t nerdy enough to spend a whole lot of time arguing about it online. It’s a sizeable group and currently they weigh in at 889 members.

Think about this for a second. If one of the primary ways that people are convinced of the benefits of craft beer is word of mouth, then the Toronto scene has nearly a thousand loosely organized people who are spreading the word. They’re not doing it because it benefits them directly. They’re doing it because they enjoy going out to the pub and trying new things. If they like something, they’re probably going to spread the word. They might even bring their friends along. That’s a bigger deal than you might imagine.

Maybe the most interesting part is that they’re doing it from a consumer perspective; looking for value for money and events where their members are most likely to have fun. Reethi Jagannathan is sort of their de facto leader along with a couple of other people (Craig and Michael) who organize events and gatherings. Because they’re aware of the size of the group and they don’t want to overwhelm a pub on a busy night, they post that there are a certain number of spots open for the event and then people RSVP.

Reethi beat me pretty soundly and advances to face Nick Pashley in the semi-finals.

It works out surprisingly well. Apparently there are about 100 hardcore members and the rest of them sort of rotate through. This not only means that there are always people willing to attend events, but also that there are always going to be new people to talk to. If you go to the same pub all the time, eventually you’ll hear everyone’s stories. In this case, the rotating cast keeps things fresh.

I caught up with them at The Rhino on Tuesday night and hung out for a while. By the time I got there, there were about 20 members of the group. At one end of the line of tables they had grabbed, they were doing a sort of unofficial beer tasting to determine what they thought of the beers that were available on tap. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the things they were tasting. Black Oak’s Marmalade Saison was in the same lineup as a number of the Great Lakes beers that are being featured there throughout the week.

Usually, if you go to a beer tasting, people group certain styles of beer together. That’s not what this was about. This was early in the evening and they had purchased a number of things that just looked interesting and got everyone to try them. It makes a lot of sense. If there are a lot of new beers on tap and you’ve never tried them before, it’s a pretty good way to figure out what you should order. Plus, it creates a lot of discussion, not about the technical facets of brewing or about the IBU content of the IPA, but simply about what people would like to have next.

Tasting a whole bunch of different beers just for fun? Weirdos.

It’s a good reminder that for the most part people just want to have a good time. Beer is many things, but it excels as a social lubricant. Most of the time beer isn’t about art. I write about some high flown concepts sometimes, but I’m going to be pretty quick to concede that a lot of the time, you just want to unwind and have fun. This is beer appreciation as an excuse to bring people with common interests together. And that’s pretty much the whole point of the brewing industry. It’s awesome.

If you go out to any number of the Ontario Craft Beer Week events, you’ll probably meet people from the Toronto Beer Lovers group. You might want to consider joining them. Not only will you drink good beer, meet interesting people and visit pubs you’ve never heard of, you’ll have fun. I did.

Also, it should be pointed out that Robohop from Great Lakes is an absolute hop monster. It’s pretty much the reason that I decided to take Wednesday off from Ontario Craft Beer Week. If you want to wake up feeling like you’ve got a hop vine growing out of your cerebral cortex, then Robohop is the beer for you. Sweet Christmas, is that a hoppy beer. I mean, just take all of the hops in the world and throw them in the kettle why don’t you? Holy jumping cats. Son of a motherless goat and so forth.

Posted in: Ontario Craft Beer Week ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Ontario Craft Beer Week 2011 – Day Two

June 21, 2011 4:37 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

This year, I’m trying to get to as many Ontario Craft Beer Week events as is humanly possible, so you’ll probably see me out and about knocking around the GTA in some capacity or other. Maybe I’ll be complaining violently about having been to so many events. Maybe I’ll be quietly taking notes in a corner. Maybe I’ll be drinking a Pina Colada at Trader Vic’s. Maybe I’ll be drinking a beer at noon on a Tuesday. Only time will tell.

As my editor keeps telling me, “research is important,” and I am one of the happy few who can literally cite drinking beer and carousing with ne’er do wells as research. That said, let’s see what I got up to on Monday.

Beer Cocktails at Burger Bar. 5:00-7:00 PM

This is kind of an interesting event for me, because I’m researching for an article on Beer Cocktails for early next month. I can honestly say that I haven’t been exposed to the idea enough to speak emphatically about it, but it seems to me that it’s one of those things that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t know that the world is clamoring for the beer cocktail.

If you had asked me about them a month ago, I probably would have politely but firmly asked you to go away. At this point, I’m not so sure. I tend to think of craft beer as a finished artisanal product, but it occurs to me that it’s probably not a lot different in principle than adding a syrup to a Berliner Weiss or grapefruit juice to a Radler. I’m starting to understand that when it’s done properly, it’s about adding to the flavours already present in order to enhance the experience. That’s no bad thing.

Mirella Amato and Christine Sismondo were hosting this event and they’d come up with a selection of beer cocktails to show off the rapidly growing phenomenon. My feeling is that if anyone was going to be able to convince me, it was going to be these two women, since between them they have a huge amount of knowledge to draw from.

I didn’t manage to try all of the beer cocktails, since I was pacing myself, but let me tell you a little about what worked and what didn’t.

The Rusty Knot.

The Rusty Knot worked pretty well. It was a cocktail of Lake of Bays Pale Ale with Tawny Port, grapefruit juice and homemade grenadine. I’m not sure that I was able to detect a lot of the Pale Ale within it, but the grapefruit juice offered a pleasing bitterness to combat the sweetness of the 10 year old Taylor Fladgate they had chosen. The Blackberry garnish was visually pleasing, and while I’m moderately colourblind, I think it’s attractive in the glassware.

Sweet Dreams. Not just a clever name, since it hits like a brickbat.

The Sweet Dreams didn’t really work for me. It was Beau’s Matt’s Sleepy Time Stout with Chambord, Crème de Menthe and muddled mint. Christine claimed rightly that the problem in working with an 8.0% percent beer in the summer is that it’s difficult to make it into a light refreshing beverage. I’m not sure that it would have worked with raspberry and mint even in the winter. It’s a little too sweet and the combination of the alcohol and the sugar was overpowering. That might be a beer that is more or less uncocktailable.

The winner, in my estimation:

I think the best example that they came up with was the “Lotus Green” which is made with Great Lakes Green Tea Ale, honey and elderflower. This is an example of a beer cocktail where the ingredients work together to the strengths of the key ingredient. The honey brings out the grassiness of the green tea and the elderflower adds a layer of flavour that plays on top of it. Well done, Cocktailers. (Cocktailsters? Cocktailinistas?)

Great Lakes Beer Dinner at Harbord House 7:00-9:00 PM

My host for this event was David Bieman, who had worked on the menu with the owner of the Harbord House, John, and his chef Jake. The food was quite as good as it was for the beer dinner during last year’s Ontario Craft Beer Week.

Tuna Tartare with various salsas.

The first course was a Tuna Tartare served on Potato Crisps with a variety of salsas. In terms of pairing beer with the course, they went with the Great Lakes Green Tea Ale. It’s a valid choice since most of the time I’m eating raw tuna, it’s either going to be with beer or green tea. I don’t think that any of the salsas overpowered the beer, but the poblano pepper and tomatillo one came close. Interestingly, the one that worked best was the salsa of cucumber and mint, which seemed more inspired by Mediterranean cuisine than Southwestern.

Duck Three ways. Croquettes! Duck and Blueberry Sausage! Smoked Breast!

The Entrée was a trio of duck preparations. The smoked duck breast and duck sausage were very good, but for me the standout were the croquettes. I have to compliment their chef on his seasoning. It’s very easy to oversalt a smoked duck breast, and similarly easy to undersalt a croquette (I suspect the reasoning would be “well, it’s fried and there’s cranberry compote to go with it. Better back off.”)  He got it exactly right for my taste.

The trio were paired with Great Lakes’ Faith No More Saison. I was talking to Lackey yesterday and apparently it’s the summer of Saison at the brewery. They’re going to be producing a bunch of Saisons over the course of the summer and I have to tell you that they’ve come a long way since the first one I tried. This was actually a reimagining of David’s Saison from last year, which was pleasantly funky, but maybe overly honeyed. You could tell from the nose of this Saison exactly how dry the finish was going to be. It was lemon, spice and pepper with a hint of melon of all things in the mid palate. It’s a lot more restrained than the last one. If they move it to production they’ll make a mint.

For dessert, David went all Richard Blais on us.

See, this is when I figured out what was going to happen. Check out the maniacal grin on Bieman.

You should really experience being in a room when one corner suddenly fills up with wafting liquid nitrogen.

Brewer drops science. Worried pub owner looks on.

I don’t know if the sorbet that he made a la carte was all that good, but I can pretty much guarantee you that no one will ever forget the evening if only for the whisking clinic that David put on in the corner.

Eventually, they called in a professional pinch-whisker

Stout Irish Pub Brewing Under The Stars 9:30-10:30 PM

I’ve done a bit of brewing. I’ve even done it on the system that they used at Stout, but I have to commend the idea behind the event. Most people haven’t brewed a beer, or even considered the possibility. How do you reach people who don’t want to go on a brewery tour and see how it’s done? You bring the fight to them during boardgame night on a local patio. It’s a good opportunity for people who are curious to go over and check it out. There was no shortage of brewers to answer their questions. George Eagleson was there, and he was a good choice. No one is too intimidated by George to ask a question. He will probably even give you a hug if you ask a good question. Or for any reason at all.

The Great Lakes pilot system is apparently transportable.

Jason Britton from Cameron’s seemed to be doing most of the explaining, but people circulated and chatted and seemed to be finding out what they wanted to know.

There were also a number of beers available from the brewers who were collaborating.

"What? You want one of these beers? I don't know, man."

There was even a Potato Malt Liquor available from Biergotter. Eric Ecclestone, local badass was heard to remark, “I don’t care if you don’t like it, St. John. Put this up on yer blag and publish it.” I did like it, but I must have made a face when I took a sniff and didn’t recognize the Rosemary used as an aromatic. I spent the next several minutes awkwardly groping for a pop culture reference to defuse the situation.

Eric Ecclestone: Local Badass is a dangerous man with a dangerous beer.

I’m still alive, so I must have done something right.

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Ontario Craft Beer Week 2011 – Day One

June 19, 2011 2:09 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Do you know how far the perception of beer has come in the last ten years? A very long way indeed, and a lot of that is down to craft brewers getting involved with locations outside of the places that you’d traditionally find them. As I look at the lineup for Craft Beer Week, I’m noticing that there are a lot of events that go outside of the traditional “Here is a pint of beer. It’s better than the beer that you’re used to drinking. Why don’t you give it a shot?”

It’s for that reason that this year I’m determined to seek out some of the more esoteric Craft Beer Week events. There are some that are listed on the website. For instance, Cameron’s is involved with a Polo tournament featuring the Royal Jaipur team. No one saw that coming. There are at least three festivals just within Toronto alone this week: C’est What, Session and the Beach BBQ and Brews Festival. Not to mention the Wine and Spirit Festival. Consider how unlikely that would have been five years ago.

I decided to kick the week off with a fanfare. Literally.

Atmospheric lighting! Mellow, yet reminiscent of a planetarium!

It turns out that the popularity of craft beer has gotten to the point where it is popping up as a draw in places that you’d never expect it. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra had an event last night that was meant to appeal to a younger demographic: a 10:30 PM performance of Mahler’s fifth symphony in C sharp minor. Before that, though, they had a BBQ tailgate party in their parking lot. With beer provided by Steam Whistle.

It’s apparently part of a program called Tsoundcheck, which is designed to make the symphony more approachable. The astounding thing to me is that it works. While the tailgate party was full up, I did sort of hang around the barriers to have a look at the crowd. The TSO’s PR representative had told me that they were aiming for a demographic of 25-40 with their promotion, and I think that it may have actually skewed younger than that.

It turns out that if you combine things that people like (music, beer and food) they will show up in droves. The parking lot was jammed with fashionable young people who had paid 75 bucks to eat barbeque, drink craft beer and then go listen to a symphony.

Not only that, but they licensed the auditiorium at Roy Thompson Hall. You could take a beer in with you! Now, I didn’t think much of that until I walked in the door, but I was early and struck up a conversation with a bartender. It’s not something that they do often, but it seems to me to be the kind of thing they could pull out at will. And it was mostly craft beer! I had a Tankhouse. As the bartender said “It’s quite civilized, if you ask me.”

This is your beer.

Do you know what happens if you let people take drinks into the auditorium to listen to serious classical music? Well, the first thing is that the audience is slightly looser. I sometimes dislike performances of classical music because I feel like I ought to be sitting immobile, which results in an uneasiness. I feel like a slight rustle from the audience will be perceived by the woodwinds, even though I know from having played in wind ensembles that this is not true. In this case, the place was packed to the rafters and the crowd had less inhibition than usual. Everyone behaved themselves. Civilization did not collapse. Peter Oundjian even suggested that we applaud during the breaks if the mood struck us.

The other thing that happens is that since people have drinks to sip, there’s less of the stifled coughing that you usually get in an air conditioned concert hall. You know the kind. The violins descend to a pianissimo pizzicato counterpoint and that’s the moment that you inevitably find that you have a tickle in your throat. Well, not if you’ve got a beverage. You can just take a sip and avoid the annoyed glances from the wealthy dowager in seat 6B.

This is your beer on music.

The other thing that’s worth noting is that Mahler’s fifth is a bloody challenging piece of music. It’s seventy minutes long and has five movements. It was completed in 1902 and was so challenging that it wasn’t premiered in England until the 1930’s. The fourth movement, an Adagietto, was the most accessible part and was usually played as an excerpt before then. It’s technically difficult. The amount of lung capacity needed by the French Horns is such that you had better have an oxygen tent waiting backstage if you’re going to perform it.

The other thing is that it’s not programmatic. That is to say that there’s no story that goes along with it. That might have been alright for Debussy and Berlioz, but Mahler wasn’t having any of that “Prelude To The Afternoon of a Whatsit” stuff. It’s just music. You can ascribe whatever influences from Mahler’s personal life you want, but it’s not designed that way. You can say that it switches from C sharp minor to D major for the final movement and that that’s because he found the love of his life and was recovering from a near death experience while writing it and it’s for that reason that it’s a porthole into the transformative journey of the human soul, but that’s a load of historically revisionist nonsense. It just IS, if that makes any sense.

And it’s beautiful. Not having heard it, you can tell where the musical line is going to go. His melodic lines reach that point and then continue on as if defying expectation. They’ll crescendo to the point where you think that the timpanist is going to wreck his equipment and then back completely off. The finale is so big and brash and joyful and is possessed of so many false endings that it actually made me giggle because it becomes practically a caricature of itself.

The symphony got the longest standing ovation I’ve ever seen at Roy Thompson Hall. Longer than the premiere of Eric idle’s Not The Messiah, anyway. It might have been because of the comparative youth of the audience. It might have been because of the slight inhibition loosening qualities of the drinks they were allowed to bring in. I think, though, that it was because they were expressly informed by the nature of the event that they were allowed to have fun.

Maybe we should look for other ways to get craft beer into cultural venues like this one. It’s not an audience craft beer usually gets, and it seemed to improve peoples’ enjoyment of what is, let’s be honest, a long and challenging symphony. That’s got to be a win for everyone involved.

Posted in: Ontario Craft Beer Week ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Ontario Craft Beer Week – An Epilogue OR “Look Back Hungover”

June 28, 2010 2:58 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Now that the booths have been packed up at the Sunnyside Pavilion and the events of the week have come to an end, it’s a good opportunity to take a look back and see exactly what Ontario Craft Beer Week accomplished. For me, there were high spots and low spots evident throughout the week, but since I’ve already covered my opinions pretty thoroughly (even I’m tired of listening to my prattle), I’ve decided to abide by a new metric: How successful was Ontario Craft Beer Week in spreading the word about Ontario Craft Beer?

One of the problems in sponsoring a week-long series of beer events in Toronto seems to be the fact that preaching to the choir is unavoidable. Without the ability to provide for large media buys and television spots, promotion is available through a relatively limited series of channels. Bar Towel is a good example of this phenomenon. It operates as a good channel of information and the forums are full of people, both registered and lurking, who are definitely interested in going out to the pub and seeing what’s available. There are thirty thousand registered users, which is a pretty good group. The problem is that in order to have heard about Ontario Craft Beer Week through Bar Towel, you would have had to visit the site; you’d already have to be seeking out information about it. The same can essentially be said for TAPS, which has a fairly devoted online following both at their website, but also on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. You’d already need to be following a national beer magazine in order to hear about the events.

Josh Rubin had a nice piece over at the Toronto Star, which was published five days before the events started. It included a limited list of the events taking place throughout Toronto. I’m googling my spacebar off over here, and that’s about all the mainstream coverage that pops up in the first five pages of results. I know that Jed from the Griffin Gastropub had a Breakfast Television interview scheduled on Tuesday. That may have singlehandedly reached a larger audience than all other attempts combined, but a segment like that is a one shot deal. Once it’s over, it’s not going to get replayed unless it makes the website. I didn’t see it linked anywhere online, so I’m guessing that it didn’t (the BT website is down as of this writing, the servers probably having either been set on fire by the black bloc or bashed by a riot shield). There’s nothing in Eye Weekly and there’s nothing in NOW Magazine. It didn’t even make Torontoist.com. I feel as though it should have been possible to reach a larger audience in the run up to the events.

One of the reasons that this difficulty exists is that Ontario Craft Beer Week was put together in a little under eleven weeks. The initial press release for the event went out on March 31st. The first organizational meeting was apparently in the middle of April, meaning that all of the logistics had to be put together within two months. Given that timeframe, what they were able to put together was beyond impressive. When you consider the number of special brews that were put together for the week and the amount of face time put in by the brewers themselves, it’s easy to see that there is definitely a huge amount of enthusiasm within the industry for an event like this. After all, a high tide raises all boats.

I lack the ability to be objective when I’m out reviewing an event, partially because I’m a complete beer nerd and partially because the notes tend to become illegible after a certain number of samples, but let’s have a bit of a think about who actually attended the events that I covered.

Granite Brewery Taste of All Ontario: Father’s Day crowd, but mostly people who are already visiting the Granite.

Bar Volo Belgontario: Young people who are willing to learn about beer and try new things, and a smattering of die hard beer nerds.

Harbord House Beer Dinner: Mostly people who go to Harbord House (based on the ease with which they launched into conversation with each other.)

Cass and Troy’s Pub Crawl: Bartowelers, industry people.

Project XXXX: They got over 150 people out, many of whom you have to assume hadn’t been there before since it was their largest ever turnout.

Session Festival: For the most part, twenty somethings with disposable income who are willing to try new things.

Out of six events, three of them managed to target non-industry people or people  not actually physically attending a brewpub. Just based on volume through the doors, Session was the most successful event in terms of reaching a new audience followed by Belgontario and Project XXXX. I don’t want to guess at the actual numbers.

Ontario Craft Beer Week didn’t misstep. It did the majority of things right when you take into account the fact that nothing like this had ever been tried on this scale. It used the promotional avenues available, even going so far as to put together a video to drum up online interest. It managed to schedule a number of events of different kinds province wide, allowing for peoples’ differing tastes and comfort levels. It was an incredibly important step forward for the Ontario Craft Brewing industry if only because there is now a frame of reference for events of this magnitude. This was a solid program, and hopefully it will encourage fuller participation from Ontario brewers for the next festival. If they’d had more time to prepare, it would have been better.

Speaking of which, Toronto Beer Week will potentially be the first festival to benefit from this testing of the waters. Here are the lessons they need to take away from Ontario Craft Beer Week: If the goal of the event is to raise awareness and reach new audiences, it is simply not enough to use online, industry friendly media outlets. In order to expand the brand of craft brewing generally, there needs to be mainstream media attention. Additionally, you need to get a combination of the larger beer bars in Toronto, and it wouldn’t hurt to get licensees on board that don’t already cater to your existing audience; maybe some kind of Toronto Beer Week “Craft Beer Challenge,” where you get bars that don’t usually serve craft beer to try it out with their clientele. Maybe get the attention of the Firkin group or something. All I know is that there has to be a certain amount of spectacle to get the general public involved.

Feel free, incidentally, to take advantage of the relative anonymity of the comment section to spitball ideas for Toronto Beer Week either based on what you saw this week or just generally.

I am now going go to take advantage of the fact that Ontario Craft Beer Week is over by giving my liver a well deserved hiatus.

There, there, little liver. You’ll be ok.

Posted in: Ontario Craft Beer Week ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Ontario Craft Beer Week – Session: A Craft Beer Festival

June 27, 2010 1:32 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

The concept of launching an Ontario Craft Beer Week is a reasonable proposition. Breweries were able to prepare for the event and put together relatively small gatherings at venues throughout Toronto. The Victory, for instance, had craft beers on tap all this week. Being that they had also had craft beers on tap the week before that and for the last couple of years running, it’s not much of a stretch to throw support behind an additional week. It’s not a big ask to get a bar like Volo to display some excellent Belgian style beers, and it’s not much of a coup to get Great Lakes or Black Oak to produce excellent beer. They were going to do it anyway. These are organizations that will throw down at the drop of a hat and which will gladly throw support behind a local promotion. The fact that there’s an Ontario Craft Beer Week just means that they’ll get more attention for doing the things they’re already doing well.

Innovation, on the other hand, is risky. The Session Craft Beer Festival represents a departure from Toronto’s mainstay beer festival: The Toronto Festival of Beer. I have heard the Toronto Festival of Beer referred to by various people as “a gong show”, “a drunk tank” and “that time I threw up a bunch.” Typically the complaints that you get about the TF o’ B are that they don’t showcase any new products, that it’s incredibly noisy and crowded and that because large national brands are in evidence, it’s relatively difficult to promote smaller brands. This week I heard horror stories about serving beer there; tales of debauchery and pointless violence and poor behavior. Any time that you get ten thousand people together and supply them with an endless stream of lager, things are going to get dicey.

Sunnyside PavilionSession set out to remedy several problems associated with the larger festival. For starters, it’s a much smaller venue than Bandshell Park. The Sunnyside Pavilion, which is a marvel of a bygone age when Lake Ontario was swimmable has, according to the security guard I spoke to, a capacity of about 3000 people. The fact that the festival featured only craft beer removed the influence of national brands and also the presence of their proponents. Tickets to the festival cost $35.00 (and to be fair, included a very nice half pint stein), which has to be viewed as a strategic move on the part of the Griffin Gastropub, who organized the event. It’s certainly restrictive in demographic terms; People who are unwilling to pay the extra four dollars to avoid drinking Lucky Lager are certainly not going to shell out $35.00 for a ticket that doesn’t include beer samples. Once you had been admitted to the festival, samples were quite reasonable. The stein was marked at four ounces and eight ounces, but I suspect that the pours were closer to five ounces and ten ounces. A four-five ounce sample was a dollar, or about four dollars a pint. If you think in terms of comparison to Mondial de la Biere’s model, where admission is free but four ounce samples can run up to five dollars, it no longer seems unreasonable. It’s even fairly clever in that in order to get your money’s worth at Session, you basically had to commit to the whole afternoon.

In the run up to the event, I tried to get some of my beer nerd friends to go with me. None of them were particularly interested. For people who pay fairly close attention to the beer scene in Toronto, Session wasn’t much of a draw. There wasn’t a lot of stuff on tap that you couldn’t purchase at the LCBO or find on tap at other venues during Ontario Craft Beer Week. A lack of unique products limited the draw of the festival for a number of people, especially considering that even three unique beers would probably not have justified the price of admission.

This means that two categories of beer drinkers had been eliminated: Beer Nerds and Buck-a-Beer enthusiasts.

His Ompteeness in a candid momentIt’s a clever strategy, if you pause to think about the fact that the folks at the Griffin Gastropub managed to draw a crowd of twenty somethings with disposable income who are willing to try out new things. It’s unlikely that they would have already tried all of the beers on offer and they probably wouldn’t have gone to many of the other Ontario Craft Beer Week events. It’s fairly likely that these people will walk away from the festival having found something that they liked and that they would drink again and even actively seek out. The key accomplishment for the festival is the fact that they managed to reach and address an important demographic which is, if not untapped, then usually not taken seriously. Between the pricing structure which ensured a captive audience for an afternoon and the lovely scenery around the Sunnyside Pavilion, the attendees were relaxed and genial and even avoided having to wait in long lines.

It should have been an overwhelming success, but there was the timing.

To say that the timing was unfortunate is like claiming that war orphans are underprivileged. This was a beer festival in a remote location in the middle of the world cup on the weekend of the G20 when protestors roamed the streets of Toronto. And it rained! On the way to the festival, I caught the bus out of Keele moments after the announcement that all subway services in downtown Toronto had been stopped due to a security incident, giving the 80 Queensway the feel of the last chopper out of Saigon. People stayed home in droves. You can expect a certain amount of hunkering down when there are seven thousand people walking along Queen Street West, smashing windows and setting fire to police cars. By 3:30, people at the festival were obsessively checking their iPhones for updates on the situation. Throughout the afternoon, the crowd did pick up, but not substantially. Even after the sun came out, the festival remained fairly empty. In point of fact, more people may have been arrested in Toronto yesterday than attended Session.

Beer and a lake: An Ontario WeekendIt may have actually worked in their favour. For the people in attendance, there was the ability to talk to the brewers and actually learn about the beer they were drinking. There was in-depth conversation and people enjoyed themselves. I was able to spend half an hour having a good natured conversation, enjoying a tasty beverage while looking out at Lake Ontario and I was never jostled once. For the people who braved the confusion of the events surrounding the G20, it was a delightful afternoon.

To sum up, Session was a good idea that almost worked. It was valiant attempt at a craft beer festival that didn’t quite make it. I suspect that on any other weekend, this would have been a much greater success. I want the festival to succeed if they do it next year, so all I can hope for is that it can be scheduled during a period with less rioting and arson.

Posted in: Ontario Craft Beer Week, Uncategorized ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Ontario Craft Beer Week – Project XXXX

June 25, 2010 3:00 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Project XicansGreat Lakes Brewery hosts a monthly event called Project X on the second Thursday of each month. At its inception a year ago, the idea was that they would show off one cask conditioned ale and a number of their beers on tap. The $10 membership would get you a t-shirt and inclusion on the mailing list, and you would have to pay $10 on each subsequent visit to cover the cost of snacks. I’ve been out there a couple of times, and it has become fairly obvious to me that the event has evolved way past its original model into something unique. The number of cask conditioned ales on offer has gone through the roof. The event is frequently tied to other, larger events. Project XX was a benefit event with proceeds going to the Women’s Habitat of Etobicoke, featuring food and cask ale produced by women (the rather excellently named Great Lakes “Does this muu-muu make me look Hefe?” Imperial Hefeweizen is seemingly based on one of the beers from this event and is available tonight at Volo). This month’s edition not only marks the one year anniversary of Project X, it ties them to Ontario Craft Beer Week.

This month’s edition, Project XXXX is a fine jumping off point to talk about the spirit of the event. Great Lakes is Toronto’s oldest craft brewery and for the most part the thing that has sustained them to this point are the brews that they have produced in order to appeal to the mass market: Golden Horseshoe Premium Lager and Red Leaf Smooth Red Lager. In 2006 they started releasing more substantial fare and their Devil’s Pale Ale and seasonal releases followed from that point on. There’s a Pumpkin Ale, a Winter Ale, an Orange Peel Ale, a Green Tea Ale and the Crazy Canuck Pale Ale, which was released in time for the 2010 winter olympics. For those of you keeping track at home, that’s six beers that have made it into the LCBO in the last four years.

In order to develop new beers, it seems to me that you need three things: A pilot brewing system, competent and enthusiastic brewers, and the willingness to get the hell out of their way and let them experiment. Great Lakes has all three of these things, and Project X exists in order to show off the results of the process and also to recoup a small amount of the R&D outlay. The sheer variety of products that they’ve produced as a result of experimentation just in the last year is massively impressive. There have been Barley Wines, Double IPAs, West Coast IPAs, Saisons, Rauchbiers, Breakfast Stouts, Imperial Hefeweizens, Hoppy Weissbiers, English Milds, and two beers based on medieval styles and techniques: a Gruit Ale and a Steinbier.

Everyone seems to be getting in on the act. I already talked about David Bieman’s Saison over here. John Bowden is responsible for the Morning Glory Breakfast Stout, which was a favourite at Cask Days last year. And then, there’s Mike Lackey. I’ve spent a small amount of time taunting Mike about his maniacal hop obsession this week, claiming that I was going to make sport of him at some point. I came up with a number of potential jokes, which I include here in a Rostand style categorization:

Melodramatic: When he approaches the mash tun, the soundtrack swells with pizzicato strings.

Chuck Norris: Mike Lackey doesn’t love hops. He hates tooth enamel.

Illegality: Mike Lackey’s hops are delivered daily in bales dropped from a low flying plane.

Corporate: Mike Lackey has more hops than a malfunctioning energizer bunny.

Agrarian: Mike Lackey is personally responsible for the continued subsidy of half the hop growers in Washington State.

Concerned: I hope he doesn’t end up in a padded room, rocking slowly back and forth, repeating “Columbus” over and over.

Straight-up Thievery: He must love the little beer nerds, to give them this to drink.

In truth, there’s no reason to mock the guy. He’s the brewer behind My Bitter Wife IPA, My Bitterer Wife Double IPA, Miami Weiss, Lackey’s Caskey, Armadildo IPA and other excellent products. He’s got a signature style and he may be the only brewer in Ontario whose beer is immediately recognizable. His beer is going into round two of the Volo IPA challenge with a commanding lead and I have no doubt that he’s going to win. The best part, as a beer nerd, is getting to see how he’s tweaking the recipe with every new brew run. It’s a useful insight into the refinement process and a great display of his enthusiasm and ability.

Great Lakes' Take on a Fake LakeProject XXXX had a great party atmosphere. Having lucked out on the weather, Great Lakes splurged on a G20 style fake lake of their own. There was a small lakeside area with Muskoka style deck chairs. They were serving pork and lamb sausages with roasted red peppers and a mixed salad with a Green Tea Ale vinaigrette. The Rollergettes, the Great Lakes affiliated roller derby team, were onhand and provided what looked to be the most entertaining impromptu day care service in the GTA. (Roller Derby Daycare. Someone pitch it to Fox.)

Roller Derby Daycare

Taken moments before little Johnny was hipchecked into oncoming traffic.

They invited F&M, Flying Monkeys and Muskoka to supply casks for the event. F&M supplied a Strawberry Blonde lager, which was refreshing in the afternoon sun. Muskoka brought a dry-hopped Cream Ale. Peter Chiodo from Flying Monkeys brought both a cask and bottles of his new Smashbomb IPA (72 IBU, Citra Hops) in order to allow people to do a side by side tasting. The cask version had an effusive mouthfeel and an overwhelming citrus quality, while the bottle version was served slightly colder and seems to concentrate its attack on the mid palate. Great Lakes provided Lackey’s Caskey, My Bitter Wife and Miami Weiss.

If you haven’t been out to Project X yet, you’re missing out. Next month will be different, but no less impressive. It’s definitely worth the trek out to Royal York and the Queensway. Plus, where else can you get great food and sample several kinds of beer for ten bucks?

Posted in: Ontario Craft Beer Week ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,