St. John's Wort Beery Musings and Amusing Beers

The Ontario Beer Revolution – Part One

August 18, 2010 3:17 am ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

There has been much made lately of a talk that was given at the Toronto Festival of Beer by Steve Beauchesne from Beau’s All Natural Brewing Company. It was titled “What If Ontario Had A Beer Revolution” and you can find the full text of it over at Steve’s Blog. Now he’s not talking about walking around with a little red book of beer ratings or some kind of guerilla incursion on the Labatt facility. He’s talking about a hypothetical scenario in which half of the beer consumed in Ontario is actually brewed in Ontario by independent brewers. Currently it seems that one of every twenty beers consumed in the province is made by a local independent brewer. According to the figures he has come up with, this would require 315 new breweries to be founded in order to meet the volume necessary to fulfill the criteria that he has set out for the scenario. Steve is quick to point out that it’s not as outlandish as it sounds given that Bavaria has a population roughly the same as Ontario’s and they’ve got 629 breweries.

Look. I don’t mean to be a buzzkill here, but I feel as though I have to point out that some of the math being used is fanciful in the extreme and much of the reasoning is fallacious. Don’t get me wrong. I like the concept of The Ontario Beer Revolution. I consider myself a hatchetman in the fight for better pints of beer. But I’m sitting here thinking to myself things disloyal to our fearless leader. Things like “But surely Bavaria is smack dab in one of the oldest continuous beer cultures in the world and has had hundreds of years to develop?” and “That seems like a lot of breweries for a province with a couple of fairly centralized population hubs” and “What exactly is the timeline for this explosion of industry and where the hell are you going to get 315 brewers on short notice?”

It’s all very well to dream of a future in which Ontario is a world leader in brewing, but there’s a problem: You can’t drink possible beers. You need actual beers. To drop some Rumsfeldian science on you: “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

Think of it this way: There are about 40 independent brewers in Ontario. The first one was founded in 1984. It would not be entirely disingenuous to point out that in 26 years, we have gained approximately 1.53 breweries per year. (In reality they get founded in fits and starts. I seem to recall 1996-1999 held a larger than average concentration.) At this rate it would take 205 years, 10 months to open 315 breweries. Of course, you could take into account the idea that some of the existing breweries would expand the volume that they produce, which would be more likely. It would take a considerable amount of pressure off of the theoretical brewers who are plonking down their capital in order to start up their own breweries. Let’s assume that the existing breweries expand their production to 120 million litres a year. In that case we would only need 245 new breweries, which would only take 160 years of continuous Maoist style revolution during which time no breweries would fail or be allowed to close or merge.

By the year 2170, we could have quite the selection of beers. Of course, by then Zefram Cochrane will have invented the warp drive, initiating first contact with the Vulcans and Ontario brewers will have to compete against imports from the Romulan Empire.

Let’s talk sensibly and set a reasonable goal: How would it be possible to triple the market share that exists for local independent brewers in Ontario in the next ten years? I think that’s a modest and fairly reasonable goal considering that it might actually be possible within our lifespan. Let’s use the basics of Steve’s math to lay out a scenario: 120 million litres of beer a year produced by the 40 or so brewers that already exist and by new breweries which will begin to crop up with more frequency over the next several years. The Niagara College program is important to factor in here, since brewers don’t just spring fully formed into the world. You have to assume that there will be maybe 10 graduates per year starting two years from now who will stay in Ontario (currently 6/24 students are international and are unlikely to remain in the province after graduation and I think another 8 will probably end up in the states.) So, increase the number of breweries founded per year to say… 2. By 2020 that would give you 120 million litres a year produced by 60 breweries. You’d average 2 million litres of beer per brewery per year, barring closures of breweries or unhealthy local competition between those 60 breweries.

That’s not a completely unreasonable scenario, but you’ll notice that Steve doesn’t discuss exactly how we’re meant to get to that point in Ontario. The thing is this: All we have to work with to increase awareness and market share are the products that already exist. It’s all well and good to talk about a wonderland of tax benefits and charitable giving in a vacuum, but there are concerns that I have about actually getting people to choose craft beer; for instance you’ll notice that nowhere in the manifesto does it mention what percentage of the 1400 brands of beer would be worth drinking. You have to make people actually want to drink the stuff, and this has to be the immediate focus if Ontario brewers want to get to that point. Much of the time, the desire of the public to actually drink craft beer is taken for granted because most of the discussion that takes place about it is done by people who are already loyal to the concept. That’s not something that you can afford to forget if you’re going to engage in this mental experiment.

I can tell you right now that Steve Beauchesne is on the side of the angels. It’s definitely a good thing to have someone thinking about the big picture, but if there’s going to be a revolution, there needs to be an actual strategy. That strategy will require a studied look at a very simple question that consumers need an answer to: “Why should I drink craft beer?”

I don’t know what the answer is, but I can tell you right now that it doesn’t involve a pie chart.

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

St. John’s Wort Shameless Publicity Grab IPA – Brew Day

August 17, 2010 4:44 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Many people, when they write about brewing beer, start at the very beginning: A theoretical brewer somewhere in Egypt or Sumeria who discovered nearly eight millennia ago that by some miracle of nature, wet barley would ferment given exposure to wild yeast. It’s a relatively nonsensical place to start because you have to assume that Imhotep or Enkidu or whatever you want to call the jammy bastard who suddenly discovered that it was possible to create beer didn’t really do anything other than stumble along at an opportune moment. I feel relatively certain that the public school system in Ur didn’t have courses in microbiology and that the Tigris-Euphrates Polytechnic Institute (The Fighting Agrarians!) did not explicitly understand that millions of tiny eukaryotes were in there eating sugars and pooping booze.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; You can bet though that shortly after this discovery, early man, with an imperfect understanding of exactly what was happening, was in there trying to replicate the results. I don’t mean to belittle this ostensible pioneer: he or she demonstrated the spirit of discovery and the sheer bloody mindedness of human endeavor. It must have been frustrating to have very little idea of what was actually going on. Brewing is, after all, a relatively complex process involving a certain amount of subtle chemistry. It would have been basically impossible to control the results. They would have been lucky to produce something similar in quality to a stale forty of Olde English. Early man must have spent a lot of time quietly whimpering in a corner with a crippling hangover and a sense that whatever sacrifice had been made to Sneddon, the God of good harvest, it must have really ticked him off.

The good news is that we’ve come a long way since then: We have all sorts of things that make brewing easier. We have sterilizing solution. We’ve got hundreds of kinds of barley and dozens of kinds of hops. You can buy millions of little dormant yeast cells for less than a lunch out. We’ve got glass carboys and plastic buckets and indoor plumbing and refrigeration and air conditioning. We don’t have to break down maize starches with our saliva anymore. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve got the internet, which will provide you with all of the information you could possibly need in order to get started with homebrewing and then just enough information to confuse you utterly. Fortunately for you, there’s also the library. I say give it a shot. You’re at least as clever as a prehistoric Sumerian and probably more hygienic to boot.

St. John's Wort. Literally.

I have no intention of walking you through the homebrewing process. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is that this is my fifth or sixth batch and I don’t want the blame for your inevitable misadventure. Suffice it to say that at some point, you’re going to screw up. Probably badly. You might pitch the yeast at the wrong temperature, killing off half of the population resulting in a half fermented batch of undrinkable liquid. You might decide to clean your bottling bucket with Sunlight and end up with an unintentional lemon tang. Probably, you will follow all of the instructions precisely, but your first attempt at creating your own recipe will just result in something you don’t like a great deal and which you will drink five gallons of slowly over the course of months because you can’t bring yourself to pour it out.

I will share some minor pointers, though:

Nylon Mesh Grain Bag/Ladieswear

First off, if you’re brewing an extract recipe like the one that I came up with that has a number of specialty grains involved, you’re going to need a nylon mesh bag for the grains. You’re going to want to steep the grains at about 150 degrees farenheit and you’re going to want to be able to get them out of the wort in fairly short order. Boiled grains can create off flavours. If you’re like me and you forget you need a nylon mesh bag, you can always go down to the drugstore and purchase a pair of pantyhose. They’re nearly ideally suited for the purpose, and with a decent pair of scissors, you can convert one leg into a grain bag and use the other one for dry hopping. If the clerk gives you a strange look at the checkout counter, feel free to make an offhand remark about the fact that they don’t seem to carry junior miss sizes.

Secondly, you’re going to want to calibrate your hydrometer prior to taking your original gravity measurement. The paper scale on the inside of mine has managed to slide down inside the tube over the course of several batches of beer. If you get to the end of the boil and you’ve aerated your wort and it seems like the original gravity is impossibly low, it probably means that you’re going to need to compensate. If you forget about calibration you’re liable to stand there with your mouth agape wondering how it’s remotely possible that the fermentables in the liquid don’t seem to be registering properly. As it stands, my beer came out to approximately the gravity that it should have, but there was a moment of mind bending panic where it seemed as though something had gone horribly wrong.

Hops!

Finally, if you have created a recipe that you think is going to work, don’t deviate from the recipe. You’ll get to the point where there’s 15 minutes left in the boil and there are lots of hops left to go in. Follow the hopping schedule that you decided on originally. You may be tempted to put aside an ounce of hops for dry hopping, but let’s face it: You’re an amateur and you have no idea what you’re doing. There are many situations where that extemporaneous creative instinct will serve you well. This is probably not one of them.

This also includes the fermentation process. Don’t open the carboy. Don’t futz with the airlock. If it’s bubbling away, you’re probably going to be alright. It’s a process that will take a couple of weeks and there’s very little benefit to compulsively worrying whether a yeast krausen has formed and whether or not there’s anything you can do about it. Leave it alone. Go about your business. Put the fermenting vessel somewhere that’s not in your direct line of sight. You’ll just drive yourself crazy.

At the end of your brew day, you may be worried: About your yeast. About your badly misaligned hydrometer. About the rumors now circulating the neighbourhood about your possible transvestitism. About the possibility of poisoning several accredited beer judges at the end of the process. It’s best not to think about it.

Besides. You can always blame it on Sneddon. It’s a time honored Sumerian tradition.

Posted in: Ongoing Projects ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

St. John’s Wort Shameless Publicity Grab IPA – Preparation

August 12, 2010 9:43 am ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

Charlie Papazian is famous in song and story for having written, in The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, the phrase “Relax. Have a homebrew.” If you read any edition of his book it becomes clear fairly quickly that this is a mantra of sorts for Charlie, and it’s a good one. It’s just that I’m not sure it applies to my current situation. In announcing my entry in to the Toronto Beer Week Homebrewing Competition, I have created two problems:

Firstly, I have to actually do it. If ever there was a significant motivator, it’s the idea that there are a huge number (read couple of dozen) people reading your blog who are likely to laugh at you if you don’t carry through with your stated goal of brewing a beer to subject the judges to. I don’t want to walk in to Volo at some point in the near future and have folks ask “how’s that going for you” while tittering under their breath. It’s a reality of the situation that I’m now committed to actually doing the thing, and if nothing else I have to brew a beer in order to avoid the mockery of the Biergotter fellows and other local enthusiasts.

Secondly, there’s the preparation. As I see it, there are a number of things that you need to do in order to prepare to brew a beer. You need ingredients, equipment, some kind of plan and a sterile working environment.

Some of these things are more time consuming than others. Getting ingredients for homebrewing can be difficult in Toronto if you don’t have a car. It seems to me that the best supplier in the area is Canadian Homebrew Supplies. They have a huge number of products for homebrewers both experienced and just starting out. The main problem seems to be the fact that they’re in Brampton. If you’ve got a car, this is not worth commenting on, but if you’re like me and you have to order the products online and have them shipped using Canada Post, there’s a significant niggle at the back of your mind. The Wyeast Activator packs, (basically a package of yeast and nutrients that activates upon being hit hard enough to release the yeast into the nutrients) are meant to be refrigerated until they’re used. If you’re in the middle of a particularly hot stretch of the summer, do you really want to risk having your yeast sit in an unrefrigerated warehouse for two or three days? I mean, ideally Canada Post will deliver within 48 hours, but if you miss the initial delivery, it could be longer. It won’t kill the yeast dead, but it might stop them performing to the best of their ability. You don’t want to drink an under attenuated beer just because there was a mishap with a scanner.

Fortunately, I was in Buffalo anyway, and I was able to visit Niagara Traditions Homebrew Supply. I’ve got to say that it’s a very different experience standing in an actual store while shopping for homebrew ingredients. If you’re shopping online, you need to know exactly what you’re going to do before hand and you’ve got a checklist that you’re working from. If you’re on the ground in a store, you’ve got people who know what they’re doing to help you. The guy who helped me was pretty well informed and even suggested a couple of kinds of specialty malts for use in my beer. I had a loose idea of what I was going to do, but it’s always good to have a professional opinion backing you up. Plus, because the yeast was refrigerated, or at least unceremoniously dumped in a cooler with an ice pack during transit, I don’t have the option of claiming that it was the yeast’s fault if I end up with an undrinkable mass of hops and pure evil.

If you’re going to brew beer, you also need a recipe. If you’re just starting out, it’s excusable to buy a kit, but this is Toronto Beer Week, so I needed to put together something that’ll actually make an impression if it comes off. One of the strictures of the Toronto Beer Week Homebrewing Competition is that your beer has to conform to BJCP judging criteria for the style that you’re creating. Fortunately for hacks like me, there’s a website called Hopville that allows you to design recipes that will conform to those criteria. All you have to do is choose a style and then plug your information into the recipe form in order to avoid looking like a complete doofus.

I have chosen to compete in style 14B: American IPA. Partly this is because I’m curious about the Ontario market and how hard it can possibly be to create a drinkable American IPA, and partly it’s because I haven’t seen anyone else announce that they’re aiming for this category on Bar Towel. I figure that in a category of one, I should at least be able to come in third. After playing around with the recipe generator for a while (and getting some advice from Russ from Biergotter) I have decided on a title for my brew: St.John’s Wort Shameless Publicity Grab IPA. The recipe is over here. It contains both of the hops of the moment: Citra and Sorachi Ace, so it should contain slightly more citrus aroma than Florida.

Finally, and most importantly, if you’re going to brew a beer at home you want everything to be sterile. My attitude to housekeeping can most charitably be described as somewhat Laissez-faire. Given that the state of my kitchen is usually somewhere between “health code violation” and “AGH! KILL IT WITH FIRE!” it seems that I’m going to be forced to spend this afternoon in a hazmat suit scrubbing violently away with bleach and steel wool.

I kid. It’s not really that bad, but I do have to get all the equipment ready and break out the Star San and get ready to explain to the neighbours why the hallway smells funny.

Posted in: Ongoing Projects ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , ,

Buffalo Brewfest 2010 – Part 2

August 8, 2010 3:57 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

The first booth we visited was the Harpoon Brewery out of Boston, started in 1986. I had talked with their representative Chirsan via email, and he was more than happy to explain the beers on offer. There were two of their core products, Harpoon IPA and their UFO unfiltered Hefeweizen on offer, but there was also the Belgian Pale Ale, which managed to steal the show. The IPA is an English style and clocks in at around 5.9% alcohol with 42 IBU and it seems like a quality product, but is part of the core lineup and therefore sort of a workhorse for the brewery. The Belgian Pale Ale is slightly less hoppy (33 IBU) but it’s an interesting departure for the company, having been distributed for the first time this year. I don’t claim to know a great deal about the thought process, but it seems to me this is the kind of beer a brewer would roll out in order to be able to start experimenting with higher gravity Belgian styles. I suspect their leviathan series will probably start to include more Belgian influence over the next couple of years.

Since the Ellicottville booth was right next to Harpoon, it was clearly next. It was another of the breweries that I had corresponded with. Dan Minner, their brewer suggested that I try their pale ale. The description from the press release is “Copper in color, mildly malty and packaged with citrusy cascade hop flavor and aroma. 5.5% ABV 51 IBU.”  It’s an American Pale Ale, but it reminded me a lot of Ontario IPAs because of the darker colour and hop bitterness and in much the same way as the Ontario IPAs it seems to want to be two different beers. I think it uses some English style malting, but with west coast hopping. I liked it well enough, but it seems a little schizoid if you look at it by itself. On the other hand, it would pair nicely with a number of different foods, so it’s unsurprising that it’s their brewpub’s flagship beer. Incidentally, I dare you to check out their brewpub’s food menu without subconsciously attempting to clear your schedule for a visit.

With the lines expanding, we wandered to the upper level which mostly contained booths from upstate New York and Vermont. If I had felt any dismay at being unable to access the courtyard, I quickly forgot about it because I was pleasantly surprised by just about everything I tried on the second level. Saranac, Lake Placid and Long Trail were right next to each other and had very reasonable lines. I hadn’t received replies from these breweries, so I had no idea what to expect. Being Canadian and generally apologetic, that tended to mean making snap decisions when I got to the front so that the line could keep moving and I somehow ended up with the strongest beers from each booth.

Saranac Imperial Stout:  A really roast forward Imperial Stout. They’re claiming that it includes 11 malt varieties, so it’s not unexpected that it should be both high gravity and incredibly dark. It’s 9% alcohol and while it’s very good, a 4oz sample was probably more effective than a pint since it’s very aggressively flavoured with bitterness from coffee, chocolate and hops. Everything you need to know is right there in the first couple of sips.

Lake Placid UBU Ale: I don’t know quite what to make of this. It purports to be an English Strong Ale, and it does that nicely, but it verges on being a winter warmer if only for the finish. It’s very much the kind of thing a forward thinking brewpub would produce since it’s versatile as both a standalone product and would compliment a pub menu nicely. It’s red (I think) and it seems to weigh in around 7% alcohol. I’m sitting here trying to envision whether this should be in a snifter or a pint glass, which gives you some idea of the versatility.

Kingston Correspondent's Double Bag

Long Trail Double IPA: I had only had the Long Trail Double Bag prior to this and I hadn’t been particularly impressed by it. The Double IPA completely changed my mind about the brewery, because it’s absolutely fantastic. At 8.6%, they’ve managed to squeeze in over 100 IBUs with just Chinook and Cascade hops with a lot of citrus and fruit. I wish I had managed to find a bottle of it to bring back because it is very comparable to Black Oak Ten Bitter Years. A side by side tasting would be ideal if only to see whether my memory was playing up. Doppelganger style similarity there.

I am now reporting on overhanging Labatt signage.

With the crowds getting somewhat unmanageable and with the event coordinators sidling up to suggest that people with press passes shouldn’t actually be drinking (which is a crock, since it’s a beer festival and what are you going to report on, the giant overhanging Labatt signage?) we decided to try a few more booths before calling it a day and going to find some dinner at the Pearl Street Grill.

Hoptical Illusion, NY edition

I couldn’t resist trying out the Blue Point Hoptical Illusion, if only because of the fact that Flying Monkeys also makes a Hoptical Illusion. There’s even a thread on Bar Towel comparing the two of them. They don’t really compare well because the Ontario H.I. is about 5% and really a lightly hopped Pale Ale. The American one is much higher in alcohol and is an IPA. I talked to the Blue Point representative about it and it seems like everyone is aware of the trademark situation and nobody is eager to get all litigious about it. Their representative (for some reason, despite the fact that he’s an awesome sales rep for them, the thick Long Island Moe Syzlak style accent and extensive memory for sales figures made me a little nervous) quickly pointed out that the Toasted Lager is actually their flagship brand. I tried it and I’ve got to say that it’s fantastically drinkable and the caramelization sort of reminded me of toasted puffed rice. Since there aren’t any adjuncts, it’s an interesting flavour in a very pleasant beer that you don’t have to think about much. I could drink a lot of it, if it were available locally.

Finally, I had the Great Lakes Lake Erie Monster, which their representative Ryan had recommended to me. It was definitely a good beer to finish up on, because at this point, there wasn’t going to be much of anything that could actually reach my palate. The Lake Erie Monster weighs in at 9.1% Alcohol and 80 IBUs. I’m sort of shocked to learn that it only includes two hop varieties: Simcoe and Fuggles. It seems to me that they’ve coaxed quite a bit of complexity out of those two ingredients, so I’m even more impressed with it now than I was at the time.

On the whole, I have to say that the Buffalo Brewfest was mostly a successful event, but it seems to me that I would have enjoyed it more if it had been less crowded. Also, I think that 20 sample tickets is probably overkill. Between the number of tickets and the length of the booth lineups it sort of managed to regulate itself, which was a good thing. It’s certainly got me thinking a little bit about the way that American breweries are developing their products and what they’re able to accomplish with fewer government regulations. It also got me a trip to Premiere Gourmet, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

Posted in: Reviews ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Buffalo Brewfest 2010 – Part 1

August 8, 2010 3:16 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

I don't see any wings.

Bloggers, I have noticed, tend to be fickle, capricious creatures with short attention spans, and I’m no different. After nearly 8 solid weeks of blogging about Canadian beer, I felt like a change of pace from the Ontario beer scene, and who can blame me? The arguments about difficulties producing craft beer in Ontario are pretty well trod at this point in time and trying to determine how to fix them tends to lead one around in mental circles. Even when new, exciting beers come out the rush to try them tends to mean that there’s a period of boredom with them before they’re widespread in pubs and the LCBO. Sometimes, even if it’s something like Smashbomb, which is really good, it’s hard to maintain excitement over the long term.

So what can be done to alleviate this zymurgical ennui? What can an itinerant canucklehead blogger do for a change of pace? The exact same thing every Ontario beer nerd with a valid passport has done since time immemorial: Shuffle off to Buffalo.

Yes, Buffalo: Where thousands of Canadians are lost each year trying to navigate the skyway, and more still attempting to find an open exit to I-90. A city where giant shopping mall complexes are named after environmentalist works by Thoreau. Buffalo! The Nickel City! Home of the chicken wing! Famous for its tire fires since 1988!

(Actually, if you ignore the pervasive roadwork, it’s a little like a more urbane Scarborough.)

Last month, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to email the organizers of the Buffalo Brewfest in order to see whether I could get a press pass. After all, I’ve been blogging for eleven weeks now, which makes me a pro by Fox news standards. I managed to get one without any real problem thanks to the kindness of the event organizers and also managed to organize a ride to Buffalo thanks to my Kingston correspondent. Undaunted by the fact that I’d be attending two beer festivals in two days I pressed on.

The truth of the matter is that for all that I hear about American beer while I’m talking to beer nerds and hanging out at places like Volo and the Beer Bistro, it’s been a long time since I’ve actually been south of the border. It’s entirely possible that the last place I ordered a beer in the US was Pickwick’s Pub in Stowe, VT and that would have been nearly half a decade ago, so my frame of reference is probably askew. The thing is this: We really only hear about the highlights from each brewery. To choose a brewery at random: Avery Brewing out of Colorado. I know that I’ve heard positively glowing things about the Maharaja Imperial IPA and the Hog Heaven Barleywine, but that’s only a fraction of what they do. They’ve got a series of ales available year round which make up the bulk of their product line and those are the things that are typically available at festivals. If there’s a Samuel Adams booth, you’re going to see their summer seasonal, not the Utopia, if you get my meaning.

Which presented me with a significant logistical problem: The 2010 Buffalo Brewfest was only four hours long and had thirty five breweries in attendance, some of which I had never heard of because they’re local to upper New York State. The other issue is that while the website had announced the breweries that were participating in the event, there was no mention of which beers the breweries would be serving, making it essentially impossible to formulate a gameplan.

I did the only sensible thing and emailed the participating breweries in order to figure out what was available, asking politely for them to suggest one or two beers that they’d be serving of which they were the most proud.  It actually ended up working pretty well, as I managed to get responses from: Ellicottville, Harpoon, Sly Fox, Great Lakes (the other one), Ommegang, Victory and Rohrbach. I was slightly surprised to find out that I was being taken relatively seriously, but then again time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.

It’s one thing to have a plan, but it’s quite another to put it into action on the ground. In a setting like the Toronto Festival of Beer, where you know beforehand exactly what’s going to be on offer and you’ve tried just about everything before, you can streamline the process very effectively safe in the knowledge that it’s a large venue and that lineups will probably not be an issue. At the HSBC centre in Buffalo, it turned out to be a very different situation.  3500 people cramped into the lobby and courtyard meant that some booths were almost entirely inaccessible.

Graaaaains

The courtyard became essentially intractable by 6:30 meaning that a number of breweries were immediately discounted, and when I provide the list for you, you’ll understand just how crowded it must have been in order to dissuade me: Dogfish Head, Troegs, Victory, Erie, Stone, Ommegang, Sly Fox and Butternuts. It’s not very surprising that these breweries had the lines that they did as at least four of them are currently world class operations. Looking down at the courtyard from the second floor of the lobby was a great deal like looking at a George Romero film, what with the staggering and the moaning. (Q: What does a beer zombie want? A: GRAAAAINS!) It’s also no surprise that there was staggering. While admission included a 4oz sample glass, it also included 20 drink tickets which over the course of the event added up to four pints of beer for the diehard value-for-money types. Since most of the offerings were well over 5%, a certain amount of gentle swaying and stumbling was certainly called for.

This meant that we decided to stay inside, where the booths were dominated by slightly smaller, more local breweries. It also meant that I had to resort to plan B: Find the guy with the most interesting beer shirt and ask him what’s good. Fortunately, a pleasant man in a Cantillon shirt hove into view and I was quickly sorted out.

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The Toronto Festival Of Beer

August 7, 2010 11:24 am ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

Bulova Watch Time: Beer forty five

I should preface my thoughts on the Toronto Festival of Beer by saying that I’ve never actually managed to get to the Toronto Festival of Beer before, despite living in the city for the majority of my adult life. In fact, prior to this year the only beer festival that I had been to was the Mondiale de la Biere in Montreal. From listening to people talk about the TFOB, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that it’s basically a frat party. The phrases that I have heard various people (some of whom are brewers) use are “Drunk Tank” “Gong Show” and “Do I have to go again this year?” It’s difficult to walk into a situation like this without a certain amount of wary prejudice, given that a number of people whose opinions I respect are dismissive of the festival.

It’s not as though they haven’t had time to reach these conclusions and then repeatedly test them. This was the 16th year for the Toronto Festival of Beer, so the majority of the people I had talked to about it before hand had been several times over the years. For that reason, I made it my mission to walk around with an open mind in order to see whether the negative reputation was deserved.

The first thing that became immediately apparent was that the festival is timed a certain way. I went on Thursday, so the hours for the day were 4-10 PM: It’s not an all day event. You’re really looking at about six hours of festival per day, and while the Saturday and Sunday hours are 1-7 PM, the amount of time that it’s open is relatively small. On Thursday, we didn’t actually get in until closer to 5:00, so realistically it was only a five hour festival.

It seems to me that this is a measure designed to be a deterrent to those over-enthusiastic partakers who are likely to end up spilling their beer or some other substance all down their shirt fronts. Hanging around with some friends who were also attending the festival it became obvious that there were a number of other safety measures built in to the festival. The yellow shirted “Alcohol Enforcement” personnel drifted gently about censuring anyone who happened to be holding two glasses. While it’s not necessarily a bad idea to restrict people to one cup at a time, it becomes an issue if you’re holding a cup for someone who has to use the port-a-john and suddenly find yourself accused of malfeasance and dereliction of human decency. Theoretically, in order to accede to the wishes of the yellow shirts, you need to either take your beer with you into the cubicle  or leave it outside with the possible consequence that someone will swipe it. That may not sound likely, but since a replacement cup costs twenty bucks, it’s certainly a worry.

To give you some idea of the prohibitive measures in place, a friend of mine reported that he had seen a sign on the way in to the festival reading “Public Urination Will Not Be Tolerated.” While I’m all in favour preventing people from stepping discreetly into the hedge to answer the call of nature, the fact that a sign is required for the purpose tells you a lot about the crowd that’s drawn to the event.

Local Hat Enthusiast, Gandalf the Grey

The crowd seems to be pretty gung ho about event participation. There were beer enthusiasts with silly hats, which is all well and good (and even, as it turns out a pretty good way to break the ice with just about everyone) but there were also people with outfits that would have made Randy “The Macho Man” Savage look like a banker. These are people who have come out to the festival with the apparent purpose of not actually remembering the visit.

It’s interesting, though, to observe some of the changes that must have happened in the last couple of years. While there was the excellently designed Budweiser section (replete with travelling festival wagon/pub) the large breweries really didn’t take up a huge amount of acreage. They were over in the corner. The focus in terms of both space and content seemed to be on the OCB, which has got to be a good thing. They were all located in front of the bandshell at a distance that wouldn’t cause permanent hearing loss. The majority of them had their core lineups of beers available, which is exactly what you want in a situation like this: Relatively light, refreshing beverages for hot summer days. There’s even the possibility that if the crowd tries your beer early in the proceedings, they might remember that they like it. There’s the very real possibility of converting people to your product. I’m forced to concede that it’s unlikely if it’s someone wearing a neon green shock wig under a straw cowboy hat, but the remote possibility exists.

Gearing up for CASKAPALOOZA!

Some Ontario brewers were even having fun with the event. Flying Monkeys has a number of one offs for the occasion including a raspberry porter which, while it’s pretty syrupy, manages to taste a little like a sacher torte or black forest cake. I talked with Peter Chiodo, and it seemed to me that while he was proud of it, he was also in the process of refining the recipe for later use. Great Lakes had an entire wall of casks for their CASKAPALOOZA zone, including a couple of varieties that I hadn’t tried before including their Windy City Pale Ale (complete with floating pieces of hops) and Sweet Pete’s Peach Wheat which is very easy drinking, although I think it might benefit from a hint more tartness on the next go round.

For all that there were maniacs in wigs and fluorescent shirts staggering determinedly to the next booth, there were also people taking a reasonable, cultivated approach to the event. One of the things that I hadn’t expected was Mirella Amato’s Girl’s Guided Beer Tour. Now, it was only available on Thursday, but it was interesting to watch some of it. Instead of showing up at the festival and wasting time trying to figure out where everything was and what was worth trying (a problem for everyone regardless of gender), the women on the tour got some direction and some information about the health benefits of beer and the styles of beer they were drinking; Most importantly, everyone seemed to be having fun doing it. I’m generally in favour of anything that gets more women to drink beer, so it was nice to see that this worked so well.

As the evening drew to a close, a serious problem became apparent, and it was mostly logistical. Beer Tokens were being advertised as available in packages of five or twenty, essentially working out to a dollar a token. While that’s pretty reasonable, it’s hard to get through twenty samples of beer in five hours. Since the tokens are non-refundable, you’ve pretty much got to use them up which meant that toward 10 PM when the taps stopped pouring, people started to throw tokens at just about anything available. People were trading tokens for cigarettes or just handing them off on their way out the door. It began to feel like control of the event was slipping away. I think that given another hour or so the event would have degenerated badly towards the kinds of behavior that have earned the festival its reputation. I’m not sure that I would have enjoyed seeing a sixth hour of the festival, which I’m sure would have necessitated the liberal use of sawdust and hoses.

If they’re so worried about crowd control, I think they should just go to two four hour sessions a day. I don’t even think that they’d need to change the entrance fee very much, and it would certainly be a good deal more manageable.

In summary, it seemed to me like the Toronto Festival of Beer is probably going in the right direction to shake off some of the negative reputation that it has earned over the years and some events like CASKAPALOOZA and the continued presence of the Ontario Craft Brewers are making a dent. It may never be exactly civilized, but it is a fine excuse to dress like you’re on your way to a match with Hulk Hogan.

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So You Want To Be A Brewer – The Toronto Beer Week Homebrew Competition

August 3, 2010 1:59 pm ⋅ 4 Comments ⋅

One of the best things about being a beer drinker in Toronto this year is the fact that the number of events keeps increasing. There was Ontario Craft Beer Week, the Hart House Craft Beer Festival and starting on Thursday of this week, we’re going to have the Toronto Festival of Beer which will be interesting if for no other reason than the ability to watch a large of number of people staggering about complaining about the price of a sample of light beer.

On the horizon though is Toronto Beer Week, which is starting to differentiate itself from the other events this summer in the variety of events that it’s going to include. As I understand it, a fairly large number of pubs will be involved and they’ll all be playing to their strengths, which is as it should be. According to the website there are going to be neighbourhood pub crawls, beer dinners, cask tastings, meet the brewer nights and even beer trivia nights for those of you who have amassed a wealth of comparatively useless knowledge over the years.

The most interesting development was announced last week, which is the introduction of a Toronto Beer Week Homebrew Competition. It’s a great idea because it not only creates discussion about Toronto Beer Week in lead up to the events, it also allows people to take part in an activity instead of having all of the events for the week determined by pub owners and the governing committee. It’s a great event in that it creates recognition for those talented amateur brewers from around the city who would normally only be able to show off their skills when people come over for a drink.

It’s especially interesting to me because I’m a closet homebrewer. I don’t mean to say that I’m ashamed of my homebrewing; I mean that I’m literally forced to brew in a closet. I live in a one bedroom apartment so small that the clichéd jokes are hunchbacked. Periodically I think about getting a cat or a dog and I realize that keeping an animal in a space this confined would be cruel, which inevitably prompts the thought that while it is probably also cruel to keep myself here I am at least spared having to take monthly heartworm medication.

I have made a number of attempts at homebrewing over the years, starting back during university. Fortunately we currently live in an age when online homebrewing resources are extremely accessible and there are very well illustrated, easy to follow guides for those who are attempting to do it for the first time. They walk you through all of the steps of both all grain and extract brewing. There are even videos on youtube available for those of you what don’t read good. In university, though, we didn’t really have the same number of resources and there weren’t really a huge number of instructional sources. We were pretty much limited to the information on the back of the can of hopped malt extract.

Theoretically, brewing beer as a university student is a fantastic idea. It’ll save money and you’ll be able to list it as a hobby. Realistically, however, you end up with wort stains on the stovetop, exploding bottles in the closet and, if you’re trying to brew a coffee stout, grounds in your teeth. I wish that I could claim that this was in the days before cheesecloth, but the better claim is that it was in the days before common sense. We didn’t understand any of the chemistry behind brewing and the results were so disappointing that the second batch of beer never got bottled and may still be sitting at the back of a closet somewhere a decade later having developed sentience.

In the last couple of years, there have been more successful attempts and while nothing that I have made is anything to write home about, it has at least been drinkable. They’ve all been ales, and at least at this point I understand the process. It’s frustrating attempting to brew in a one bedroom apartment, though. I have a window air conditioner, so temperature control is a problem. Last august I ended up trying to brew an American style wheat beer that had to be poured out due to a heat wave. It was no great loss at that point because it had begun to smell like soy sauce. When it’s not unbearably hot out, though, I’ve done pretty well. There was a mild bitter that was pretty drinkable and an American IPA that was good enough that I never quite got around to sharing it with anyone. Truly, the only beer that I was disappointed in was the ESB that I tried to create a recipe for; I seriously misjudged the amount of crystal malt. You know that you’ve done badly when you’d rather have a nice mug of cocoa.

Over the last year or so, I’ve learned a lot about brewing and have even completed grade 12 biology, so I think it’s time to dust off the ol’ carboy. I’m relatively sure that I can come up with something that, while unlikely to win any prizes, will probably not rank with the Hindenburg in terms of man-made disasters. In truth, I’m aiming to do slightly better. Possibly between “unfortunate train derailment” and “collapsed overpass.”

After all, I’ve got all the equipment already and it’ll give me an excuse to give the kitchen a good cleaning. All I need is some decent bottles, a recipe and the ingredients and I’m good to go. Sure, there’ll be a lot of Star-San rinsing and a certain amount of obsessively checking to make sure that the yeast is forming a krausen (which is slightly more compulsive than Farmville). I’m willing to go to these lengths for two reasons: Firstly, there’s an entire closet which is essentially unusable since it’s full of brewing equipment anyway. Secondly, the rules for the contest on the Toronto Beer Week blog suggest that anyone who provides an email address will receive feedback on their submission and I’ve always wanted to see how many times a BJCP certified individual can use the word travesty in a review.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon poring over the beer section of my library in an attempt to develop a recipe that is unlikely to result in a mob of pitchfork wielding beer judges chasing after me.

Posted in: Ongoing Projects ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

The Hart House Craft Beer Festival

July 31, 2010 12:20 pm ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

On Thursday, I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Craft Beer Festival at Hart House at the University of Toronto. I don’t get down to Hart House very much. In fact, I think the last time I was there was to see a production of Guys and Dolls and Clinton may have still been president. It’s always slightly off putting, then, to realize that there’s a very large and stolid gothic revival structure placed just outside of downtown Toronto. From a distance it tends to look as though you’re likely to be attending a beer festival at stately Wayne Manor, but when you close in on the place you realize very quickly that instead of a millionaire playboy and his butler, you’re actually surrounded by penniless grad students and their professors.

Hart House, described by one local beer enthusiast as being "classier than all get out."

Going in to the Hart House Craft Beer Festival, I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I had a page of questions that I wanted answers to and I’ll list some of them here: What was the history of Hart House? What information can I get about the previous years at the festival? Is there anything new at the festival? Is it worth the $35.00 entrance fee? What exactly is the point of having a beer festival at a university when the majority of the students are gone for the summer?

Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and I decided to enjoy myself instead of trying to answer damn fool questions about the provenance of the building and the history of the festival. You can probably find out about the building from Wikipedia if you’re really into that kind of thing, and the history of the festival doesn’t really signify since it’s only three years old. There’s not any point in asking hard hitting questions about this festival, because it’s working on its own agenda.

This festival isn’t really about promoting new, innovative products or judging beers on their relative merits or creating awareness of the Ontario beer scene. This is a festival that doesn’t really care about any of that, having decided that it would be a good idea to provide people with a very pleasant place to stand around with some good food and a refreshing glass of something cold to drink. Instead of concentrating on promotion, they concentrated on fun. Remember fun? Back when you didn’t really care very much about IBUs or whether the Wellington Silver Wheat Beer was any good? Back when the point of going to a beer festival wasn’t really about finding new beers to try, but rather having a good time and maybe flirting with girls in summer dresses?

This, more than anything, is the attraction of the Hart House Craft Beer Festival, and the demographic that it draws certainly reflects that. My understanding was that the venue was limited to 650 attendees, and out of that number, there were only a dozen or so hardcore beer nerds hanging about the place. The remainder of the attendees tended to be between 20 and 35 although there were certainly a handful of middle aged men as there are at all beer festivals everywhere. This is exactly the demographic that everyone wants to attract to a festival like this for the reason that if you can convert people to craft beer early enough, they’re very unlikely to go back to drinking whatever was available during their undergraduate lives.

The food was surprisingly good. I realize that universities tend to have on site catering staff, but I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. There were very tasty pulled pork sandwiches (which is essentially the sandwich of the now. You can’t go anywhere in Toronto without accidentally ingesting one of these at this point) and a table of crudités with cheese and pate and whole pieces of fruit. I liked the jerked tofu so much that it has thrown my entire carnivoristic world view out of whack. You may read elsewhere about some of the organizational problems that existed regarding the lineups for the entrees. You may hear that people might as well have been lining up for a copy of Pravda in Omsk circa 1987 for all the speed with which the line moved. You may hear that people organized platoons of diners to stand in line so that they could trade off on going to refill their glasses. These probably aren’t exaggerations, but it’s a relatively minor quibble.

For all that there was nothing brewed specifically for the festival, there were a number of things that I hadn’t tried before. Grand River brought their Ploughman’s Anniversary Ale (American Pale Ale, 70 IBU according to Zach Tremaine from the brewery) which I had been wanting to try for a while. It’s very much like the rest of their lineup: It’s a solid offering with a lot of malt although it differs slightly in that it’s about 6.5%. It’s a well balanced beer which I’m of two minds about. On the one hand it’s a seasonal  offering, celebrating the brewery’s anniversary and therefore not constantly available. On the other, it’s something to look forward to.

HMH Negotiants had what was pretty clearly the most popular booth of the evening, given that they managed to sell out of nearly everything that they brought to the festival. They were very much showcasing their line of Quebec beers, with products from Dieu Du Ciel, Charlevoix and Trois Mousquetaires. I’m relatively sure that I hadn’t seen the Equinox du Printemps from Dieu Du Ciel before (It’s a 9.1% Scotch Ale with maple syrup and potentially too heavy for a warm summer afternoon) I also tried the Trois Mousquetaires Doppelbock, which I found overwhelmingly malty, but in a pleasant way.

Towards the end of the night, with the sound system turned up and, thanks to the high walls of the quad, nothing visible overhead but the stars, people actually managed to enjoy themselves. They drank beer, sure, but more importantly they sat in circles on the grass and talked and laughed and some of them even danced!

All of the criticism that I have heard of the festival has to do with the fact that there was nothing new on offer. Anyone who makes that criticism has completely missed the point of the thing. The Hart House Craft Beer Festival is not about finding you something new to put on ratebeer. It’s about opening up a new audience for the stuff that already exists. One of the problems that periodically effects the discourse on beer drinking seems to be that enthusiasts take for granted that everyone ought to have already tried whatever new beer debuted the previous month. That’s a nonsensical position. The majority of the public probably couldn’t name six craft breweries, let alone those breweries brands. It simply cannot be taken for granted that people WANT to drink craft beer. It’s why festivals like Hart House are so important: They introduce people to the concept and hopefully as a result of having fun drinking and dancing and carrying on, they acquire a taste for craft beer.  It’s a small crowd and it’s a nice venue and it reaches 650 people at a time, some of whom are still in line for sandwiches.

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The Wreck of the Okanagan Springs Brewery

July 24, 2010 1:28 pm ⋅ 7 Comments ⋅

This morning, when I logged into Bar Towel, I read a very distressing piece of news which had been linked from the Globe and Mail. A tragedy has occurred at the Okanagan Springs Brewery in Vernon, BC. Apparently, a gas buildup in a fermenting vat resulted in an explosion, causing the loss of 32,000 litres of beer. Now some people who have tried the Okanagan Springs product may think that this is an improvement over actually making a shipment, but I admonish you! Think of all the poor unfortunate beer drinkers in British Columbia who will be forced to wait for their beer. They may even have to buy a different product while they wait for the next batch from the brewery. This is a tragedy of epic proportion, and alcohol abuse of the worst possible kind.

That said, we’re Canadians and we should rally around and show support for the poor men and women who are now forced to sweep up shards of broken glass and fermentor. I mean, how would you feel if you got in to work in the morning and sat down at your desk and the computer suddenly caught fire? You’d probably get to take the rest of the day off while the IT department fixed it, but that’s neither here nor there. The fact remains that this is a tragedy and given our national character, the loss of this much beer is an affront nearly on par with the G20 riots, mining disasters and people making fun of our accent!

I began to think to myself, what can I do to raise the spirits of the poor souls involved in the clean up? They have literally days of work ahead of them and the brewery will smell even more like a brewery than usual. Then I realized that my course of action was clear: WWGLD? What Would Gordon Lightfoot Do? He’d record a song commemorating the sacrifice of the people involved in the disaster and probably wear a snazzy leather jacket while doing it!

Since I had no idea of how to go about contacting Gordon Lightfoot, I’ve had to make do with an ugly approximation of my own design. It’s a shame because my leather jacket is nowhere near snazzy enough to do Gord’s song the justice it deserves.

Without further ado, I give you The Wreck of the Okanagan Springs Brewery. I have even included lyrics so you can sing along at home

The legend lives on throughout Vernon’s downtown

Of the day the fermenter exploded

The beer, it is said, never gave up its head

And by nighttime the city was coated

As craft breweries go it was bigger than most

Each fermenter held thousands of liters

But there wasn’t a vent and it finally went:

Broken bottles for dozens of meters.

The newspapers claimed that the problem was blamed

On a buildup of carbon dioxide

The force of the squall tore the door from the wall

With the violence and strength of a rock slide

This was the tale of a batch of cream ale

from the brewery called Okanagan

The lumberjacks cried and they broke down inside;

There’d be nothing to drink after logging.

The beer it was spilled and though no one was killed

It was tragic enough to the brewers

Instead of being filtered through beer loving men

It flowed directly into the sewers.

While it may not be the rallying cry that the folks at Okanagan Springs need during this, their darkest hour, I feel as though I’m at least attempting to provide some moral support and with that untenable sense of self righteousness under my belt, I’m going to go and enjoy the rest of my Saturday afternoon.

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On Palate and Limitations

July 23, 2010 12:04 pm ⋅ 6 Comments ⋅

Regular readers will have noticed by now that I tend not to review individual beers for my blog. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which are down to mechanics and some of which are down to personal taste.

In mechanical terms, I find that I don’t necessarily trust myself to make notes accurately. I’m hampered by a certain amount of red-green and blue-purple colourblindness. While this is the kind of thing that can be a huge genetic advantage in aerial cartography, it can be sort of a nuisance when faced with traffic lights, modern art or action movie bomb defusing. God help us all if I’m ever called upon to cut the dark green wire.

Typically the response that people have when they find out about this minor condition is to hold things up or point at various objects scattered around the room and ask “what colour is that?” as though they are encountering someone with this issue for the very first time. Usually they’ll point at a tree, or the grass first in order to attempt to establish a baseline. It’s fun to blow their minds by pointing out that the grass is, in fact, green. All that they have really established is that I once read a first grade primer. In fact, no one knew I was colourblind until I was six. I developed the very simple coping mechanism of knowing what colours things were supposed to be and then finding a crayon with the name of the colour written on the wrapper.

One of the problems with evaluating beer, though, is that colour is determined through SRM which is a relatively dull abbreviation for Standard Reference Method. It refers to the colour of the beer, ranging from water (0) to complete and total darkness (40+). I have no problem with crystal clear or black as midnight on a moonless night. I have a significant amount of trouble reliably determining colours between about 7 SRM and 25 SRM. I might be able to guess within about three or four points, but I’m not absolutely sure that such an estimation is of use to anyone. And I tend to be thrown off by opacity! An unfiltered beer will look darker to me even if it isn’t actually any darker in colour.

Fortunately, there’s a relatively simple workaround: recruiting people who don’t have this problem. “Hey, uh, Tim? Yeah, man. What colour is this? Right. Riiiight…”

On Saturday, though, I came to an additional realization: I was drinking a sample of Charlevoix’s excellent Dominus Vobiscum Hibernus and I was unable to describe exactly what I was tasting. It’s not a matter of cognitive dissonance. I simply didn’t have the vocabulary. Here’s what I wrote:

This is a Belgian Strong Ale, and when I was attempting to determine which beers to try this afternoon, I was warned that this was very spicy. It is extremely spicy, but it also contained a number of fruit notes. I sat for a couple of minutes attempting to come up with a list of things that I was tasting (many of the things on the list had question marks beside them), but ended up completely sidetracked when I realized what food I would pair it with. The best explanation that I can give you about this beer is that it needs to go with Tortiere. It absolutely has to. In a perfect world everyone would come back from Christmas Eve mass, and have a large, warming glass of this with a slice of homemade Tortiere. Looking at the trade description I realized I wasn’t far off even without the adequate tasting vocabulary:  “A salutary elixir that will comfort you from the wintry season’s frigid grasp. It will indeed warm and enliven your soul even when our glacial winter doesn’t want to let up.”

Clearly, I understand what’s going on and I can associate the flavours with places where I have tried them before, but I can’t list the individual contributing flavours. Look at this review of the same beer from Ratebeer.com:

“Pours a beautiful walnut colored pour with a nice off-white, frothy head. Aroma holds some really nice nectarine and peach notes, along with rosemary, tarragon (props). These two two concepts meld beautifully into a mulled cider profile, that has clove and pear in the background– very spicy on the nose overall. Flavor takes a while to develop, then explodes with heavy heavy spice. Definitely a winter beer- reminds me of those gimmicky Christmas ales, but to be fair, it has a little more going on. Some molasses and caramel malt, but that beautiful nectarine profile from the aroma has been overpowered by the mulled spice. Bittersweet chocolate creeps in as well.”

While no one tastes the same things in any particular beer, I have to concede that I wish I could pick out all of these things. I have realized that I’m working with a shockingly limited vocabulary in terms of flavour.

Just looking at this note, I can tell you with complete certainty that I haven’t had a nectarine in an extraordinarily long time, if ever. I think I may have had a glass of mulled cider a few years ago at a Christmas function, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what’s being mulled. I’m not even really sure what Tarragon is. This is probably a function of living as a single twenty something male person in a one bedroom apartment: The kind of lifestyle where food preparation involves periodically grilling some chicken and tweaking your recipe for chili con carne; washing dishes only when absolutely necessary. It’s probably also the result of being the whiny kid who wanted everything plain. According to mom, I didn’t like gingerbread and would run from the room when the Christmas cake was laid out.

While there’s nothing that I can do about colourblindness short of recruiting a seeing eye drinker, I know with some degree of certainty that I’ll be able to improve my vocabulary in terms of palate. As I see it, this is the kind of information that can be acquired. I have decided to attempt this over the course of the next month or so, and it seems to me that the best thing to do is to split the project into three sections: Spices (Everything from Aniseed to Za’atar), Fruit (Everything short of Durian) and Other (which will include chocolate and caramel and things of that nature).

I’m not entirely sure whether this is going to prove to be beneficial. I don’t know for certain that it will make me a better observer. I don’t even know exactly how I’m going to go about it. However, if you’re at the St. Lawrence Market over the next couple of weeks and you see a large, confused looking man wandering around the spice vendor’s stall with a copy of the Complete Idiot’s Field Guide to Marjoram, it will probably be me.

If It’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

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