It’s Alberta. Each brewery is mandated by law to own a cow.

I’ve been compiling notes on beers from Big Rock for a while now, but it wasn’t until February that I got out there to see the brewery. One of the things that’s amazing to me is the amount of hushed respect that everyone I talked to had for the first brewmaster at Big Rock: Bernd Pieper. The brewery produces something like 330,000 HL and I was given to understand that most of it was laid out under his watchful eye. It can always be a little daunting to have a shadow like that around a brewery, especially if you’re trying to change direction.

Now, this is the size that they’re making most of their beer on. It’s huge. This is the third story.

The size is a significant factor in changing the direction of a brewery. If you’re making 200,000 HL of beer and another 130,000 HL of your capacity is tied up in brewing for contracts, then you’ve already got a relatively sure thing going. The beers all have an internal logical consistency for better or for worse. You’ve got a series named after animals which sells pretty well. You’ve got a series named after the brewery’s founder which is, I guess, more highly regarded. You can’t simply change a brand after nearly 25 years. Well, you could, but you’d always wonder whether the market would follow you before you rolled out the new brands.

It’s the obligatory malt room shot. Only interesting because of the scale.

If you’re someone like Paul Gautreau, who’s brewing there now, I suppose the question is “what do you do to maintain the reputation of the brewery while attempting to keep up with emerging craft brewers who are free to create brands from scratch that feel contemporary?”

You have to stand out from the crowd, but in order to be considered by the crowd you probably need one offs. You could jump on the bandwagon and make a big hoppy west coast IPA, but that puts you square in the middle of intense competition from imports in a style you’re not known for. You could do that, but it would be an uphill climb. Instead, this year, they published a road map

The decision to make a bunch of fairly esoteric beer reminds me a lot of Great Lakes in Ontario. In point of fact, one of the beers in the alchemist is a Stein beer, which is one of the things Great Lakes was doing when I first started paying attention. Superheating a lump of granite seems like a bad idea to me, but I have long since been rendered cautious by those PSA’s with the robot from Saturday morning cartoons.

Big Rock, possibly because they noticed that my column runs in Calgary, started sending me beer about a year ago. Now, some of them have been a touch underwhelming. I think that the Helles Bock was brewed very much to the dead center of the style and as a result wasn’t really a standout. I think the Saaz Pilz could probably have had a touch more Saaz in retrospect. I also question whether I simply don’t like their lager yeast strain. I usually get a slightly sour finish of Big Rock lagers.

I love it when people refer to systems of this size as their pilot system. It makes me wonder whether they homebrew in a small glacial lake.

But some of the Big Rock stuff has been pretty good. In point of fact, some of it has been really good.

Some of them I never wrote about in the newspaper. I think they understand that not all of them are going to make it to print. Take, for instance, Barghest Barleywine. Well, first of all, there are only 3000 bottles. Secondly, it’s not for sale in four of the markets in which the column appears.

It was as though I had asked them to send me the beer with the largest amount of Bargh possible.

That said, it was a pretty astonishing little number. It had already been aged in barrels for a year prior to bottling. I think that it was made in the image of the Thomas Hardy, and while I had to drink the bottle that was sent for notes, I had the sneaking suspicion that it would probably have aged and improved for five years. There was a slight character of sherry-like oxidation that I think would have merged eventually with the dried fruit and caramel that was in there. I could see what he was trying to do, which was a good sign. Trying to emulate something that respected while most people are going for big hoppy American Barleywine is laudable. (Next time, larger volume and more bottles so you can do vertical events in years to come.)

Seriously, 3000 bottles is just not a big enough run for something like this.

The Purple Gas didn’t really do it for me. I mean, who puts together a wheat based beer with an indigenous fruit variety and blue agave nectar… I mean, other than that time I did it.

The Paradox Light Dark Ale, on the other hand, was pretty darn good. I don’t know why they named it the way that they did. It was essentially a mild bitter. It was nicely balanced and at 3.75% it would have been a great summer barbeque beer. Probably, they should have made more of that one as well. (In my notes I gave it a 3.5/5. The spider tasting chart looks a little like a dyspeptic seagull, which is neither here nor there.)

The Erratic Stone Fired Ale (see, cause it’s a hunk of granite and they’re named after a glacial erratic.) was probably one of the best packaging jobs I’ve seen on a Canadian beer this year. The aroma was a massive caramel and sweet malt hit, but on the palate it dissipates away through some minerally tones. The first sip is luscious malt, but maybe so much of it that it seems to recede on subsequent ones. I have written in my notes “interesting style, good experiment” which I think is all anyone can expect of a Stein Beer.

This is a legitimately attractive packaging solution. If you told me it was from Big Rock without showing me the press release, I would have been shocked.

Last week, they sent a beer called Rosmarinus Aromatic Ale, which is pretty much a Pale Ale with some rosemary infused. The rosemary exists in it as a faint aroma and as an accent on the palate. I don’t know why, but the hop schedule seems to have worked with it. Of the new school, this is probably the best result. Really quite tasty, plus I bet you could marinate a Pork Tenderloin in it.

Here’s the thing: Big Rock and Paul Gautreau are getting better at creation, which is a hard thing to do when you’re brewing a really large amount of only a few kinds of beer. The quality of the one offs has been steadily ticking up since they started them. Some of the ones on the list I’m actually excited about trying. The thing is this: being a creative brewer is different than brewing a brand on a large scale, but Big Rock is managing the transition better than I would have expected. At some point in the near future they’re going to really nail something and shock the hell out of everyone that hasn’t been paying attention.

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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 19^th, 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 19^th, 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.

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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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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Probably the most interesting thing about the currently available LCBO brewery feature is the fact that many of the beers from Brasserie Dupont are not as easily quantifiable as past featured breweries.

If you look, for instance, at one of the first brewery features from Tree Brewing in British Columbia, many of the styles that were on offer were relatively accessible. They had a dopplebock, a hefeweizen, a double IPA and a raspberry porter. There’s not much to be said against any of these beers, pleasing as they were. They are relatively accessible styles and fairly easily explained. Dopplebock is covered annually during lent. Hefeweizen is quite popular as a summer staple. You might need a double IPA explained to you if you’re new on the scene and have never read a blog.

The brewery feature from Shipyard featured big American bruisers. The Norrebro Brygghus and Nogne features had some less easily explained standouts (I’m thinking specifically of the Nogne Underlig Jul, which is a sort of Christmas Ale by way of Scandinavia and contains some interesting spice additions).

The brewery feature program has been a success, but I think that this is partly because the offerings are not particularly daunting. That goes more or less out the window with Brasserie Dupont, especially since the average beer drinker will need it explained to them exactly why the brewery, which specializes in Saison, a style that is really only beginning to have representation on Ontario shelves, is held in such high regard.

From what I’ve seen of the Brasserie Dupont lineup, the beers don’t really seem bothered to confine themselves to particular sets of guidelines. This is one of the real strengths of Belgian ales. The brewers don’t really care to restrict themselves, being far more interested in just making something that they like. Look at BJCP sections 16 and 18 which define Belgian Ales. There’s so much variation within each of the subcategories that the categorization can only ever really be a loose approximation. It’s an attempt to categorize knowledge systemically through imposition. It’s useful as an intellectual tool, but probably not reflective of reality, which has a bias against rigid categorization.

That said, the Dupont beers wind a bit farther afield than some, probably because of the house yeast character. The Saison yeast ferments hot and creates a lot of ester and a certain amount of authentic Wallonian funk. Average ale yeasts will ferment optimally between about 58 and 74 degrees. Dupont Saison yeast is up in the range of 80-95 for best results. I remember the first attempt Great Lakes made at fermenting with Saison yeast, buying into the romance of the thing about brewing in March for a summer beer. The ambient temperature in the brewery wouldn’t let it work at the high temperature, even with space heaters pointed at it. (Eventually they got it and those beers are doing extremely well.)

The result is a pretty phenolic experience. It doesn’t have the “horse blanket” thing that Brettanomyces does. There is a suggestion of damp, fermenting hay. I think Saison is a good deal closer to Sheep Pen than Horse Blanket. There’s a suggestion of damp spring drying out for summer if that makes any sense; of the dust rising from earth that is giving up the last of its moisture in the sun. These things can all be experienced on a hot late may day at Riverdale Farm.

The Monk’s Stout is the least alcoholic of these offerings at 5.2% alcohol and I think that it’s probably closest to being a dry stout, and the yeast character comes across relatively mildly, leaving an impression of roast character. It’s not the most approachable of the Dupont beers currently available in Ontario by a long chalk, but it’s an interesting variation on what would be a traditional style if made by another brewery.

The Cervesia seems to me to be a sweeter version of Dupont’s Saison, retaining much of the carbonation and character of the original. The additional sugar seems to bring out slightly more floral character and it leans towards the territory of Strong Blonde Ale or even a Tripel (but without the additional graininess.

The Moinette Brune (for which my tasting notes mysteriously include the phrase “oooh, I went”) is an extremely interesting representation of the difference that a brewer’s house yeast can make in a relatively standard style. It pours more red than brown, with a fairly vibrant head. There’s the fig, brown malt flavour and a small amount of chocolate that you would typically experience in a Belgian brown ale, but the yeast dries it out slightly and seems to make those robust flavours more subtle. Because of that there’s an initial surge of the flavour that you expect which then fades gradually to the finish.

That said, I think that the most interesting beer in this release is the Biere de Miel, which is apparently an organic product. The brewery at Hainaut has apparently always had apiaries nearby, so it makes sense that it should be used in their beer as it was prior to the takeover of the brewery by the Dupont family. For me, the really interesting part is that there is a pronounced spearmint character in amongst the floral highlights. I don’t know exactly where that comes from. There are hops that give off a mint character, but usually it is not this pronounced. I end up wondering whether the honey used in brewing was taken from a colony of bees that were pollenating spearmint, since there are differences in flavour between colonies reared next to clover or alfalfa or blueberries. When you add this to the hints of apricot and lemon, I begin to wonder whether this might not pair particularly well with a Mediterranean dish, either from Spain or possibly Greece. I really can’t recommend the Biere de Miel highly enough, especially given that Dupont has done what would be basically unthinkable in Canada: They’ve made a honey beer a highlight of their repertoire.

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As most beer nerds (and I suspect relatively few other people) know, Goose Island was bought out by AB InBev a couple of years ago for about 40 million bucks. Some of the existing personnel have changed over. John Hall, the original owner, stepped down as CEO. Greg Hall, who was the brewmaster is now making craft cider.

There was outcry about the purchase. People swore up and down that they’d never drink the stuff again. Then there was an announcement that some of the beer would be brewed in upstate New York. Again, people more or less lost their minds.

It has been about two years since the takeover, and for better or worse, I had never managed to get to Chicago when it was under the old ownership. I have no platonic ideal of what the product ought to be to compare it to. For me, it holds no sentimental value. I feel like I’m relatively well equipped to talk about the beer and the food that was paired with it without a whole lot of bias.

So, that being said, let’s have a look at what’s going on here.

I’ll say one thing for goblet style glasses: they lend your beer a sense of gravitas. A sippy cup would simply not cut it.

The launch took place at Nota Bene at lunchtime, and the beer and food pairings were designed by their chef, David Lee. It seems that the beers are more or less exclusive to Nota Bene until the end of April (although, I have heard reports of them popping up in other quarters.) According to a representative for AB InBev, Matilda and Sofie should hit liquor stores the week of April 29^th, with other brands following in the nearish future.

The concept of a beer launch in Toronto that is restricted to a restaurant, as opposed to a pub or bar is something of a rarity. I don’t recall that happening before. Even a single location launch is practically unheard of. I believe this to be because of the specialized nature of the Goose Island Vintage Ales. I’m sure that you could drink them by themselves, but they cry out for food. This is not because there is some hole in the flavour profile that needs to be filled, but rather because there is so much nuance throughout. Food teases things out of them.

Take Sofie, for instance, a Belgian Style Farmhouse Ale. It’s a Saison with brettanomyces and it’s aged in neutral oak barrels for three months. Neutral oak, as it was explained, essentially means that the barrels were used for wine at one point, but have been re-used frequently enough that they now only impart oak flavour. The aroma is huge with pear and pepper and tropical fruit and wheat and the mildest touch of barnyard. On the palate it diffuses into ripe peach and kiwi and passion fruit and honey. It finishes dry and is dangerously more-ish. The carbonation is vivacious.

It was paired here with Poached Nova Scotia Lobster with a Citrus Vinaigrette, Pineapple-Vanilla Reduction, A Foam made from the beer itself and um… Crispies.

Now, the lobster is rich and the carbonation cuts right through that, but there’s nothing particularly revelatory about pairing seafood with saison. Where David Lee’s pairing shines is on the understanding of the periphery. It might seem overly elaborate to include a foam and a reduction and a vinaigrette on the same plate, but all of them hit different tones in the beer. The Pineapple-Vanilla reduction is especially clever because if there’s even a mild note of vanillin from the barrels, it will highlight it. Not mentioned in the brief on the menu was the bed of what I believe were enoki mushrooms. I had never considered it previously, but there is probably some umami component in a bottle conditioned beer that resonates there, creating a detail in pairing that is somehow more about commonality in mouthfeel than flavour. A trick I had never seen before.

Matilda is a Belgian Pale Ale, but no less complex. The aroma I picked up off of it, aside from the cloves and some other baking spice which likely derive from the yeast were stewed apple and possibly persimmon. The hops are Saaz and Styrian Golding, and there’s this quality of depth to it reminiscent of some English Pale Ales which I can really best describe as forest floor; that hint of herbal dampness in brisk autumn.

Matilda is so much clearer than other belgian pale ales I’ve tried that at first I assumed that it would be more like a Belgian Amber. I was wrong.

It was paired with a Suckling Pig and Boudin Noir tart with Maple-Smoked Bacon, Mushrooms, Arugula and Truffle Vinaigrette.

See how the arugula is reminiscent of Oak leaves? Isn’t that clever? I don’t know if he intended it that way, but I’m given to understand that authorial intent died with modernism.

Looking back now at the plating, I wonder whether David Lee came to the same conclusion I did: Matilda is an Autumn. From the plating up through the pastry to the mushrooms to the staggering variety of pork, he’s practically recreating that forest floor, layer by layer. The suckling pig is (and I hate to use the word) unctuous and the boudin is surprisingly light. The bacon and crackling are, I suspect, just there to round out the concept of the pig rooting for truffles. It is not so much a pairing of beer and food as an evocation of October.

You can see why they chose Nota Bene. David Lee should really be doing this kind of thing more frequently, as he clearly has some insights into how pairing beer and food should work.

As to the Goose Island beers, let me say this, if you’re concerned about the takeover: Both Matilda and Sofie are lovely, complex beers. If you’ve had them before, I would advise to seriously consider should you find there to have been a decrease in quality, whether it is imagined. If you haven’t had them before, you’re in for a treat.

As for the launch at Nota Bene, I have to suggest to you that I have not seen anyone pair to the whole flavour profile of a beer like David Lee. The specialty menu is on until April 30^th.

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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!

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About six weeks ago, I suffered a fracture of the greater tuberosity of the humerus. That’s the sort of knurl of the bone in your upper arm that attaches your bicep and rotator cuff. I had long wondered, having watched a deal of Sportscentre, exactly what the rotator cuff was. It turns out that it is the part of your arm that allows you a free range of motion. Say you want to get something off a high shelf or take off your jacket without having your face contort into a rictus of agony or lift your arm very, very slightly; that’s part of what the rotator cuff does.

I know what you’re thinking: He’s a beer writer. Probably he was incapacitated with drink at the time of the accident. Possibly it’s the result of a drunken bar room brawl.

There is no such story. The truth of the matter is that it was a fluke accident caused in total sobriety by a patch of black ice. I had recently discovered that I prefer anchovies to bacon on toast for breakfast and was on the way to the store to purchase both. It was six in the morning and I wasn’t even hungover.

I don’t suppose that the majority of people get to 32 without having experienced so much as a hangnail. That was approximately the expected life span in the medieval period. I thought that it might be instructive to share with you some of the things that I have learned as a result of the experience.

1.)

• There is a portion of the BBC television program Last Chance To See in which Stephen Fry manages to fall rather awkwardly off a gangway in the middle of South America. He was on his way to visit the river dolphins in order to track conservation efforts. It is a program worth seeing if you’re interested in endangered animals, Stephen Fry or sexually frustrated parrots. Objectively, the most unexpected moment in the series is Stephen Fry breaking his arm as a result of his attempt to get on a boat. He is as polite as it is possible to be under the circumstances, and I had always wondered whether, when faced with the sudden catastrophic pain that accompanied the injury, he was playing it down out of either staid Englishness or whether he knew that the cameras were rolling and wanted to avoid profanity so that there would at least be usable pre-watershed footage.

As it turns out, profanity is a vastly overrated thing in these types of situations. While the discovery that you’re out of mustard may provoke a volley of four letter words, and a series of strikeouts from your favorite baseball team might engender new and interesting portmanteau vulgarities, cursing will do you no good as you lie on the ground considering what you have just done to your ankle and shoulder. I am pleased to say that after approximately thirty seconds of consideration, I expressed a hearty “botheration.”

2)

• “When the house is on fire one forgets even the dinner–Yes, but one recovers it from among the ashes.” – Nietschze, Beyond Good and Evil

This is to say that despite what would turn out to be a minor debilitating ailment, I went and bought the bread for toast anyway. You can learn a lot about yourself with a broken arm, not the least lesson of which was that I wasn’t going to let the situation be a total loss. For reference, Anchovy tins are difficult to open one-armed.

3)

• If you suffer a really painful injury, the doctors in Emerg will prescribe something for the pain. In my case it was Percocet 325/5. Initially, I joked with people that I might do a review of Percocet in the style of a beer review (drying on the palate with a constipatory finish). It turns out that I hate Percocet, but at least the results were predictable. Even a single one would knock me completely out. On the way to approximately four hours of lying there in complete stillness would come the terrible aural hallucinations. I dispensed with the Percocet on day three, discovering that no amount of water or fibre or coffee would relieve their most commonly experienced side effect. Also, since they contain acetaminophen, beer is more or less out of the question. Terrible stuff. If you’re ever in a position where you find yourself taking them, my suggestion is to wean yourself off them as quickly as possible.

4)You will have taken for granted by now that you will be able to perform certain everyday actions indefinitely and without complaint. Without thinking about it, you have probably attributed to one hand or the other various of your day to day tasks. You might lather your hair left handed when shampooing. You might carry your keys in your left pocket despite being a righty. You might well use your left hand to push the buttons for the elevator. It should go without saying that breaking your arm means that you will have, for the first time in years, to think about how you carry out simple actions on a day to day basis.

For instance, if Barry Pletch drops by with a package of St.Ambroise products (Pale Ale now in Cans! Somehow more assertively aromatic! What a triumph for St.Ambroise!) and you put a bottle of Oatmeal Stout in the fridge door for later and completely forget about it whilst going to attempt some other activity easily accomplished while invalided like, oh, I don’t know, breathing gently or staring out the window, you might find very quickly that the situation requires thought. Or, at least it should have done.

What happens in reality is that you open the fridge right handed, reach in left handed, jolt with pain upon realizing that you cannot, in fact, do that, but not before having upset the bottle with the action causing it to shatter on the kitchen floor. You will spend the next thirty minutes painfully re-learning how to use a mop while trying to decide whether to attempt to pick up the broken glass or simply abandon that section of the apartment indefinitely.

Similarly, bath time was a challenge. If you decide that you wish to soak your rather badly sprained ankle with a broken arm, you will need to put more thought into it than usual, with an especial emphasis upon getting into and out of the tub. Of course, it’s likely that you will not plan out such a simple activity, taking for granted that everything will go to plan.

It turns out that gently lowering yourself into the tub is a feat really only made possible by the fact that you usually have two working arms. This doesn’t even begin to cross your mind until gravity has made itself known. It is said that Archimedes yelled Eureka upon entering his bath. I contented myself with an unintentional cannonball, an “oh, bugger”, and the knowledge that the ceiling was probably due for cleaning anyway.

In short, your day to day life will become a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption designed solely with your inconvenience in mind.

5) Having healed up nearly completely, I will say this: I hadn’t used the emergency room in Canada since I had an ear infection on a family holiday in Montreal in about 1993. Encountering it for the first time as an adult, I have to say how marvelous it is that we live in a country where you’re unlikely to go bankrupt if you suffer an accident. I read stories from the United States about the number of people who find themselves suddenly struck with inexorable debt caused by medical services when they are hit by a car or tumble down the stairs. In some parts of the USA, the injury I suffered would probably have cost something like $5,000 dollars without taking follow ups or prescriptions into account.

I know that my experience wasn’t typical. I went to Sunnybrook Emerg at a non peak time and spent maybe 75 minutes there from admission to X-Ray to scheduled fracture clinic follow up. That’s low for the system. I have had three follow up visits with the fracture clinic at Sunnybrook, all of which have been relatively painless (although hospital waiting rooms remain a mostly featureless void where the life cycle of magazines comes to an end). The most expensive part of the entire procedure was the prescription for Percocet, which came out to something less than twenty bucks.

I know that these services are not free. We pay for them through our taxes. We’re lucky to be able to do so. When they argue about Obamacare in the US, you will periodically see Canada pointed out as a negative example because our medical system might require a longer waiting period for conditions with complex diagnoses or long term consequences. We should work on that. The simple fact of the matter is that if you’re in Canada and you suffer a serious, comparatively routine injury or illness, you will be seen to in short order and you will not have to consider upon how to pay for it in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. If that’s not something we can be proud of as a country, I don’t know what is.

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I’m a little conflicted about this beer because I’ve seen most of its stages of development. Before it was brewed, I got to see the recipe. I’m pretty sure it was this beer since I’ve only ever seen one recipe with dried quince in it brewed at Niagara College.

I remember thinking at the time that it would be ludicrous. Seven malts in a beer is almost unheard of. Five hop varieties might make it into a high end IPA. I remember my main objection to the recipe was the amount of dried fruit going into the fermenter, which would almost certainly soak liquid and create some pretty significant volume loss on the way to packaging. Then there was the spice load. And the maple syrup. At the time, I didn’t know about the Calvados barrels that the beer would be aged in, but beyond a certain point you can’t even feign surprise.

What I didn’t know was that it would be the first offering from Bush Pilot Brewing Company, which is a collaboration between Roland and Russell and Anders Kissmeyer, Gypsy Brewer Extraordinaire. Vlado from Roland and Russell points out that the main reason they decided on a Barley Wine is because the first thing they imported was Thomas Hardy’s Barley Wine. The other reason that they decided on a Barley Wine was because it represented a challenge. You can’t accuse a brewery of taking the easy path if their first beer is the size of Helsinki.

It weighs in at 11% and the 750ml bottle can apparently be aged for 8 years. The best before date is listed as October 2020 (although at that point, you can give or take a month.) It represents a collaborative contract brew between Niagara College and Nickel Brook. It is probably the first Canadian beer to use Calvados barrels (although I’ve seen a similar treatment used to great effect on Moor’s Freddy Walker.) It’s always difficult to find an opportunity to open a bottle like this. There’s a question of appropriateness. Given that the nice people at Roland and Russell expect feedback, I have decided that Wednesday morning is as good a time as any.

Once you get through the waxed top (I knew I owned steak knives for a reason) and pop the crown, there’s an immediate aroma of mulled cider detectable from nearly a meter out. It pours a reddish tinged brown and is nearly opaque with only a trace of lacing around the rim of the glass. You’ll probably want a snifter for this one.

It’s a pretty complex aroma with dried fig, clove and vanilla in addition to pretty significant apple pie spice. There’s a slightly boozy note that’s hard to ignore completely, but at 11% that’s to be expected. The flavour runs sweet to bitter on the palate, starting with some calvados stickiness and malt, fading away into a lingering bitter finish the intensity of which never really seems to fade; a feeling of dried spices in the throat.

It’s an interesting beer. I think that there is probably a fine line between complexity and confusion. I sit here wondering whether the beer would be noticeably different if a couple of the ingredients had gone missing. Would I miss, for instance, the juniper berries? The quince? I’m wonder if this has gone beyond the sweet spot at which it is more than the sum of its parts and is now becoming less cohesive as a result of overpopulation. I wonder whether any brewer is clever enough to know going into a recipe how 25 separate ingredients are going to interact with each other.

I have a little difficulty here in that I don’t have much to compare it to even for seasoned beer drinkers. I suppose the closest thing might be a Traquair Jacobite Ale if you really pushed the alcohol and spice content.

That said, I don’t want to come down too hard on Stormy Monday. It is, at the very least, ambitious. It is big. It is bold. It’s got a certain amount of bravado. It’s actually conceptually a good fit for a company named after a Bush Pilot. Imagine trying to land a fast moving flying vehicle on a small lake without ending up with your pontoons wrapped around a douglas fir. That takes some chutzpah. So does releasing a Barley Wine of this complexity in Ontario.

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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.

The reason I’m writing about WURST now is that they have a launch on the 20^th. 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 19^th 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.

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.

Then, you stuff the wing with sausage.

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.

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.

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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.

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