St. John's Wort Beery Musings and Amusing Beers

Category Archives: The Ontario Beer Revolution

Hoppy Beers and Monoculture in Ontario

May 2, 2013 2:50 pm ⋅ 7 Comments ⋅

I want to suggest something to you, and it may be something that has crossed your mind if you’re a brewer in Ontario. I think that we’re all aware that large brewers are, if not faltering, then experiencing a period of contraction. This is probably as the result of the ascendance of craft beer in some small part, but it also has to do with shifting preference in packaging and with the economic recession from 2008 to the present. So craft beer is taking off. Why not buy a few bottles of really interesting beer instead of a 24 of lager that might be indistinguishable from its competition?

That’s the important bit: many mass produced lagers are as like their competition as it is realistically possible to be. It’s (and I borrow a term from Jason Tremblay who posted about this on Bartowel.com) a monoculture.

Tremblay went on to suggest that the current growth of craft beer is on the back of hoppy pale ales and IPAs. This seemed somewhat suspect to me, so I decided to crunch some numbers. I like a bit of data-centric research periodically, so what I’ve done is taken two snapshots of LCBO product lists based on their API data and broken down those snapshots into stylistic preference. The first is the earliest record I have access to: January 1, 2011. The second is from April 19th, 2013.

I have included only beers produced in North America. I have not delineated between macro and micro. I have included only one SKU per product, which is to say that while there might be different available formats of something like Budweiser, I have listed only the Budweiser brand as a coverall for those SKUs. If a product has listed itself as a Pilsner, I have simply taken the listing at its word. I hear you say “but Lakeport Pilsner isn’t really a Pilsner.”

Well, true. The data isn’t concrete. What it does is paint a picture of the last 28 months.

For January 1, 2011 there are 10837 existing SKUs of which about a thousand are categorized as beer, 571 of which are produced in Canada and 55 were American imports.

There are, by my count, 45 brands of Lager, craft or otherwise, that don’t differentiate themselves into stylistic subcategories. Basic Light beers count for 20 SKUs. Pale Ales count for 18 SKUs. There were only 5 Canadian produced IPAs. From the USA, the numbers are 9/0/2/4 in those same categories.

It should be noted that this does not mean that they were all on the shelves at the same time. Some were seasonals. Realistically, there were as few as three IPAs on the shelf at any one time.

If you fast forward to the present (or near as dammit) There are 20939 SKUs represented on the LCBO Product list (which goes some way to explaining why people aren’t grumbling about selection as much anymore). Of these 1427 are beer, 856 are produced in Canada and 95 are imports from the USA.

The number of undifferentiated lagers has actually decreased by one over the last couple of years: 44. There are now 22 light beers on offer. Pale Ales have grown to 27 SKUs. Canadian produced IPAs have grown to 22. (This is not to say there are this many on the shelves. Some of them were seasonals). From the USA, the numbers are 13/0/4/7.

Just for the sake of argument, I’ll point out that in January 2011, there had been one Double IPA: Garrison. As of April 19th, 2013, there had been nine from Canada and the USA.

So, this tells us that interest in Lager has waned very slightly and that there is almost no growth in light beer. If you’re a craft brewer, this is a good thing. It also tells us that the Pale Ale category has grown by a factor of 1.5 and that IPA as a category has grown by a factor of 4.4. If you include the American SKUs for those categories, there’s comparatively little change in lager. The growth of Pale Ale rises slightly to a factor of 1.55. The growth factor of IPA shrinks slightly to 3.2.

Now, I’ll point out that one of the nice things about the large brewers is that they tend not to brew a great deal for consumption that excludes mainstream sales channels. That is to say that there aren’t a lot of lagers that are sold exclusively outside the LCBO and The Beer Store.

You may wish to consider, however, the total number of small brewers not represented in the LCBO and the likelihood that basically every single one of those brewers has a pale ale. I don’t have a figure for that, but you have to realize that of the now 112 Ontario breweries reported on Mom and Hops’ directory it is probable that 7/10 of them have a pale ale as a continuing brand. Some will also have IPAs.

There are some pretty significant downsides to this. First of all, it’s just massively unsustainable. Secondly, it means that craft brewers are largely competing for the market segment that defines their expansion. Thirdly, the problem isn’t going away. I can think of at least three new pale ales and IPAs hitting the market next month. As smaller breweries attempt to get into the LCBO it’s more vendors competing for approximately the same slice of the pie.

What I guess I’m saying to you is this: If you ever had a good idea for a beer that you thought would work, now would be the time to diversify. Just because everyone else is making a hoppy ale doesn’t mean that you have to. Plus, the increasing number of American craft beer products coming to the LCBO is probably going to make competition even tougher.

If you’re going to launch a new brewery, you’d do well to do something to differentiate yourself stylistically and find something accessible for drinkers that provides value for money and has a novelty factor. It provides craft beer some genetic diversity and might just put some money in your pocket. Launching a non-descript Pale Ale or IPA that can’t compete against objectively better beers is more or less a recipe for bankruptcy.

Posted in: Accounting for Taste, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Keith’s Hop Series

March 11, 2013 3:36 pm ⋅ 8 Comments ⋅

If you’ll recall, I wrote a column early in January about the Hop Mason beer that Keith’s are brewing for pubs in the Prime chain across Canada. The conclusion that I came to was that it was objectively good and that the specs for the beer put it squarely in the realm of English IPA. In addition to this it bore some of the hallmarks of a beer produced by a very large company. It was comparatively accessible and it was aggressively filtered resulting in a much clearer beer than you’d usually see in a craft IPA. It wasn’t exactly a world beater, but it could be said objectively to be a good beer.

On Thursday last week, I received a package from Keith’s with the beers from their new Hop Series. They’re not really IPAs. My understanding is that the BU’s come in way under specification for even an English style.

Here’s the really interesting part: They’re not being marketed as IPAs. Not really.

Rather than going for overwhelming bitterness, they’ve opted to showcase the flavour and aroma of a single hop in each Iteration of the Hop Series. The first two are Hallertauer and Cascade, which would be pretty approachable for the drinkers that they’re trying to reach. Rather than going for bittering, they’ve opted to dry hop the beers pretty aggressively. You get aroma without the sting of bitterness. Furthermore, it’s an all malt product.

You’ll read a lot of reviews if you follow beer blogs where the subject is approached with the intent of suggesting to you that the author is developing a begrudging respect for the product. I’m not going to bother with the pretense. The Keith’s Hop Series beers were pretty good. If offered one, I would not turn it down.

The reason I’m not bothering with the pretense (aside from the fact I knew they were going to do this two months ago) is that it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that large brewers can make flavourful beers if they want to. It’s just that they’ve never seemed to want to before, or at the very least, haven’t quite understood how to approach the problem.

It’s unusual that two separate topics flow into each other this well. You’ll remember my conclusion about Discount Beer February: That in 1993, President’s Choice getting 3% of the beer market in Ontario was a large enough threshold to force large brewers to play their game and that this situation might be relevant to Craft Beer in Ontario 20 years later, given that Craft has about 5-6% of the market depending on who you include.

Usually it takes months for the other shoe to drop.

The thing about the Alexander Keith’s Hop Series is that it’s not simply a beer release. This is going to be an event. There’s going to be mobile sampling across the country through April and early May. They’re actually interested in doing education on the product and on how hops work in beer. They’re taking it to the streets.

Shed your cynicism about large brewers for a moment and look at what just happened. Forget that it’s Keith’s. If I were to exclude the company name and say to you that a brewery with a budget for marketing and education were making a push to introduce the public to single hop beers as an attempt to make flavour the focus of their product, what would you say?

The problem, for Keith’s at least, is that there are likely unforeseen consequences. I suspect that most of your dyed in the wool craft beer drinkers, if they’re reasonable, will admit that the Hop Series beers are pretty good. I don’t believe for a second that they’ll purchase them in quantity. This means that the success of the Hop Series beers depends on drinkers from other segments of the market. I’m talking generally about people who drink stuff like regular Keith’s or Canadian or Budweiser.

If you’re a Keith’s drinker and you see a new product with the Keith’s logo on it, you’ll probably give it a shot. If the marketing convinces you that the flavour that you’re now enjoying is hops and the educational aspect is enough to display to you that there is a causal effect between ingredients and flavour, what is preventing you, the average Keith’s drinker, from making the small leap to drinking more hoppy beer on a regular basis?

Nothing. That’s what.

If it goes the way I think it’s going to go, this is going to lead to a steady trickle of beer drinkers discovering and purchasing craft products instead of big name beers. I can see no reason that the Hop Series won’t be as successful for AB InBev in Ontario as Creemore and Granville have been for Molson. Hop City is doing the same for Moosehead. I wouldn’t be surprised if Miller wants out of their distribution contract in Ontario so that they can push their Leinenkugel stuff.

So, to sum up: Large brewers are now spending very large amounts of money on making all-malt beers and ensuring through education that they are conceptually accessible to the public. I have to suppose that they’re doing this to take advantage of the fastest growing segment of the Canadian beer market. They know going in, if they’ve done their research, that there is not a huge amount of brand loyalty in the craft market segment. People don’t identify as a Cameron’s drinker or as a Muskoka drinker. They identify as Craft Beer drinkers (an interesting side effect of which is that small brewery imports are now defacto “craft beer”).

They are actually converting their customers to craft beer drinkers. I can’t even pretend to know what the endgame is here. I will make a prediction though: One of the results of this activity is that the craft beer segment is going to expand faster this year than we’ve ever seen before in Ontario.

Posted in: Accounting for Taste, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

Discount Beer February – How We Got Where We Are

February 6, 2013 6:38 am ⋅ 4 Comments ⋅

(Much of the background information for the following comes from Allen Winn Sneath’s excellent book Brewed in Canada. I borrowed Ken Woods’ copy, but you should probably buy your own.)

The DISCOUNT BEER CATEGORY at The Beer Store exists for two reasons:

1)      Canadians didn’t drink enough Amstel in the late 1980’s

2)      You really liked those President’s Choice Decadent Chocolate Chip Cookies as a kid.

Clearly, this is going to take some explaining.

Picture it: Canada in 1992!

Brian Mulroney and his chin share the role of Prime Minister. Kelly Gruber is a sex symbol. Much Music is playing actual videos and the CBC is starting to phase out Beachcombers re-runs. The fine, stalwart, slightly inebriated people of Ontario cry out for cheap beer and their call is heeded by two men: Bill Sharpe and Dave Nichol.

Bill Sharpe had worked for at Pacific Western Brewing in BC and had done pretty well by them. He thought that he could make a go of private label contract brewing and approached Loblaws to gauge their interest. In order to take advantage of the situation, he would need a brewery and he would need financing to purchase a brewery.

He approaches Cott, who already produce the President’s Choice soda brands. They agree to finance the purchase of a brewery located in Hamilton, which until recently had been owned by Heineken and was used to produce Amstel. It was an unprofitable venture unless it was running at the full capacity of 330,000 HL and they unloaded it in 1991. The brewery is christened the LAKEPORT BREWING COMPANY and is operative by June, 1992. It brews a brand called Around Ontario. By September, they have created Laker and Laker Light. On December 11th, they launch President’s Choice Premium Draft.

You have to understand that Dave Nichol was as much of a rock star as a bespectacled, middle aged man with a canine sidekick who’s hawking a line of private label dipping sauces with names like “Memories of Bangkok” can possibly be. Personally, I think it was the chocolate chip cookies that did it. That, or the chocolate fudge crackle ice cream. The thing was that President’s Choice did really well as a store brand. Still does. They have their own TV show.

In 1992, they expanded to beer. The first batch of President’s Choice Premium Draft sold out basically immediately. In a genius marketing move, Lakeport takes out a full page newspaper ad, putatively apologizing to Dave Nichol, but really, capturing the attention of the public. The public ate it up and by June, 1993, Lakeport had 3% of the Ontario Market.

Was the beer any good? In a sense it didn’t matter. Dave Nichol was behind it. Did it matter that Dave Nichol didn’t drink beer? No, because the beer was cheap. At launch, Around Ontario was $5.95 for a six pack. PC Premium Draft was $12.50 a case. That undercut Molson and Labatt by about a dollar a case.

A dollar in price difference, or about eight and a half cents a beer, and suddenly, there’s an entire new category. In the summer of 1993, Molson introduces their Carling brand as a competitor and Labatt brings in Wildcat. The category is now 15% of the total Ontario Beer Market because “Hey. Eight and a half cents, man.”

The next few years are a little like a shell game run by a paranoid schizophrenic.

In 1994, President’s Choice decides to change over to Labatt. Dave Nichol, wheeler dealer that he was, still owned the recipes to Premium Draft, so they start brewing that at Lakeport under the name Dave Nichol. Essentially, there are now two identical beers competing against each other with no real differentiation in price.

In 1995, Cott sells the marketing rights to the Dave Nichol brand to Molson, meaning that Molson is now marketing a beer identical to the one Labatt is marketing. In the same year it sells Molson the rights to the Laker brands. Since Lakeport no longer has any brands to speak of, they launch a range simply called Lakeport, which uses the same recipes that Laker had used.

In 1996, Molson, possibly because they realized how bizarrely incestuous this was getting and decided that discretion was the better part of valour, sold the Laker brands to Brick, acquiring a small percentage of the ownership of that brewery in the process. Since Molson is fighting a battle to consolidate the ownership of their own company, using Brick as a cat’s paw to force Labatt to continue competing in a market segment is sheer Machiavellian genius, if not elegance in its simplicity. This puts Brick in a position where it can start acquiring other brands as well, like Formosa Springs.

In 1998, since the Lakeport Brewery hasn’t been running at full capacity, they go bankrupt. They’re taken over by Alpha Corporate Holdings.

By 2005, the discount category is a really big deal. That year, Brick sees a 325% rise in sales of their Laker brands. Lakeport has about 7% of the Ontario market share. President’s Choice, possibly sensing a shift in the wind, contracts their brews to Brick.

In 2006, the high point of the Buck-A-Beer craze, Lakeport has 11% of the Ontario Beer Market share and two of the top ten brands at The Beer Store.

In 2007, Labatt decides enough is enough and buys the Lakeport Brewing Company for 204 million bucks. That’s a pretty small price to pay for 11% of the market. (To give you an idea, that is 4% more than all of the craft beer market share in Ontario in 2013). They acquire the Lakeport brands and Brava.

In 2008, the Buck-A-Beer craze ends when Ontario raises the minimum beer price to $25.60. This obsoletes the incredibly catchy “Make ‘er a Laker, it’s a buck a beer” radio commercial, which we can all be thankful for.

In 2010, Labatt does something incredibly clever and decides not to sell a brewery capable of producing 10% of the beer in the province to a smaller, hungry rival in Minhas brewing. They do the sensible thing by gutting the brewery and figuratively salting the earth. This prevents anything like this concatenation of circumstances from ever occurring again, since no one really has the capacity to compete. It angers the Teamsters Union, but tactically it’s the best option.

In 2012, the minimum beer price in Ontario is raised to $29.35. There is no convenient way to turn this price into a catchy radio jingle, and for this we owe our thanks to the AGCO.

So, that’s why everyone owns all of the brands that they own even if many of those brands are more or less identical, historically. This sequence of events accounts for approximately 2/3rds of the entire market segment.

Wouldn’t it have been easier to just put down the cookies and enjoy an Amstel?

Posted in: DISCOUNT BEER FEBRUARY, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Ramblin’ Road Brewery Farm

January 26, 2013 7:59 pm ⋅ 5 Comments ⋅


It’s hard to know exactly what to make of Ramblin’ Road Brewery Farm. They’re a new brewery in Norfolk County. Part of the issue here is that there really aren’t all that many farm breweries kicking around and there’s not really a concrete definition of what that might entail, at least in Ontario. Is it “we grow some of our own ingredients” or “we produce farmhouse style beers” or “this brewery is actually, physically located on a farm” or some or none of the above.

This image came from Canadian Beer News, partially because I made notes on the Pilsner so long ago that I don't even remember if I took pictures.

This image came from Canadian Beer News, partially because I made notes on the Pilsner so long ago that I don’t even remember if I took pictures.

The concept is a little sketchy. To give you an idea, there was a law passed in New York State in 2012 that suggests that it has less to do with whether the brewery grows its own ingredients and more to do with whether they come from that agricultural area. The percentage of material grown in New York State that must be included in a “farm brewery” beer will increase from 20% (currently) to 90% by 2024. The actual beer that is produced seems of comparatively little consequence in terms of designation. In Ontario, there’s no such guideline.

There is, I think, a mental association that people have developed with a few farm producers in the states that created a certain amount of excitement before the products coming out of Ramblin’ Road were announced. I know that I initially thought, “Oh, so what? Like Hill Farmstead? That’ll be great.”

Ramblin’ Road has sidestepped rusticity in their beers, preferring to start with some easily accessible beer styles. There’s a Pale Lager, a Cream Ale and a Pilsner. Of these, I’ve only tried the Pilsner. It’s not quite saazy enough to be a Czech jobbie and it doesn’t quite have the cracker grain character of a northern German Pilsner. By process of elimination, it’s sort of an American Pilsner and therefore a touch less exciting than I was hoping for, although still pleasingly floral in a mild way.

It is certainly well made. I can’t fault the brewers there. I wouldn’t turn my nose up at having it again in the future. I sat there staring at the glass for a while trying to figure out why you would start out with that range of beers if you were in Ontario of all places where there are now similarly named breweries launching with a shot across the bow like Canny Man.

Then I remembered two things:

1)      Ramblin’ Road is in La Salette and not Toronto.

2)      I’ve seen this work just across the lake in Chautauqua County, NY

I don’t know that if they had started with more interesting beers, people would have gone out of their way to visit Ramblin’ Road. In terms of drawing power, it’s probably better to brew solid popular mainstays and get people to visit from nearby than to bet the brewery farm that people will drive in for barrel aged thingummies. That works in Toronto, but we’ve got semi functioning public transit and something like five million people. La Salette has a post office and a general store and I would bet you that they are both closed on Sunday.

It’s actually a pretty clever idea. Unlike, say, Toronto, where you’ve got a number of craft brewery lagers competing for space on tap with every new thing that comes out, Southwestern Ontario is more or less Lager country and comparatively unchanging. This is kind of clever. If you draw a 150 km radius from the brewery (about two hours of country driving), you’re equidistant to Toronto and the Huron coast. You have the ability to sell all over the place (although making inroads within Labatt heavy London might be a bit of a bear.)

Combine this with the fact that the owner of the brewery, John Picard, has been distributing his fresh roasted, salty nuts all over the province for 30 years, and you probably take a lot of the guesswork out of sales and distribution. I would imagine that also highlights for the brewery the importance of food safety and sanitation, so you don’t get rookie mistakes. Also, consider the overhead on a brewery outside of Delhi. Peanuts.

Now, that’s a wide catchment area; a huge radius. You probably don’t have to go that far afield to sell a lot of well made accessible beer. Southern Tier in Lakewood, NY, makes a beer called Chautauqua Brew that does more or less the same thing: Provides a locally made accessible alternative to macro beers. If I remember the conversation with the brewers correctly, the only thing that outsells it locally is Busch Light.

They are actually growing a wide variety of hops at Ramblin’ Road. According to their representative in a thread on Bartowel, the farm that it’s located on has been growing them for five years. This suggests to me that by the time August rolls around you might start seeing some more esoteric products. Apparently, Norfolk County produces Ginger, Hazelnuts and Lavender. If it were me, I’d take advantage of that in addition to the hops. Plus, by that point, they’ll have had a brisk summer of sales.

The sales will come partly because the beer is solid and accessible, but mostly because they’ve invested wisely in social media and online presence. The logo and design are solid and that, combined with concept that this is a rural Ontario kind of farm thing makes for just a dynamite brand. Plus, whoever is manning their twitter account is doing a bang up job.

I don’t know that their beer will ever catch on with the craft beer wonks in Toronto, but the branding is strong enough that it might actually get on tap in more mainstream environments where tastes aren’t as rarified.  I think that they will probably do exceptionally well in smaller Ontario markets because there’s not a brewery that’s more conceptually representative of rural route, concession road Ontario.

Chances are, if you’re reading my blog, it’s probably not going to knock your socks off. That said, if you want a textbook brewery opening strategy, these guys are good. Hopefully, someday they’ll get around to using the hops they’ve been growing.

Posted in: Accounting for Taste, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Amsterdam Tap Takeover @ Bar Volo

January 23, 2013 10:59 am ⋅ 5 Comments ⋅


I want to point something out to you, and it will seem obvious in retrospect: Toronto’s Amsterdam Brewery is running a tap takeover at Bar Volo on February 2nd. It sold out completely in about 4 hours. The first rating on Boneshaker IPA on Ratebeer.com is May 2010. That was the first beer they produced that you could point to and say “Oh hey. That’s not Amsterdam Blonde at all.”

This means that in the span of about 33 months, Amsterdam brewery has gotten to the point where they feel comfortable releasing 32 beers to the public at the same time. That’s about a beer a month. Many of these beers are aged in wine or bourbon barrels and will have been sitting there for quite a while. This all happened at the same time that they were moving their brewery across the city.

It’s not exactly like the organization has done a 180. They still produce a whole lot of Amsterdam Blonde, which is… y’know… wet. That’s ok. People like liquids.

The Amsterdam retail store, viewed from the Brewhouse.

The Amsterdam retail store, viewed from the Brewhouse.

Possibly, it’s because of the changes that have been taking place over there that I tend to criticize one man more frequently than anyone else in the Ontario brewing scene. His name is Iain McOustra. He works for Amsterdam as Head Brewer and he has been experimenting with varying beer styles for a while now. One time, I suggested that he danced on the head of a pin, trying to satisfy the tastes of Toronto beer drinkers. I may have suggested that he did it in a tutu. I am still sorry for putting that image in your head, because even two years on, no one needs that.

I digress.

His methods are a little odd. If you look at the way that pilot brews and the development of differing styles works in Ontario, it’s easy to see some examples of systematic progress. I mean, we didn’t get Great Lakes Karma Citra without Mike Lackey brewing literally dozens of batches of different IPAs in a sort of research capacity. I think that Iain’s approach is a little more scattershot, but this is probably because he gets excited about so many different ideas. I’m not saying there’s not progression, but it doesn’t always end up being in a consistent direction.

Most of your Amsterdam one-off beers are coming out of this system these days. It's an improvement over the Keggles they started out with.

Most of your Amsterdam one-off beers are coming out of this system these days. It’s an improvement over the Keggles they started out with.

I haven’t ever really publicly criticized the stuff he’s done. I’ll mostly just give him feedback to his face. Now, to be fair, I’ve never intentionally downrated anything that he has done just to annoy him. When he has done well, I’ve told him so. When he has not done as well as he hoped, I have periodically embellished slightly after his first burst of profanity, because he’s just so easy to rile up.

It’ll sometimes go like this, as it did in 2011:

J: I really don’t like this Hulk Hogan thing. Is it a Kolsch? It’s a little catty.

IM: What? MotherF***er? That S**t is the bomb.

J: No, man. It tastes like an ocelot peed next to it and the pee seeped in there.

The point is this: I have, for the last… let’s say year or so, given Iain a batting average for his beers at any single event.  At the 2011 Movember Bash, he hit about .400. This is not bad if you’re Ted Williams. It meant that about 2 of 5 brews that he made for the occasion were good. Good is maybe underselling it. The thing is that if you’re going to have your own event, if you know you’re going to be serving beer to people, you want to do the best you can. Experimental brews have the potential to bring your average down. Nature of the beast. You aren’t going to come out a hero the first time all the time.

Then there was a night at Volo when he had a few beers on. Night Train, I think the specialty was called. That was an .800 night. 4/5. The man did good. People liked this. It was a funkifized brown ale on a wine barrel tip. I liked it. Hell, I told him so.

At the Hart House festival, there was Sleeping Giant Barley Wine, which made really solid use of the barrel character. At Cask Days this year, everything the man touched turned to gold. Full City Tempest? A proper coffee Imperial Stout as good as anything in that style that has been brewed in this province?

The special event space is packed full of barrels. I guess if you own that many barrels, you gotta stash 'em somewhere. Green Flash does the same thing.

The special event space is packed full of barrels. I guess if you own that many barrels, you gotta stash ‘em somewhere. Green Flash does the same thing.

Between all of this stuff, I was down at Amsterdam periodically, to fill up a ridiculous wooden keg or on a beer tour of Toronto when Iain was dodging the host and I didn’t really want to pretend I didn’t know about how lager was made. He showed me something in a Golden Ale in a Pinot barrel. I might have been the first to taste that one. It was, at that point, mellow and a skooch mango-y. I still gave him a going over for “what market is there for this and who’s going to drink it?”

So when the Amsterdam night at Volo sold completely out in about four hours, I wasn’t all that surprised that there was a market. The only problem is that there are 32 taps. That’s a lot of taps. There will be misses. No one bats a thousand. It just doesn’t happen. Name a brewery that does everything perfectly. Go on. Do it. You can’t. I’d say a .500 performance would be a good deal on 32 taps.

Here is Iain McOustra looking respectable. He does not like having his photo taken, even when he is wearing a jacket.

Here is Iain McOustra looking respectable. He does not like having his photo taken, even when he is wearing a jacket.

Either way, this is something of a landmark in terms of Amsterdam’s development, in the dichotomy between the easily approachable, slightly pedestrian fare in their core lineup and the new, exciting, more sophisticated stuff of the last three years. Will Iain McOustra be able to bring the recent standard of quality one-offs to bare on the new brewpub? Will they finally scrap the KLB zombie brands? Will Jamie Mistry show up wearing his Lederhosen?

The answer to all these questions is “probably.”

Edit: Some readers seem to be of the opinion that I am somehow anti-McOustra. This is not the case. I am very much pro-McOustra, even if I needle him periodically. He gives as good as he gets. The point of the article here is to showcase the fact that his development as a brewer has been interesting to watch and is more and more frequently resulting in excellent one-off beers. While I have made it clear that 16/32 really good beers would be a respectable outing for a tap takeover of this magnitude, I have little doubt that he’ll surpass that mark, especially when you take the collaborations into account. That said, I don’t think anyone is going to completely dominate on 32 taps. To ascribe that likelihood to any brewer would be to engender potential disappointment. If you try to do a difficult thing well, you will sometimes fail.

Posted in: Bar Volo, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ 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: , , , , ,

Set up a brewery in Kingston, already!

December 31, 2012 12:23 am ⋅ 6 Comments ⋅

Although I grew up in Toronto, I spent a year after university living in Kingston. I like Kingston, but I never really felt as though I understood it. The downtown is laid out as a sort of Triangle, and the bar scene at the time was more or less based on the fact that Queen’s students enjoy cheap beer. The pleasant limestone construction can impose itself on your imagination as you make your way through streets blasted by winter wind. I am comparatively pleased that I wasn’t there for the Ice Storm, since I have seen the six foot icicles that hang off those roofs during the best of winters.

I don’t mean to hold forth on the character of the city overmuch, as that is clearly the bailiwick of Alan McLeod. I will content myself with having my column appear periodically in the Kingston Whig-Standard.

One of the things that always struck me is that this is a city of over a hundred thousand, halfway between Toronto and Ottawa and that no one has seen fit to build a brewery there. It’s more or less ripe for the picking, but without some investment of time or effort, there will not be a brewery there. I think that a proper brewery in Kingston is something of an inevitability.

I’m not entirely discounting the presence of the Kingston Brewing Company, which has a very nice pub, but I’m of the opinion that the shot they took at Ontario market might not work in the current climate. The Dragon’s Breath Pale Ale was a well made and thoroughly satisfying beer back at the turn of the century, but I can’t see anyone with the space to bring it back as a contract brew as Hart Brewing once did. It is still a nice place to spend a couple of hours.

The fact of the matter is that Kingston has incredible potential for a craft brewery, and not just for the reason that there is an annual influx of student loan money and enthusiasm for going out on a Friday night. The city has changed somewhat in terms of appreciating what’s around from a culinary perspective. It can lay claim to some of the best charcuterie in the country in the forms of Luke’s Gastronomy and Seed To Sausage (Up Highway 38 near Sharbot Lake). There’s some very nice cheese being made in Wilton. There are some excellent dairies and organic vegetable farms. This is a city where it’s now possible to buy local everything if you know where to shop.

In addition, the pubs that I remember are not the pubs that people are talking about. There was the Tir Na N’og, which benefited massively from the influx of Belgian beers under the Oland company in the mid 90’s. There was the Toucan, which was where bartenders would call their orders in from other pubs when it was time to close down.

It’s something of an amazement to me that less than a decade on, there are a number of pretty decent places serving craft beers, but no brewery.

As a for instance, there’s The Alibi, which, judging by their facebook presence, may as well be in Toronto. They have Spearhead and Boneshaker and even had a Great Lakes one-off in the form of Audrey Hopburn just before Christmas. Of course there are the more locally based breweries in the form of Barley Days and Church Key. This looks to me to be a step in the right direction.

There’s the Iron Duke, which had Muskoka Mad Tom last time I visited. There’s Sir John’s Public House, which is decorated in the manner of an early 19th century public house replete with haggis fritters (I believe it to be a city by-law that there must be at least one drinking establishment in Kingston which features the likeness of Sir John A. MacDonald. Unlike in America where it is “Washington slept here,” in Kingston it’s “MacDonald drank a fifth of gin, passed out, fell down the stairs, got up without a scratch on him and proceeded to debate a portrait of Thomas D’arcy McGee.”) Sir John’s is a marked improvement on the previous incarnation, Johnny Mac’s, which is now a bridal shop.

The place I had heard the most good things about was The Red House. Before I went to Kingston for Christmas, I found that they had a cask of Pinot Noir barrel aged imperial stout from Nickel Brook. Apparently Ryan Morrow visits the area occasionally and brings beer. I wanted to try it because their Bourbon Barrel Aged Imperial Stout “Kentucky Bastard” is a freakin’ monster.

By the time I got to The Red House on Boxing Day, they had run out of that beer, but that turned out to be something of a blessing in disguise. It’s hard to enjoy your dinner if you start out with the imperial stout. Their tap lineup was suffering somewhat as a result of it being the Christmas season. They were even out of Pilsner Urquell, which is something you don’t see much. I take this to mean that patrons are blowing through good beer in Kingston at a decent clip. Encouraging.

This is more or less what I want. Quality and simplicity, rather than a wider variety.

This is more or less what I want. Quality and simplicity, rather than a wider variety.

Not as encouraging as the food. It’s the sort of upscale down home cooking that makes any beer you order better.  My Brother had the leek, potato and bacon soup and the fried chicken sandwich. I had the burger and Caesar salad. We split a side of lentils because… well, how often do you see a side of lentils? (They were delicious if a tad dijon mustard heavy.)

Skipping dessert, we had the charcuterie platter, which the menu doesn’t really do justice to. In addition to what’s described, there was pepperoncini and marinated artichoke and what I think must have been eggplant. It came with local cheese and meat, which must have come from within a hundred kilometers.

All of this was reasonably priced, especially when you consider the effort the care that has gone into creating the menu. The most expensive thing on there is the cassoulet, and I bet it’s excellent. McLeod, who I mentioned earlier, reported having to restrain himself from licking a plate on one visit. If that’s not an overwhelming endorsement, I don’t know what is. If they had more uniform access to really good beer, this would potentially be one of the best pubs in the country.

At some point, there’ll be a brewery in Kingston to take advantage of this new crop of pubs. The stage exists and only needs an actor to make it work. Then again, I thought more or less the same thing three years ago and nothing has happened yet. Eventually, some second year bio-chem student will take up a hobby. There is definitely room to expand your brewery in Kingston. Probably for cheap.

Posted in: Beer and Food, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

Every Six Months…

December 8, 2012 3:38 pm ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

It seems like every six months we get a spate of articles about privatization of liquor, wine and beer sales in Ontario. Currently, it’s in the press again because Tim Hudak is theoretically in favour of selling off the LCBO. Now, personally, I think that privatization of sales is a shiny bauble that gets waved in front of the electorate. There are so many factors that would go into privatization that simply mentioning it is never going to accomplish anything. I don’t believe that it will happen in the short term, and that a number of stars would have to align in order to make it happen in the long term.

The reason that the discussion is frustrating is that the status quo for the organizations that would be involved in the discussion never seem to change sufficiently in a six month period to bring any new information to bear on the situation.

It’s like a campus demonstration on social equality. The actual rate at which change takes place on a societal level is glacial. It’s the result of many small changes over a lengthy period. Sure, having placards and megaphones for an afternoon is cathartic, but it accomplishes relatively little. It also promotes a cognitive dissonance between people who think that change ought to be instantaneous and the reality of the situation. Small vocal groups tend not to represent the majority.

When these articles are written, they tend towards being somewhat exploratory while ignoring the fact that there was a similar article in the recent past. Personally, I hate this because the situation exists on a continuum and not as a single instance of reporting as you would be led to believe.

Rather than looking at it from the perspective of the consumer, you have to look at it from the point of view of the revenue stream for the province. The consumer wants change because they can’t find a certain variety of sherry or port, or because the craft beer selection is not expanding quickly enough. The consumer essentially wants to be satisfied on a basic, short term level. I have some sympathy for this, since “more good beer” is probably not a bad thing.

The problem is that that desire simply doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If you’ve read an article on the subject in the last year or so, you know that the LCBO generated a dividend of about 1.55 billion dollars for the province in the 2010-2011 period and about 1.63 billion in the 2011-2012 period. Keep in mind that the total amount of revenue for the province of Ontario in 2011-2012 is about 109.25 billion dollars.

This means that the LCBO dividend to the province is worth approximately 1% of the total provincial revenue. It will be slightly higher than that in coming years due to the sale of the LCBO headquarters and adjacent properties. Also, the dividend has been ticking steadily up for the last decade, meaning that there is some significant optimization of profitability going on.

The difficulty is that privatization is not an overnight process. It’s fine to spitball the concept that tax revenue might remain the same or even increase were sales of liquor, beer and wine permitted in convenience and grocery stores. The issue is that this is not magic. There are transitions to be made in order to allow for that situation.

Folks point at Alberta as a shining beacon of privatization. Sherbrooke Liquor, with its thousand beer selection gets mentioned a lot as the kind of thing that might appeal. The thing that tends not to get discussed in re Sherbrooke Liquor is that Alberta was privatized in 1993, meaning that it has taken approximately 20 years to get to the point where there are a thousand beers on the shelf.

I think one of two conditions has to be met amongst the players in the market before privatization can be considered anything more than a pipe dream.

In the case of political will, I suspect that it is unlikely that we will see privatization prior to a year in which there is a budget surplus in the province of Ontario. Ontario’s economic recovery plan suggests  that this will not happen until 2017-18 barring any catastrophe. Until such a time, it would be folly to play with the LCBO dividend that results in 1% of the provincial revenue stream. I would like to think that politicians of all stripes recognize that a guaranteed amount of income in a period of financial hardship is a better choice than an unproven alternative. Once there is money to play around with, you might see change.

The other possibility in the situation has to do with market share. There’s the possibility that the large brewers who own The Beer Store might be quite interested in privatized sales. While they currently control a de facto monopoly on 80% of beer sales within the province, the market share for their products is eroding at a relatively slow drip. This is a bad thing for large brewers, and you can see how there might be some resentment of the fact that they are forced to provide logistics and shelf space (however minimal) for their competition.

I mean, they’re not quite as resentful as the small brewers who are forced to pay for listings and shelf space, but they are probably mildly resentful.

The question of privatization may well hinge on whether the large brewers are willing to forego a sales monopoly in order to take advantage of wider distribution through supermarkets and convenience stores. After all, they are in an advantageous position in terms of economy of scale. Small breweries don’t have the ability to leverage deals with large chains. Large breweries do.

The difficulty is the additional outlay required to make this happen. This requires sales and negotiation, distribution, lobbying, additional and possibly alternative packaging for various chains. It requires more labour. It is an expensive proposition, and a strategy which would not see immediate profit due to the capital expenditure required to make it work.

Should large brewers see a series of poor financial quarters, this might begin to look appealing to them. It assumes, however, that the additional convenience provided to the consumer would result in the growth of the market. Given overall trends we’ve seen for sales of large brewers’ products, this is probably more risk than they are willing to sign on for at the moment.

What might well occur is a concatenation of circumstances whereby a provincial budget surplus and a shrinking market share pronounced enough for large brewers to take such a risk exist at the same time. Say, about… 2016-17.

In the meantime, I think Tim Hudak is performing the time tested political trick of “being seen to be looking into,” which probably doesn’t hurt.

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

It Takes A Village – Liberty Village Brewing Company

November 15, 2012 3:49 pm ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

These days when I go to a tasting for a new brewery, I’m always a little bit leery. The sheer number of startups in Ontario at the moment suggest to me that we are in a boom period for craft beer. If you want to look at it objectively, you could probably claim that the boom is represented by the day Spearhead came off the line in June of 2011. Since then, we’ve had Hops and Robbers and Hogtown and The Indie Alehouse and Sawdust City and Silversmith and Oast House and that’s just near Toronto. Add in the fact that you’re going to have Snowman and Ramblin’ Road and Radical Road and 5 paddles and a large number of others and you start to think “Hey. Some of these fellows are going to lose pretty badly.”

The difficulty is that I generally like brewers and people who work for breweries. It’s hard not to like people who are passionate about what they do and who have given up other careers in order to make it work. I don’t want to see them fail, but I begin to get the sense that some failure is inevitable. I wrote it about it over here last year, prognosticating the issue. No one seems to have paid any attention, which is about par for the course in a boom. One of the problems with passionate people is that they believe in what they’re doing.

I think that the best thing you can do, if you’re a nano-brewery startup, is find a populous area that no one else has cornered the market on and set up there. It helps if the people are young and drink beer and have money. You might get bonus points if they wear a lot of plaid and ripped jeans and have ironic horn rim glasses despite living in pretty nicely appointed condos.

Once you’ve got your own glassware branded, you pretty much have to open a brewery.

The folks behind Liberty Village Brewing are thinking ahead in just that way. At their first tasting on Tuesday night, it became clear that they have the support of much of the liberty village community. The location for the event was provided gratis, and they seem to have struck up an arrangement with the local BIA. Like many of the other startups we’ve had in Toronto, it’s a group of people working together with one brewer. In this case, the brewer is Eric Emery, who took 3rd place in the IPA category of the Toronto Beer Week Homebrewing contest in 2011.

I have some sympathy for that position since I fared exactly the same in that category in 2010.

Liberty Village Brewing is going to try to get their own space up and running in 2013, with a view to eventually getting into the LCBO. I think that will be difficult at such a small volume, and may prove to be unnecessary in Liberty Village since there’s so much parking.

They have chosen the odd route of having public tastings for the purposes of R&D in order to refine recipes and discover what their audience is likely to want. On the one hand, it seems like an ideal solution to marketing beer. If you already know what people want, it becomes easier to produce it for them. On the other hand, it does make it a great deal more difficult to surprise them with something new that they might not have tried.

Of the beers I tried, there wasn’t a stinker among them. This is pretty good for an outfit that’s currently using homebrewing equipment. Some of the beers that were up for tasting reminded me pretty explicitly of beers that I have had before in Ontario. I suspect that if you’re a homebrewer on the way to becoming a brewer with your own stage, you more or less have to start out emulating things you like. You don’t end up with clones, but rather amalgamations of flavour combinations that you’ve seen work elsewhere.

For that reason, some of the beers on display were reminiscent of beers that have been available in Ontario. There was a malt heavy pale ale that fits nicely into the mold of Ontario Pale Ales from the latter part of the last decade (albeit more aggressively hoppy). There was a northern California/pacific northwest IPA that was not entirely dissimilar to Boneshaker (although lighter in Alcohol). There was a Robust Porter that seemed to mimic some of the best qualities of a good vintage of LTM Baltic Porter.

Interestingly, however, there were a couple of beers that didn’t have an equivalent within the market. There was a light, balanced Pale Ale that blended new world and noble hops. It would be ideal for a summer patio, weighing in at 36 IBUs. There was also an Imperial Amber Ale that came as something of a surprise. It’s not a hop monster, remaining balanced by its caramel malt presence and a touch of smoke that made it distinct from the rest of their lineup. It seemed to make the biggest impression on the crowd, which is an odd thing for such an eccentric offering.

Oddly, what I came to respect most was that people in attendance were given the opportunity to try some of the R&D batches that didn’t make the tasting. I had one IPA (R&D batch 7) that had resulted in a sort of Oniony funk. Now, you might think that serving such a beer at a tasting designed to impress a new market would be a misstep. I think that it speaks of both the scale and transparency of the operation. They served the beers that would make the best impression first, and then displayed some of the beers that they had to make in order to be able to put their best foot forward. It says:

“Here is where we are. That was where we were. Can you imagine where we will be tomorrow?”

Who knows what beers will end up in these bottles eventually? Probably Lamont Cranston.

Unlike some startups, Liberty Village seems content to carve out a niche for themselves within the Toronto scene. It seems to call for a small brewhouse, a small retail store, a restricted number of recipes and a supportive presence within their community. Incremental steps for a sensible tomorrow. I like their chances.

Posted in: Reviews, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ 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: , , , ,