St. John's Wort Beery Musings and Amusing Beers

Category Archives: Shameless Plugs

Book Review – The Audacity Of Hops

May 28, 2013 10:41 pm ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

Recently, I was sent a copy of Tom Acitelli’s new book, The Audacity Of Hops, for review purposes. I finished it last week and I can tell you that it’s well worth reading. The prose is engaging and the story that it tells of craft beer’s rise to prominence is thoroughly well researched and entertaining. It’s not exactly a page turner, but for a book that has 40 pages of notes and bibliographical references, he’s done a great job of keeping it factually dense without having it become a slog.

It’s a book that has become necessary, especially since we’re now well into a third generation of people for whom craft beer is relatively normal. If you were born in Ontario in 1994, you can now drink. I see people in their early 20’s for whom locally made IPAs have always been around. That’s progress.

The problem is that without a proper chronicle of the good old days, like Acitelli’s book, it can be difficult to understand that this wasn’t always the case. It must seem inevitable if you are just now starting to drink beer that craft beer will continue to grow and expand in infinite ways. It has, in other words, become commonplace.

The Audacity Of Hops is really best compared to something like The Right Stuff. It wasn’t inevitable that Gordon Cooper was going to spend a whole day orbiting the earth. I don’t mean to suggest that craft beer is as important as manned space travel. What I mean to suggest is that the narrative structure is the same.

The analogy might not stand up indefinitely, so I won’t push it too far. Suffice it to say that when Chuck Yeager was flying test planes it was about pushing the envelope and seeing what was possible. It was the Wild West in terms of aeronautics. At the beginning of the exploration of space you had the Mercury Seven astronauts. You had a small number of people capable of doing a difficult and demanding thing. The public knew them and loved them. They were personalities as much as they were pilots and astronauts.

In any endeavor, there’s a brief period of time when it is associated with the personalities that excelled at the beginning. Whether they succeed or fail, there’s a tendency to impose upon their stories, if you’re reporting on them, a sense of dramatic struggle.

This is where Acitelli succeeds. He makes Fritz Maytag, Jack McAuliffe, Ken Grossman, Charlie Papazian, Michael Jackson and Jim Koch look as though they were all taking on the world from the same angle, all intentionally cahooting. You’ve got independent brewers and people running semi-legal homebrewing shops and people writing about beer, and all of these folks are pushing the envelope of what’s possible. It may not have resulted in the International Space Station and the Mars Rover, but heck, we’ve gotten some pretty good beer out of it.

The book kind of slows down towards the modern day. This is interesting, since there’s more information about more breweries and more brands of beer and more writers than ever there were before. Is it informational glut? Is it simply that it’s hard to put together a comprehensive history of two years ago if you’re attempting to thread a narrative through to the future?

This is a problem that craft beer faces, and it’s similar to the issues NASA faced following the moon landing. The initial narrative has more or less run its course.

The main issue with having legendary exemplars of an industry like Fritz Maytag, Jack McAuliffe and the others is that they’re by nature iconoclastic figures. These are, by and large, highly intelligent people who didn’t like what they were doing and chose a new career. Jim Koch ran against Mitt Romney for the presidency of their Harvard Business School class, for God’s sake. He probably could have done anything, but he chose beer.

I’ve mentioned before, probably in the context of the sale of Goose Island to AB In-Bev, that this iconoclasm tends to be a mixed blessing for the craft brewing industry. Without a certain amount of gumption, we wouldn’t be where we are today. The fact that people took risks on an unproven industry in the late 70’s and early 80’s is the only reason we’re experiencing this renaissance of locally produced beer. In some ways, it’s a good thing.

There are downsides, though. Because it’s one person’s dream, it’s not necessarily a generational, familial type of business. Eventually, the people who started the earlier breweries find themselves to be of a certain age and begin to think about retiring. Breweries are huge businesses with a lot of equity sunk into equipment and branding and it soon becomes evident that you have to sell the whole thing as a going concern. Depending on who you sell to, the public might get fickle. Goose Island got blowback on their sale. Someone like Peter McAuslan, who recently sold his St. Ambroise to Brasseurs RJ, was simply wished well.

At some point, the rest of the pioneers involved at the beginning of craft beer will also fade out of the narrative structure of craft beer. Fritz Maytag is retired. Michael Jackson (who I increasingly wish I had gotten to meet) passed away a few years ago and is already part of a new iconography. Jim Koch turned 64 the other day. Charlie Papazian is 67. These folks will eventually want to (or have to) retire.

The problem is this: You never get the power of the original narrative back. Yes, there are now more craft breweries than ever. Yes, it’s an increasingly global fascination. However, there are now more voices than ever and its becoming increasingly unlikely that they will all continue to sing from the same hymnal.

You can probably name all three of the astronauts involved in the first moon landing. It was a momentous event. If pressed, you might be able to name two astronauts from the 1980’s. You probably can’t tell me the names of the people on the ISS at the moment. Sometimes, NASA lucks out and gets personalities like Commander Hadfield and they manage to bring attention to space exploration. That’s about as good as they’re going to be able to do because you can’t be the first man on the moon twice.

Craft beer is going to be like that. Acitelli chronicles the deeds of Greg Koch, Tony Magee, Kim Jordan, Sam Calagione and Garrett Oliver. The problem is that despite the fact that they’re excellent spokespeople for the industry, the industry is now so large that I’m not sure there can reliably be one spokesperson for any aspect of it.

The milestone Acitelli chooses to end the historical narrative on is the fact that there are now more breweries than there were a century ago, before prohibition. A very reasonable question to ask, and one that Craft Beer should be asking itself far more frequently is “now what?”

Posted in: Reviews, Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , ,

The Twisted Kilt

April 27, 2013 9:36 pm ⋅ 5 Comments ⋅

In this week’s column, I answered one of the most frequently asked questions that I get, which is “What do YOU drink.” I imagine that anyone with a beer blog or column gets that question quite a bit. Most people go with the tried and tested answer “a lot of different things, depending on…” and then there’s a brief period where they name variables like whether it’s the third Tuesday in the month or which direction the wind is blowing.

I’ve answered the question with the choice of the moment. That’s different than having a favorite beer, by the way. My suspicion has always been that everyone who writes about beer probably has a favorite beer, but that since it is massively impolitic to answer the question, we’re allowed to get away with proportional amounts of prevarication.

The other question that I get a lot is “Well, where do you drink?”

I get around. I’ve been to most of the beer bars in Toronto at one point or another, and I have to say that I’m generally happiest in my local pub. This was not always the case. One of the reasons that I became a beer writer was because my local pub inexplicably went downhill at some point in 2007. I ended up hanging out at Bar Volo instead, which is the kind of place that just drills beer information into you and convinces you to take pen in hand.

The Twisted Kilt is looks improbably like the faux tudor pubs in England look.

The Twisted Kilt looks improbably like the faux Tudor pubs in England look.

The Bow and Arrow, as it was then, had some serious problems. First of all, it’s a relatively large pub and it seats something like a hundred at a time, and probably more than that if it’s busy. By the time the Bow and Arrow was on its last legs, there might have been 20-30 people in at once on a Friday night. It was maudlin. The carpets hadn’t been replaced in living memory and the pub had acquired that stale beer smell that goes along with that condition. The food had gone downhill. It was caught in a miserable spiral of less income leading to less upkeep leading to less income.

It was Brutal. If you had wanted to write a textbook on running a place into the ground, you could have looked at the Bow and Arrow at its nadir and worked backwards for your narrative.

At some point about three years ago, it became The Twisted Kilt. People periodically misread that and think that I’m talking about the Tilted Kilt chain of breastaraunts that are creeping into the Ontario market. Just the other day David Ort asked me whether I worried what people thought when I updated Untappd from a place like that. I wasn’t really upset that he thought I would frequent a place where the waitresses excuse a certain amount of obscene leering for a 25% tip. I was upset that he was impugning my pub. (For the record, I don’t care how good people claim the wings at Hooters are. Being a server in a pub is hard enough without having to display your décolletage for douchebags.)

Just for contrast, that's the minto building at Yonge/Eglinton in the background, highlighting the improbability of a faux tudor frontage existing in the same neighbourhood.

Just for contrast, that’s the minto building at Yonge/Eglinton in the background, highlighting the improbability of a faux tudor frontage existing in the same neighbourhood.

The Twisted Kilt, while occupying the same space that the Bow and Arrow occupied, could provide a different textbook entirely. It has been building up relatively constantly for a few years now, and this is mostly due to having good management. The owner, John, is the kind of guy who looks at his enterprise on a nearly daily basis and attempts to decide what he can improve. This is a good quality in a pub owner.

Take the beer selection, for instance. When he started out the variety of stuff on tap was a bit samey. There were some standard Ontario offerings. There were some English Ales and some Euro Lagers. It wasn’t a very interesting lineup. At some point subtle changes started to be made. A crop of Paulaner lagers showed up one month along with a new beer tower.

Nowadays, when I go in there, he’s always got something to show me. They’re starting to get beers on tap before the other pubs in Toronto. He’s got Ommegang Hennepin. He’s got Maredsous. He’s got Hofbrau Munchen and Black Oak Pale Ale; a one-two sessionability punch that I’m not sure you can beat. It’s one of the most balanced tap lineups I’ve seen in town. Not European for the sake of being European. Not Craft for the sake of being Craft. It’s more or less one of everything.

When you consider the small number of taps and the location of the pub, the variety of the selection is boggling.

When you consider the small number of taps and the location of the pub, the variety of the selection is boggling.

He’s working on getting a selection of bottles of Belgian beer in. I haven’t seen the list recently, but I remember that some of the bottles were things no one else has. Part of the draw is the value for money. Duvel’s on at $6.50 a bottle (the regulars are now apparently going through about two cases a week). Westvleteren 12 is priced at $20.00. I popped in on Thursday night and he asked me whether I thought Green Flash in bottles was a good idea. The week before that, he was showing me pictures of the new chairs the pub will get in a few weeks. I have rarely seen a grown man so excited by chairs.

Of course, it’s not just about the beer. He’s managed to hire good people and keep them on. All of the bartenders have been there since the day the pub opened, which is something I don’t believe I’ve seen elsewhere. Turnover amongst the servers is fairly low as well. The food continues to improve, having gotten to the point where it’s near becoming a gastropub. I’ve gotten to the point where I trust them enough that I just order the special if I’m staying for dinner.

If you ask people about the beer scene in Toronto fifteen years ago, they’d probably mention that the Bow and Arrow was one of the highlights and that its sister pub The Woolwich Arms in Guelph was great too. I was at the Bow and Arrow fifteen years ago, and I can tell you that the Twisted Kilt is better than the Bow and Arrow ever was. It hit that mark about three months ago and it’s climbing steadily. It bustles. Wednesday through Saturday, it hums the way a neighbourhood pub ought to. They’re going to have to open the second floor.

Sometimes, I have tried to get some writing done at the table in the upstairs window. It has never led to productivity.

Sometimes, I have tried to get some writing done at the table in the upstairs window. It has never led to productivity.

It took me a long time to write about The Twisted Kilt because there are really appealing qualities in having a neighbourhood pub that isn’t a destination. For one thing, it is just barely sparsely populated enough that I usually get the same stool. That’s not going to last forever. It keeps getting better in minutely perceptible ways on a weekly basis and eventually quality will out. As a beer nerd, it’s fun to watch the progression. For me, it’s practically like a spectator sport. I don’t know that it’s one of the best pubs in the city yet, but if it keeps ticking along as it has it will be soon.

 

 

Posted in: Reviews, Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: ,

In Which I Plug The Brewer’s Plate

April 11, 2013 4:47 pm ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

I’m sitting here and I’m trying to come up with an interesting and insightful way to plug The Brewer’s Plate.

I mean, you could go with “It’s one of the premiere events of the Toronto beer scene!” or “It just keeps getting bigger and better!” or “I know $125.00 seems like a bit of a spend, but it’s a better value than last year since there’s even more stuff!” or “They support a marvelous charity called Not Far From The Tree that you should look at!” or “Jamie Kennedy’s going to be there, and he’s a pretty nice guy” or “Hey, wanna learn about beer and food?! This is the place to do it!”

Any or all of these things would be accurate things to say about it. I could plug previous editions that I’ve written about, like the one from two years ago at the Wychwood Artscape Barns. That was a nice day, except for the rather startling man on stilts trying to navigate through an increasingly compact throng.

But the truth is that just about everyone has already done it.  I was asked if I’d get the word out about the event, and unfortunately, I just couldn’t figure out a way to make it play nationally in the newspaper, because I suspect there’s nothing worse than reading about an event you really want to go to in another province that you can’t possibly get to. I mean, there’s some disgruntled foodie in Edmonton who’s looking at that if it’s an article and thinking “Curse your eyes, Jordan St. Whatsit, you slightly tipsy scribbler! This is not relevant to my interests in an immediate way although possibly we could steal the idea!”

I mean, I can’t even give it the Craft Beer Advent Calendar treatment with the bad doggerel. What am I going to do, rhyme it in Homeric couplets? It would be a challenge to try that with some of the chefs’ last names. Karen Vaz for instance could only merit Hudibrastic poetry given that she works at the Rebel House (and even then only if you’re a cockney). There was a brief appeal in that Barbara Frum and Atrium seem like a natural.

The brewer’s plate is going to be excellent. I don’t know exactly what the highlights are going to be. There are celebrity chefs in addition to the regular chefs this year.  There are more regular chefs than there were last year! One of them is Howard Dubrovsky, who cooked what was possibly the best beer and food pairing event I’ve ever been to! His seafood chowder was so good I considered offering him an involuntary unpaid internship at St.John’s Wort.

There’s so much stuff that you’ll never get through all of it. There’s just no chance. You could be three people and you’d still never manage it. There’s a silent auction! You might win stuff! It’s going to be exciting. There’s going to be music and people and entertainment and slightly drunken revelry and people are going to have a really, really good time.

So buy a ticket already and send a shirt to the dry cleaners. It’s going to be awesome!

Posted in: Beer and Food, Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

WURST Calgary

March 18, 2013 12:51 am ⋅ 7 Comments ⋅

When I was in Calgary last month, there was one place I visited that didn’t really fit into the overarching narrative of the beer halls that are springing up there, and this is because it doesn’t really do North American craft beers in the same way that the other beer halls do. WURST is more interested in serving traditional German beers and in creating a somewhat more authentic Bavarian beer hall atmosphere.

__WURST Badge

The truth of the matter is that I didn’t know exactly what to do with what I was seeing within the larger context. All I know is that this sort of thing doesn’t really exist in Toronto in the same way. There isn’t the same dedication to the concept. We have WVRST, which is unrelated and very good, but the selection of beer is wider and the focus of the food menu is narrower.

The first thing that you need to know about WURST is that it’s incredibly tastefully appointed. The main dining room in the upstairs section has gone for a beer garden feel complete with trees indoors and it feels a great deal more like a fine dining establishment than I was expecting. Since I was there on a survey of the Calgary beer scene, we retired to the downstairs section, which is more traditionally a beer hall with long table communal seating and a large selection of taps featured prominently at the bar. One of the nicest features of the place is the set of lockers that is visible as you descend the main staircase. They hold dozens of steins which are reserved for regular visitors to the beer hall. It’s a lovely touch that I’ve seen discussed in other pubs, but never brought to fruition on quite this scale.Wurst 1

The reason I’m writing about WURST now is that they have a launch on the 20th. They’re bringing in Hofbrau Munchen (and if anyone can tell me how to make this keyboard produce an umlaut, you’ll be thanked). I want to suggest to you that these are beers worth trying, and as a matter of fact they’re showing up across the country. I believe we’re meant to be getting them in Ontario shortly as well. Plus, Hofbrau has a new beer hall opening in Chicago. The Germans are an industrious people.

I think that it was because I had not announced a specific agenda that I was poured nearly a half pint of everything that was on tap at WURST and could be said to hail vaguely from the region of Bavaria. This may have coloured my impression of the lunchtime I spent there, as might the fact that they were served by a lovely young lady who looked capable of wrapping a stein around your head if you cracked wise about her lederhosen. I think you want a waitress you can respect (and possibly fear a little).

That said, my favourites were the Ayinger Brau Weiss, which I think is a very underrated beer (four dollars at the LCBO, Junior Rangers!) and the Hofbrau Munich Helles.

You have to understand: A month of drinking discount beer after going for the hoppiest thing going will do interesting things to your palate. If you drink a 60 IBU beer regularly, and that is your baseline… well, I’m sorry, but your palate is absolutely wrecked. The level of bitterness you enjoy has creeped up to the point that you’re probably not a great judge of stuff less hoppy than that. I have come back from February realizing that Black Oak Pale Ale may not be generally considered to be a hoppy brew, but it is. It just is.

At the midpoint, at twenty days of macro lager, Hofbrau Munich Helles was revelatory. It explained so much. Like, “why were the American 19th century breweries trying to copy this” and “why is 90% of the world’s beer lager?” The Hofbrau Munich Helles is just this beautifully poised, wonderfully balanced beer with a slightly honeyed sweetness that fades to increasing bitterness which fades away. The mouthfeel is marvelous. The carbonation is perfect. It’s balanced on the edge of a knife. I have a friend, Greg Sherry, who has periodically worn a Hofbrau Munchen hat to beer festivals. It made him look like Gandalf the Slightly Tipsy. I will never make fun of him again.

I’m sure the dark is good too, but in that moment the Helles was the first beer I tasted and I looked at the rest of the tasting glasses and thought “can’t I just stick with this?”

Truly, a really impressive charcuterie platter at WURST.

Truly, a really impressive charcuterie platter at WURST.

The other thing I should mention is that Grant Parry is doing a really excellent job in the kitchen. The charcuterie and cheese platter was marvelous down to the speck and landjager and this buffalo bresaola that I think he called wunderfleisch. Everything that reasonably can be is sourced locally. Much of the Charcuterie came from down the highway in Canmore. There is some really lovely stuff on offer.

The food that came out of the kitchen looked better than anything I’ve ever seen in a beer hall. Maria Mendelman, their events manager, ordered a Chicken dish that looked fantastic. I asked Grant what they do that no one else does. I should have known there would be trouble when he giggled to himself.

I want to introduce you to the BAVARIAN WING.

The concept here is that you take a chicken wing and bone it out.

They have a special sausage applicator for making the BAVARIAN WING.

They have a special sausage applicator for making the BAVARIAN WING.

Then, you stuff the wing with sausage.

And here it is in action!

And here it is in action!

You poach the whole issue, dry it off and coat it in pretzel crumbs. Then you cover it in hot sauce.

You know you want it. It's delicious. It's a terrible idea, but it is delicious.

You know you want it. It’s delicious. It’s a terrible idea, but it is delicious.

The BAVARIAN WING is a … well, let’s just say that someday it’ll end up in front of a tribunal at The Hague. They come three to an order, apparently. It is exactly the right kind of mistake to make at about 11:30 PM after a long night of hoisting a stein. It is exactly right for the venue, and it is the kind of thing that you need after an enthusiastic evening of drinking Hofbrau Munich Helles.

If you’re in or around Calgary this Wednesday, WURST is where you want to be. There’s food that is some of the best I’ve seen around beer in Canada. There’s a beer that really deserves some attention. And, if you get to the point in the evening where it’s death or glory, there’s the BAVARIAN WING.

If you’re in Ontario, you should also check out the Hofbrau Munich Helles. It’ll be on tap somewhere near you shortly.

Posted in: Reviews, Shameless Plugs, Uncategorized ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Left Field Brewery

March 9, 2013 12:28 am ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

There are advantages to writing a book with a guy. For instance, it’s a good bet that you’re going to get the first samples of his brewery’s new beer.

I’m talking of course about Mark Murphy, co-author of How To Make Your Own Brewskis: The Go To Guide For Craft Beer Enthusiasts. The link is to the right, if you don’t already own a copy of this book. If I may borrow from Douglas Adams, I’ll point out that it has two advantages over Charlie Papazian’s Complete Joy Of Homebrewing. Firstly, it is slightly cheaper. Secondly, it has the words “Yes You Can!” in big friendly letters on the cover.

It strikes me that I ought to be entirely honest with you basically immediately. I don’t know how objective I can possibly be when I’m reviewing a beer brewed by a man with whom I have written a book about brewing beer. I would advise you to take my opinion with a grain of salt, although I shall try as reasonably hard to be objective as I possibly can given that it is 11:45 PM and that I have already issued a caveat.

Mark and his lovely wife Mandie have started a new brewery called Left Field. Mark has amassed some not inconsiderable brewing experience over the last few years and Mandie has a lot of experience in alcohol sales and marketing. They’re both incredibly stable people. This bodes well for the brewery.

The brewery is baseball themed. This comes as little surprise to me as I don’t believe that I have ever seen Mark Murphy without a baseball cap. The subtle difference in his appearance tonight when he arrived with sample bottles is that he now has a baseball cap with the logo of the brewery on it. It is a Brooklyn Dodgers era inspired “L”. I like that a great deal, having grown up on Dad’s stories of Duke Snider and Flatbush.

The first beer from Left Field is called “Eephus.” It is an Oatmeal Brown Ale.

This is a nice conceptual effort. I can count on one finger the number of Oatmeal Brown Ales I have ever tried. An Eephus pitch is something you throw when you’re looking to catch the batter off guard. R.A. Dickey, who the Blue Jays have just signed doesn’t quite throw an Eephus, but the principle is the same. He has a painfully slow curveball that drops a foot when you swing at it.  Dave Steib threw Eephus pitches periodically. It’s sort of an attention getter. It messes with the batter’s brain. What’s the guy going to throw next?

This is a good explanation for launching with an Oatmeal Brown Ale in Ontario at the moment. If you consider IPAs a 98 mile an hour fastball, this really is an Eephus. It’s not something that you’re expecting.

To give you some idea, I’m aware of two Oatmeal Brown Ales. One is Cigar City’s Maduro, which I have tried. The other is The Beer Academy’s Oatmeal Brown Ale, which I have not. There are probably more of them, but the fact that I’ve only ever heard of two and have a greater breadth of context than most people makes it about as rare as anything I can think of.

Brown Ale is not something you see a lot at the moment. It’s an underappreciated style. Oatmeal Brown Ale is slightly different because it has a little more body because of the oats in the grist. It’s given a thicker, more substantial mouthfeel. Eephus doesn’t quite get slick in the way an Oatmeal Stout does. I would guess that there are fewer residual sugars to aid that property.

The label boasts that “This American Brown Ale finds its sweet spot with dark, dried fruit aromas, a touch of bitterness and spicy woodiness, and a surprisingly creamy smooth taste.” I’m happy to say that it does exactly what it says on the tin. I’d compare it favourably to Cigar City Maduro, although it’s worth pointing out that it’s slightly hoppier and has a little less sweetness to it.

I also like the label, which is understated and tells you everything that you might want to know about the beer. ABV. IBU. SRM.

I know it's not a very good picture, but you try taking a picture while holding up a bottle with a broken arm. It's fine, thanks. Range of motion is improving, but I'm on the six week DL.

I know it’s not a very good picture, but you try taking a picture while holding up a bottle with a broken arm. It’s fine, thanks. Range of motion is improving, but I’m on the six week DL.

I knew Mark was a good brewer, but I’m pleasantly surprised by the complexity here.

I asked him whether he was worried that the fate of his branding might depend on how well the Jays do in 2013, which is touted by many as the year they might actually do something. Say Encarnacion blows an ACL or something and they slide to third in the AL East by the All-Star Break? Mark was unworried. This was before I tried the beer. I can see why he was unworried.

I asked him whether he had the ability to produce enough beer to keep up with demand if the Jays go on a tear and end up in October. Say Colby Rasmus suddenly has a 40 game mullet powered hit streak. What then? People will order the beer with the baseball themed tap handle. Mark is unworried.

He’s an unflappable baseball-cappable man. It’s one of the reasons I like the guy so much. Stoicism is important in baseball and in brewing.

I have run out of nice things to say about this beer, so here is a list of 10 bad and relatively hackneyed Baseball Themed names he should consider to expand his lineup.

10. Lloyd Goseby

9. Roberto Ale-omar

8. The Ol’ Dipsy Doodle (Barley Wine)

7. Kenesaw Mountain Lambic

6. Citra Gaston IPA

5. Dopplebalk

4. Wit By Pitch

3. Lawrie (Clearly, a Brett beer)

2. Rally Cap (Actually a good name, which would be an excellent playoff beer)

1. Doug Ault-bier.

Posted in: Reviews, Shameless Plugs, Uncategorized ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

They Send Me Beer: Grand River Brewing

January 11, 2013 9:02 am ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

I’m always happy to receive beer from Grand River Brewing. I got to know Bob Hannenberg a little bit during a stopover in Philadelphia on the way to the craft brewing conference in San Diego last year. I like Bob, and generally speaking, I like much of the beer that he produces. I like the grainy heft of Galt Knife Lager and I think that if I could only choose one Ontario beer to drink in perpetuity, it would probably be the Mill Race Mild. Part of the attraction there is that it is a beer that you can have two of and then go do something afterwards. Welsh style Dark Mild. Gotta love it.

This time around, they have sent me two beers, which are sort of outside the brewery’s mission statement of lower alcohol beers. They have sent the Jubilation Winter Warmer and the Russian Gun Imperial Stout.

While the beer itself is very tasty indeed, you can't actually read the entire label without turning the bottle. I had not noticed that before.

While the beer itself is very tasty indeed, you can’t actually read the entire label without turning the bottle. I had not noticed that before.

Jay Burnett, who dropped the beers off for me, has thoughtfully provided a fact sheet. I would like to share with you the story of Russian Gun.

The Russian gun, (or Gun as we call it) is named after the Queens square cannon that sits in downtown Galt, Cambridge. The cannon was awarded to the town of Galt for its support of the English troops during the Crimean war which ended in 1856.

That year, to celebrate the victory during Victoria Day, the Cannon was fired at noon. The men firing the cannon successfully fired three shots. However, during the fourth, the powder prematurely exploded, killing both men, charring their upper bodies beyond human recognition and dismembering the arms and hands of both men; Two children were lightly scratched.

That right there, ladies and gentlemen, is the darkest backstory on any beer in Ontario. I mean, I considered calling a sumac beer Wendigo which refers to a psychosis in which people come to believe they’re possessed and turn to cannibalism.  I thought better of it, since no one is ordering Sweeny Todd’s Red Ale.

Still, Russian Gun is a good name conceptually for a Russian Imperial Stout. It’s got the Sevastopol connection from the Crimea and it represents a local history that helps define the brewery. That’s something. Plus, those two children got away comparatively unscathed.

The beer itself pours a completely opaque black with a resilient tan head that laces nicely. The aroma contains more smoke than I remember from previous years. One of the strengths of Grand River is that they can alter recipes from year to year on their seasonal beers without causing too much fuss. I think the 2010 version had more cocoa character to it. It’s a solid Imperial Stout with quite a bit of character.

The bottle I have here was packaged on the 19th of December and it’s my impression that this could do with a little bit of time to round out the rougher edges. I’m getting a lot of roast character off of it ranging from chocolate to coffee to a small amount of char, which is not entirely unappealing given the small amount of smoke in the aroma. There’s a note of drying fruit in the middle of the aroma; Like apples drying out in a root cellar. It’s in LCBOs at the moment. If you pick some up now, it will probably be in even better shape by the end of February. The fact sheet says it’s 9.0% alcohol, but the bottle says 8.0%. I’d be inclined to believe the fact sheet, based on the slight heat.

See? You've got to turn the bottle. Me, I would narrow the thing and put "Imperial Stout" in a smaller font, but what do I know? I'm shortsighted and partially colourblind.

See? You’ve got to turn the bottle. Me, I would narrow the thing and put “Imperial Stout” in a smaller font, but what do I know? I’m shortsighted and partially colourblind.

I know people who set aside bottles of Russian Gun for vertical tastings, which seems weird to me because the recipe seems to tweak annually, thus defeating the purpose somewhat, but it probably makes for a nice evening.

Jubilation Winter Warmer is available at the brewery this year, and you’re going to have to go down to Galt to get it. It’s 7.0% and it is, for my taste, cinnamon heavy. It contains too much cinnamon for its own good, becoming unbalanced. I think that the Highballer Pumpkin Ale did that this year as well. Like I mentioned earlier, since the recipe on the Jubilation Winter Warmer changes from year to year, this is not really a condemnation. Next year it will probably not contain so much cinnamon.

The thing that Jubilation represents is a switch in packaging. For the first time since I can remember, the bottle is not a 500ml bottle with the typical Grand River labeling. It’s a 650ml bomber with a much improved label that speaks to the fact that there are changes occurring at Grand River. I don’t doubt that just about every blogger or journalist that has talked to them over the last few years has mentioned that they needed new labels. That’s happening.

Of course I’ve thrown out the bottle, so I don’t have a picture of it. Trust me, it’s a marked improvement. It’s interesting to see how Grand River is evolving, and one of the things I like about them is that the change is comparatively unhurried. Some breweries, if told that their labels were sort of hokey looking, would panic and try to change things immediately. Grand River is content to change things slowly, and I suspect that’s partially because they know they have a good product and that their clientele are not going anywhere.

Posted in: LCBO Releases, Reviews, Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

They Send Me Beer: Radical Road Brewing Canny Man

January 6, 2013 4:47 pm ⋅ 7 Comments ⋅

I’m always interested when something I’m not expecting happens. For instance, I didn’t expect the brewers at Black Oak to start up their own label. They’ve been a bit cagey about it as the thing has developed and I don’t think that anyone knew quite what to expect. It was probably last winter I was talking to Simon Da Costa about this development. It must have been, because the pub next to Volo was still Local 4 and we were in there discussing it.

He said he was going to brew a Scotch Ale, that he was going to barrel age it. I looked at him and said something to the effect of “And that’s going to be your only beer? Are you crazy?” He looked at me and shrugged. When he did so, the sleeves of his well loved motorcycle jacket looked like they would probably fall off. He explained that he had worked in Scotland and he thought it would work.

Months later, dozens and dozens of Scotch barrels arrived at Black Oak. Mostly mainland, speyside barrels, if I’m remembering correctly. You’d have been forgiven, based on the number, for putting on your best welsh regimental accent and muttering to yourself “There’s thousands of them.” One week I walked into the brewery and the entire back wall was taken up with barrels.

At one point, I told Simon and Jon Hodd, who worked with him on this, that I thought they were maniacs. Who the hell imports scotch barrels in order to launch a beer? Were all the beers out of their label going to be barrel aged? Were they crazy?

Now, understand that I like both of these people. Simon is talented and funny and unassuming and gets on with the difficult job of brewing. Jon, who I tend to refer to as “Jon Boy” after the Waltons, since he’s so wholesome, is a good brewer in his own right, having come up through Volo. I really wanted to get a sense of what they were doing. I wanted to try their beer.

It was tantalizing. It was a secret project. As far as I know, no one had really tried the thing. At some point in the last couple of months, I wrote an article on Scotch Ales for The Sun and I called around to see if they’d let me try some. It wasn’t ready. Rather than attempt to get national promotion, they wanted the product to be as they envisioned it before anyone got to try it.

Today, I finally got my hands on a bottle. Now, my understanding is that they’ve spent most of the morning packaging the bottles. When you see the following photos, I have no doubt that you’ll understand why.

There’s the brewery label.

It's a Rad enough label to save the President.

It’s a Rad enough label to save the President.

And the beer label.

It's a coaster! It's a promotional gimmick! It's a coaster and a promotional gimmick!

It’s a coaster! It’s a promotional gimmick! It’s a coaster and a promotional gimmick!

And the tissue wrapping.

I'm saving this for Christmas next year.

I’m saving this for Christmas next year.

And the actual cork and cage bottle.

The actual label is sort of austere and impressive. I have liked fancy labels a lot less than this.

The actual label is sort of austere and impressive. I have liked fancy labels a lot less than this.

I suppose if you’re going to make a splash on shelves in Ontario LCBOs, this is not such a bad way to do it. It’s eye catching. It’s a bit like Rod Stewart’s hair. It’s hypnotic, and then, once you realize that he’s got your attention, it’s too late to stop singing along to Young Turks.

Knowing what I know about Simon and Jon, I’m a little surprised by the beer.  Canny Man is 9.1% and comes in what is essentially a champagne bottle. It has apparently been matured for 71 days in the barrels. I don’t know how you decide when enough is enough. I guess you have a sacrificial guinea pig barrel with a draw pipe.

It pours a sort of chestnut brown, relatively aggressively carbonated for the style. The interesting thing to me is that usually when North American brewers do Scotch Ales or Wee Heavies, they build the smoke in. I’ve confirmed with Jon that they used a tiny amount of smoked malt here, so most of the smoke comes from the barrels. The reason that’s interesting to me is that this is sort of what I remember McEwan’s being like. There’s that malt caramel/toffee/fruity middle. That’s what the beer would probably have been like without the barrel aging. It’s a proper wee heavy, which has been subsequently introduced to the barrel.

You can tell that’s what happened because the smoky notes from the barrel linger on the roof of the palate. It sort of separates into a toffee dark fruit middle while smoke wisps over top. It’s odd because it means that it is simultaneously as close to being a real wee heavy as anything I’ve tried in the last year while playing into the North American predilection for adding smoke to Scotch Ales. The effort that must have gone into getting the beer exactly right and locating the right barrels to make it happen is a little staggering, especially for two maniacs in Etobicoke.

I should have listened to Simon when he said that he knew it would work. There are only two criticisms that I can see being leveled at this beer. One is that the packaging is… well, it’s ostentatious. I understand that there is a sweatshop over at Black Oak working into the night on tissue paper wrapping. That’s easily fixed after the first edition makes a splash. It would do just fine with only the bottle. The labeling is pretty enough to sell the thing.

The other criticism I can see is that the molasses seems to have fermented out quite a bit and that it may not be sweet enough for some palates. It’s not like an Innis & Gunn barrel aged beer. It’s drier than that, but not so dry that you don’t get the body.

The impressive thing to me is that all of this activity has closed around Robbie Burns day. Theoretically, it’ll be available in the LCBO sometime this week and it should make an appearance at some Robbie Burns dinners this year.

Canny men, more like.

Posted in: Reviews, Shameless Plugs, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

The Craft Beer Advent Calendar

November 7, 2012 11:03 pm ⋅ 6 Comments ⋅

I would like to apologize in advance. 

 

‘Twas the month before Christmas and in my apartment,

The beers overflowed from the storage compartment

The fridge had no room left for soy sauce or jelly

On the bright side, no leftovers rendered it smelly

 

This infrequently happens to your beer reporter,

But sometimes with packages sent from importers

And brewers who’ve got a new product who think

That a bottle of this beer is what you should drink

 

They usually email to say that it’s coming

And this month the igoogle inbox was humming

The PR releases could choke a small camel

Or some lesser species of quadruped mammal

 

You usually know what the beer’s going to be

They list malts and hops and if it’s on lees

And although the packages come in all sizes

There frequently aren’t very many surprises

 

But one day an email arrived from out west

Craft Beer Importers, in a fit of beau geste,

were sending a package, a Christmassy present

I wasn’t to open until it was advent.

 

The concept is simple: December progresses;

Each day there’s a beer and with hope it impresses.

Not one of the beers have been sold here before.

There’s promise and wonder with each opened door.

 

With a chime of the buzzer and a knock on the door,

My package arrived and was set on the floor,

The man who delivered was nervous and wary,

That comes with the job, if the job is Beer Fairy.

 

His coveralls stank of a spilled pint of lager

His belly was proof that he wasn’t a jogger

Decorum was naught to this drunken old elf.

He burped and he farted and scratched at himself.

 

His cheeks, how they flushed! His stare it was glassy!

The Beer Fairy’s never mistaken for classy.

He thrust out a waybill and lent me his pen.

I signed, and he staggered back off to his van.

 

As I unwrapped the package I heard a small hubbub

“Sod this for a laugh, now I’m off down the pub, bub.

Now Blotto! Now Shaky! Now Wobbles and Stankey!

On Gulper! On Stumbles! On Pukey  and Jankey!”

 

(I love when he visits, please don’t get me wrong.

It’s just that I’m glad that he never stays long.

When he stands in the hallway the neighbours all stare.

They must not appreciate his savoir faire.)

 

I addressed myself back to the package and gripping

The handle could swear that the cardboard was ripping

In moments, the contents had covered the floor

And sadly, there are no surprises in store.

 

There are beers that have hops and some have seen barrels,

Some are probably worthy of new Christmas carols

“Oh my giddy aunt” I exclaimed in alarum,

“Beers featuring saccharomyces uvarum!”

 

They sit in my fridge and I cannot review’em

I don’t want to spoil the surprises for you’m

Who actually purchased this big box of beer.

At least I can say there’ll be reason for cheer.

 

The selection is worthy of waiting for advent!

It’s on shelves in Alberta! Buy one if you haven’t!

Stock’s running low now, so mind you don’t tarry

And watch out on the road if you see The Beer Fairy.

Posted in: Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

Beer And Food: Jamaican Curry Chicken and Nightmare on Mill Street

October 21, 2012 7:14 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

A large number of people like Pumpkin beer, and this is very largely because it tastes like fall. It has those pumpkin pies spices in it that make it reminiscent of coming in from raking leaves before Sunday dinner. That being said, it can be a little difficult to find something to do with Pumpkin beer, since it already tastes like dessert. They’re typically fairly sweet and they contain a mixture of allspice, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and any number of other things depending on the brewery.

The obvious thing to do is to serve it alongside pumpkin pie. If you’re particularly adventurous, you might even want to try it alongside another dessert like ginger cake that has a selection of the same spices. This might be alright for home consumption, but if you’re at a beer dinner, that sort of double barreled approach might not really be welcome after about five courses. At that point, it’s a whipped cream topped overload.

Since I’m always looking for something interesting to do with beer and food, I googled the ingredients that go into pumpkin pie. Sure enough, if you throw those ingredients in to google, you come up with jerk chicken.

Initially, this seemed like an ideal solution. I checked through a bunch of online recipes and then dug through The World Cookbook for Students in order to find something that would give me a reasonably effective version that I could try at home. I failed pretty badly, but mostly on the basis of equipment. I don’t have a grill that I can use for this kind of thing.

That’s when I realized that I know a professional cook who might be able to furnish some insight into my problem. I’m lucky enough to know La-Toya Fagon from Twist Catering from another life. At the time, I had no idea that I would end up writing about beer, but she had already managed to secure some pretty promising weekend gigs as a cook. After I left that job, I lost track of her, but cut to three years later and she’s on Marilyn Denis’s show doing a cooking demo. It turns out she’s doing Mediterranean inspired Carribean food.

Talk about a stroke of luck.

The Beer

The beer I’m working with in this case is Mill Street’s Nightmare on Mill Street. It’s a good candidate for pairing as a pumpkin beer for the reason that it is restrained. First of all, the base recipe is a wheat beer, so it’s not a high alcohol beer. It clocks in at an even 5% and is brewed with actual pumpkin. The orange colour and head retention are good. Plus, the spice blend is nicely balanced. Some of the pumpkin beers out in the LCBO overbalance in favour of cinnamon or ginger. That’s fine if it’s to your taste, but if you want to talk about a prototypical pumpkin beer, this is it. The spice blend was inspired by brewmaster Joel Manning’s wife’s recipe for pie, which is a nice thing. Well done, Mrs. Manning.

They sent over some sample bottles for me to play with, and on my recommendation sent some to La-Toya.

The Recipe

I got in touch with La-Toya about jerk chicken, but she played around with a couple of recipes and had a better idea. The problem with jerk chicken is that because the spice blend is so similar, you’d be pairing it with beer on a complimentary basis. That was more or less what I wanted to avoid by skipping the pumpkin pie and dessert angles. I’m sure it would work, but she came up with a pairing that’s a great deal more interesting.

JAMAICAN CURRY CHICKEN

1lb boneless skinless thighs

4 tbsp. vegetable oil

4 tbsp curry powder

1 tbsp garlic powder

Salt and pepper to taste

6-7 pimento seeds crushed

1 medium onion diced

1 bell pepper diced

1/2 Scotch bonnet pepper

6 spring’s fresh thyme

4 medium size potatoes

2 c. water

 

Heat oil in pan till smoking level. Cut up chicken in bite size pieces, place in a bowl. Add in all ingredients except potatoes and water. Place chicken mixture in pot, stir, and cook on high add water. Cook, till it comes to a boil, stir, lower heat until chicken is almost cooked. Add in potatoes. Cook until water is thickened.

 

Serve over steamed white rice or with roti.

 

The Pairing

This is what your food looks like if your professional cook friend takes the pictures and sends them to you.

Now, this is a vastly different flavour profile than what I started out with, and in terms of cooking curry at home, I’m lost at sea. What better way to learn than by doing?

The reason that this works is because of the pimento seeds (which I discovered are allspice after 10 minutes of standing in the spice aisle) and the thyme. The thyme plays with whatever earthiness is in the beer as a result of the hopping as an aroma, while the allspice comes through in the heat at the back of the palate. Now this makes a great deal of sense as a pairing because the heat from the Scotch Bonnet is just enough to make you want a mouthful of a cold beer. The spice mix from the Pumpkin beer chases the heat with the carbonation, but from a sensory standpoint it lends even more depth to the curry by suggesting spices that it doesn’t necessarily contain. Salting slightly higher than normal is not a bad idea because of the steamed rice and the constrasting sugars in the beer.

Now, when I mentioned I might be doing this on facebook, Garrett Oliver from Brooklyn suggested that you’d probably want quite a sweet pumpkin beer if you were going to pair with Jamaican food. I can certainly see how he would have been right if we’d gone with jerk chicken. Because we went with curry, I think that the slightly wheaty finish on the Nightmare on Mill Street works pretty well. Also, from the standpoint of personal preference, I have to suggest that you really want a lighter alcohol pumpkin beer than some of the monsters out there. The dish is spicy enough that you are likely to want more than one beer with it. Safety first.

And this is what it looks like when you do it at home and are not interested in plating. Still tasty.

WHAT DID WE LEARN

1)      The proper soundtrack for this dish is Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come

2)      La-Toya Fagon knows what she’s doing, which is not exactly a surprise since she always struck me as extremely competent. She managed to steer me to a more complex pairing from a less complex one. Good eye, and I think a good appreciation of what I’m trying to do.

3)      If it says ½ scotch bonnet, don’t go adding a whole one, especially if you’re new to the flavour profile.  I know you probably won’t have anything you can use the other half in, so just discard it. I mean, it cost you 10 cents, so this is no time to be miserly.

Posted in: Beer and Food, Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , ,

The Indie Alehouse

October 18, 2012 6:18 pm ⋅ 5 Comments ⋅

There’s a story they tell about Robert The Bruce, which may or may not be apocryphal.

It goes like this:

While he was on the run from the English at some point in 1306, he was hiding out in a cave somewhere near Ireland, which at the time was not exactly the bustling hub of commerce that it is today, or at least, was ten years ago. Lacking much in the way of entertainment (You can only play so many games of count the cave before you realize that the total will never be higher than one) he watched a spider attempt to build a web across a wide expanse on the roof of the cave. The spider couldn’t quite make the distance, failing several times to connect point A to point B. The spider, who was determined to finish the web in order to support his wife and thousands of eggs, kept trying. Eventually, it managed to create a three bedroom web with an adjacent garage and hot and cold running flies.

Robert The Bruce, who never got over the strange middle name he was given by his parents, took inspiration from the spider and realized that he must never give up in his fight against the English. He returned to Scotland and kicked a certain amount of ass. The story has become a parable on the importance of resilience in the face of hardship.

The story of the Indie Alehouse is like that, except that it features fewer arachnids.

They got swag!

I met Jason Fisher for the first time during Toronto Beer Week 2011, when he had a launch for some of his beers at The Rhino. At the time, he had a location for the Indie Alehouse scouted out and had a couple of beers that were ready to go. He had a brewer lined up in the tiny form of Kevin Somerville. Renovations were under way and he was going to open as soon as it was feasible. I wondered about the location of the brewery, thinking that Dundas and Keele might not support such a place. He seemed assured.

Jason Fisher, attending to minute detail.

The next thing I heard was several months later when it became apparent that he was cursed. The way I heard it was that the boiler was being installed when the workmen dropped it down the stairs into the basement. As the story goes, he was so used to things going wrong that he heard the noise and didn’t even look up from what he was doing, having become more or less resigned to being the Toronto beer scene’s Job.

Over the next year, he would have licensing difficulties with the city and have to meet the whims of inspectors over the positions of equipment. He would get a new brewer in the hulking form of Jeff Broeders. He would, eventually, open the doors on the 4th of October, nearly a year and a half after he started the process.

Having had a year and a half to work on the place, while clearly not ideal from some points of view, has created an interesting space. Jason has had time to work on every facet of the Indie Alehouse, from the design of the tables (solid, functional, using repurposed wood from a local church) to the board in the gift shop (whose trim he painted himself). He made the design choices himself from the traditional tin on the ceiling to the dark hardwood floor to the vintage draft fridge behind the bar. It’s roomy and functional without hitting you over the head with either of those qualities.

The Indie’s antique draft fridge lends the bar a sense of nostalgia without becoming entirely focal.

The location, which I had had qualms about has actually benefited significantly from the year it took to open the brewpub. It has gentrified and continues to do so. The number of people anxiously staring in through the locked door during my visit was staggering. They had managed nearly 150 covers the previous evening. People are excited.

The menu is manageable; small enough that it should produce obvious fan favorites over the first few months of being open. As Jason explains, “we’ve got a smoker and a pizza oven,” and the menu consequently focuses on those two amenities.

The brewery has about 55 BBL worth of fermenters, with a 10 BBL brewhouse. The basement is full of carefully organized wooden barrels, which are being used primarily for experimentation at this point. “If you’re a brewpub and you’re not brewing weird stuff, what’s the point?” says Jason.

I think that they’re pointing out that the beer they serve is ale, not that they have come up with a new beverage called beer-ale.

The mainstays, the Instigator IPA and the Breakfast Porter, are both solid beers, as they should be after a year and a half of experimentation. They certainly make up the backbone of the beer list, but they don’t tell the whole story. The more adventurous offerings are the way to go here.

There’s Broken Hipster: a Belgian Witbier and probably the lightest offering on the menu at 5%. It has coriander and manages to use two different varieties of orange peel, both bitter and sweet, which creates a fairly nuanced citrus flavour in the mid palate. It would be an excellent summer refresher and I suspect it would pair pretty well with the Shrimp Po’Boy on the menu (you know you’re in trouble when you’re halfway through a sample and planning a return visit).

There’s Spadina Monkey: a Belgian Raspberry Sour with lactobacillus. I’m not sure that this will be on the menu indefinitely due to the smell it produces when brewed, which might be off putting to patrons. As long as it’s on the menu it’s worth a shot, because it manages to be properly tart without giving up nuance of the raspberry or that wheaty texture. I think it’s good the way it is, but there’s apparently a bunch of it in chardonnay barrels. Apparently it adds complexity without stripping too much of the tart character.

There’s the Barnyard Belgian RyePA, which is excellent in its own right. It has a significant rye mouthfeel and that grape-y ester that sometimes crops up in American style Belgians. It would run the risk of not quite working except that the galaxy hops provide some tropical fruit notes that bear it out.

Finally, there’s the Pumpkin Abbey beer. It’s not a normal pumpkin beer. It’s 9.5% and it’s fermented with a Belgian trappist yeast. The pumpkin was roasted with black pepper, which, as an addition to the range of typical pumpkin spices and vanilla, manages to brighten up the final product significantly. The spices are balanced. There’s no reliance on diacetyl to make the pumpkin pie experience work. It is, I think, the best pumpkin beer going. I think it makes Southern Tier Pumking look heavy handed and clumsy.

The growler fillers do tend to look very slightly like a futuristic stasis chamber.

For all that, the most impressive part of the Indie Alehouse is Jason Fisher; watching him drift around the retail store and the bar, inspecting everything in minute detail to make sure it’s all ready. The change from the last time I saw him is immeasurable. He moves around with purpose. He’s smiling. He has every right to. He fought and he fought and he fought and he fought and eventually, he won.

Posted in: Shameless Plugs, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,