St. John's Wort Beery Musings and Amusing Beers

Tag Archives: Bar Volo

Amsterdam Tap Takeover @ Bar Volo

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


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

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

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

The Amsterdam retail store, viewed from the Brewhouse.

The Amsterdam retail store, viewed from the Brewhouse.

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

I digress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer to all these questions is “probably.”

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

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

So You Want To Be A Brewer: The Inevitability of Crushing Defeat At The Hands Of Mike Lackey

April 1, 2012 3:10 pm ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

At some point in the middle of the last month, probably during a week when there were midterm exams, I was surprised by an email about the Ontario IPA Challenge. I knew it was coming up, but usually Volo sort of organizes their events independently and it seemed a little too early in the process for them to be sending an email to me, even as a save the date sort of thing for the judging. I was part of the panel of judges last year for the event, so I figured that’s probably what it was and assumed that I didn’t need to look at it immediately and went back to pretending to learn more about centrifugal pumps and turbulent flow than I was actually managing to do.

As it turns out, I was actually being invited to compete independently in the Ontario IPA Challenge as a brewer. This was not, as you may assume, a situation for that called for unalloyed joy.  There are a lot of things to take in to account in a situation like this one:

First of all, I’m not really a brewer. I’m a beer writer who’s a bit of a dilettante brewer on the side, sometimes, when I have a good idea and I’m pretty sure I can make a drinkable beer out of it. I’ve done two semesters of brewing school at Niagara College (initially pretty dashed well and then subsequently less well as I realized that taking on writing a book and 20 hours of commuting a week were mutually exclusive goals that only a madman would actually attempt. I mean, sometimes I require sleep.) and I’ve got about five collaborative brews under my belt.

Secondly, sometimes my beer actually turns out alright. Usually, when this happens I give credit to whomever I’m brewing with, whether it’s Paul Dickey or Mike Lackey or Jason Tremblay or Jon Hodd. The fact that not one of them has been a complete stinker is testament to the talent of these guys who are kind enough to let me borrow their brewing systems and make sure I don’t do anything really stupid. Probably, though, I can afford by now to take a little bit of credit for one thing: my beers have not actually killed anyone. Sometimes people even like them.

Thirdly, there is just no way that I was ever going to win the Ontario IPA Challenge. I was relatively sure that if I could get time on a system somewhere in Toronto and actually manage to brew a beer, it would probably end up being palatable. It might even make it to the second round, depending on the way the first leg of the contest was drawn up. Beyond that, probably not so much, especially since Mike Lackey continues in his seemingly endless path of IPA dominance.

Mike Lackey, as you’ll recall from previous years at the IPA challenge, has a reputation approximately the size of mechagodzilla. He had the top two beers in 2010. Karma Citra won last year, but I’m relatively sure that it crushed the competition by a wide margin and made grown people weep with its beauty. No one felt bad about losing to that beer. I’ve had that beer on tap since then, and honestly, I cannot envision a situation in which anyone will ever beat Mike Lackey in this challenge again unless he takes some ludicrous risks. Possibly, if someone shaves his beard, he will, like Samson, lose his powers.

It’s for that reason that I decided to just relax and have fun with the thing. Since I usually find a concept for a beer that I like and work backwards from that, I thought that it would be fun to work the other way, and I was obliged by my fellow Niagara College student Austin Roach. Austin is from an engineering background and a pretty analytical guy. I like working with him because we’re from more or less the same place geographically (East York) and we have a pretty similar sense of humour (huge nerds). When we talked about the recipe for the thing, he had just a bunch of ideas he wanted to try and I agreed with all of them.

For instance, you can’t win the Ontario IPA challenge by emulating the West Coast IPA style anymore. Great Lakes has that covered. What you could do is emulate the water in Chico, California. We like the hop presence of Sierra Nevada beers and suspect it has something to do with the water profile. He wanted to play with the myrcene and humulene that would come out during the boil in various different types of hops. Those are both hop oils. My favorite hop oil is Linalool because it sounds like something you’d name a Fairy Princess.

What? It does.

We have used a pretty odd assortment of hops in our entry for the Ontario IPA Challenge, including a couple that were completely off my radar for this kind of thing. I think the only one I’ve used before is Galaxy, which made an appearance in the Gin and Juice beer I did at Volo last month. We’ve got some Galena and First Gold and Bullion in there as well. We have not done a test batch. We are making it up as we go along, footloose and fancy free. This is really about playing with the way these hops express their character, rather than some esoteric conceit that I’ve come up with. (I know! Let’s make a welsh mild that utilizes Peruvian maca root espresso and then find some tenuous connection between Wales and the Andes. I’ve got it! Double “L”. Llama Milld. Brilliant!)

Paul Dickey receives our thanks for letting us brew on his system at Black Oak. He’s a most gracious host, and I’ve only had to write a Standard Operating Procedure for his pilot system in exchange for the time. That’s a pretty good deal, if you ask me.

We’re referring to the collaboration as St. Roach. It will be available at the 4th annual Ontario Cask IPA Challenge. All I can promise you is that we enjoyed making it and that it should be substantially different than the other entries while still falling within the BJCP American IPA definition.

Also, expect to see St.John’s Wort Llama Milld on tap somewhere just as soon as I can convince someone that a Peruvian maca root espresso Welsh Mild is a good idea.

Posted in: Bar Volo, Niagara College, Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

Beer 4 Boobs

March 17, 2012 3:47 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

One of the problems with writing a national column has to do with the fact that it becomes pretty difficult to justify reporting on events that are purely local. Sometimes, I’ll see upcoming events that I want to plug, but it’s just not feasible due either to timeline constraints or due to the size of the audience that the information is relevant to. Take, for example, the Beer4Boobs event that’s going on at Bar Volo on Sunday, March 25th. It’s on Sunday, which is the day the column runs, so reporting on it does no good whatsoever. Capacity for the event is maybe 250 people over the course of the entire day, and promoting it Sunday morning is only going to be useful to people who live in Toronto, and probably the majority of them will have heard about it by then.

The thing is that it’s an interesting event and a good cause. It’s a lineup of beers made by very talented female brewers. All of the beers are one offs, and there are at least seven of them on offer. Admission to the event is twenty bucks, and there’s going to be a raffle with some very nice prizes available. All proceeds go to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. It’s an idea for an event that came from California and which is spreading across North America.

The brewers include a couple of students from Niagara College Teaching Brewery: Kellye Robertson and Jennifer Nadwodny. I got to try their beer the other day as it was being kegged, since I was standing around in the Niagara College brewery, learning stuff. It is apparently called Cocoa Inferno. I think that it would probably be bad form to talk about the beers before the day, but if their beer is any indicator of the amount of creativity that has gone into the process, this is going to be a good event.

Additionally, I should point out that I really like Freya’s Tears as a name for a beer. I don’t know who came up with that name, but well done, mystery brewer! I look forward to trying it, since I feel like there’s a conceptual element behind it and I enjoy that kind of thing.

So, follow the hashtag #Beer4Boobs on Twitter! Like them on facebook! Show up at the event and support a worthy cause! Drink a delicious beer and help people not get cancer! Buy a whole bunch of raffle tickets and you might even win a bunch of high quality swag!

I appreciate that that’s not a very long post, and that it’s not a very funny post, but sometimes it’s just about getting the word out.

Posted in: Bar Volo, Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

So You Want To Be A Brewer: House Ales/St.John’s Wort Gin and Juice IPA

February 28, 2012 3:06 pm ⋅ 6 Comments ⋅

Before I started writing about beer, I worked a job at a publishing company. It was not a particularly fulfilling job, but one of the perks that it had was location. It was located right down the street from Bar Volo. I suppose that at this point, I’ve probably been going to Volo off and on for about five years, and it’s amazing to see how much the place has changed in that time. They’ve started an import agency with Keep6imports. Their annual Cask Days event has become large enough that it now has to be held at an alternate site. They’ve even branded their on-site nanobrewery as House Ales.

Consider for a moment that this is a pub that has evolved to the point where it requires four websites to keep everyone up to date with their activities. When I started going there, they barely had one.

If you're waiting outside of a bar at 7:00 AM, and you're sober, people look at you funny.

I don’t know if it’s because I was a regular there for a long time, but every beer that I’ve brewed as a collaboration has somehow ended up on tap at Volo. There were the Lazarus Breakfast Stout and Imperial Element, which were collaborations with Mike Lackey at Great Lakes. There was the Manitou Sumac Saison, which was a collaboration with Paul Dickey.

It’s kind of a kick having your beer served at the best beer bar in the country. That’s what Volo is, according to ratebeer. For some brewers, I suspect that being on tap at Volo is just another day at the office. After all, when you’re producing thousands of hectoliters a year, it must be pretty hard to get excited about where it’s going to be served. At that point, the main priority has to be moving a lot of whatever that beer is. In my case, since the biggest batch I’ve managed so far is something like a hundred litres, it’s exciting.

I still can't believe anyone's crazy enough to entrust me with electrical equipment.

I was at Volo on the first brew day with the Blichmann system, and I’ve watched them develop as a brewery. Some of the beers have been really good and some of them have been less good. It’s like that when you’re experimenting with small batch recipes, especially during the first year. They’ve now gotten to the point where they’ve got a couple of brewers in Jason Tremblay and Jon Hodd.

The thing that I like most about House Ales is that there’s some conceptual continuity. I suspect that the Hip-Hop series of beers that they’ve done is mostly there because of Tomas and Giulian Morana’s tastes in music. It doesn’t seem like Ralph would have come up with RUN E.S.B. or NOTORIOUS I.P.A.

I’m very lucky because I don’t currently have any constraints to my creative process in terms of brewing. For that reason, I get to come up with an idea for a beer and then make it work. It doesn’t have to be marketable, since there’s not going to be a lot of it. It just has to be tasty.

First wort hopping. For that extra.. uh.. thing.

In this case, I knew that I wanted to design something that related to the Hip-Hop series that House Ales does. I figure that if you’re going to play on someone else’s turf, you ought at least to follow their rules. I also knew that rather than just giving the beer a Hip-Hop pun as a name, I wanted to come up with something that was conceptually valid and would carry through into the flavour. As it turns out there aren’t a whole lot of ways you can go conceptually.

I suppose that you could probably make a beer with just a whole lot of a really resin-y Simcoe hops for that authentic bong rip flavour and call it The Chronic. I don’t know. My lack of fluency in the genre really limited my ability to play. Eventually I settled on Gin and Juice for two reasons

1)      Because I like G-funk.

2)      It was pretty much the only thing I could think of that would translate.

I figured that if you’re going to make a beer called Gin and Juice, both of those elements need to be right up front. You’re going to need a lot of citrus and tropical fruit flavours out of the hops, which more or less means  that you have to use a lot of late additions for aroma. The most fruit flavour I’d seen out of a hop recently was from Nelson Sauvin and Galaxy, so the recipe initially called for those, with some cascade for citrus specifically. While we had to alter the ingredients on the brew day, Jason Tremblay had some really good ideas for substitutions.

See that slick of oil? Yeah, that might have some hops in there.

The Gin part is a bit trickier. Since gin gets most of its flavour from juniper berries, that’s pretty much what you’re going to have to use in order to get that flavour. I suppose that you could probably throw them in as an aroma component around five minutes from the end of the boil, and that would definitely give you some flavour. The problem is knowing how much flavour it might give you. In a batch of about 85 liters, how much juniper do you want to use? Also, how are the juniper berries going to interact with the hops? Once it’s in there, you can’t take it out. In the end, we decided that it would be better to go with putting the berries in the secondary fermenter.

I don’t know exactly what it’s going to taste like, but it’s sure as heck going to be interesting. Probably it will be on tap at Volo towards the end of March. Thanks go to Ralph Morana for letting me use his equipment and Jason Tremblay for making sure I didn’t set anything on fire.

Posted in: Bar Volo, Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Cask Days @ Hart House

November 2, 2011 9:25 pm ⋅ 5 Comments ⋅

In Ralph Morana’s ever expanding quest to take over the beer world, Cask Days 2011 has to be seen as a massive success. That being said, it wasn’t without gambles. Any time you move a beer festival to an outdoor location, you face a number of variables that are beyond your control. The truth is that it all came together perfectly this year.

One of the things I use to gauge the success of a cask festival is how the English ex-pats think of it. These are people, after all, who get back across the pond periodically to enjoy real ale festivals that are generally much larger than those we have in Canada. This year Cask Days actually managed to put blissful looks on their faces, and I talked to three or four ex-pats who lauded the thing as being a “proper festival.”

There were a number of things that helped to pull this off. The first is the setting. Hart House lends an air of sophistication to a beer festival. People tend to behave themselves when you put them in a massive university courtyard in a way that they wouldn’t necessarily do in other places. Perhaps it was the imposing nature of the structure or the nearly surreal carillon ringing from the bell tower that had this calming effect. At least during the first session, no one got out of hand.

The bells! The bells!

One of the key ingredients in this success was the massive variety of beer on offer. There were 82 separate casks, which is amazing when you consider the genesis of the event. When I started going to Cask Days four years ago, there might have been something like 40, and they would all have been from Ontario. The fact that this event has expanded to include BC, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and England is no small feat. Think about the amount of organization that it must take to get that many brewers on the phone, let alone to get them to ship casks of their beer out to coincide with the last week in October. Astounding.

Should have sent a poet.

The other thing that worked to everyone’s benefit was the fact that it was cold. It was, for me anyway, just about the right temperature to be serving cask ale at. I know that some folks seem to like it at eight or nine degrees Celsius, but I prefer it at around six, chill haze be damned. It’s going to warm up in your hands anyway, so I feel like having the flavours open up in front of you is a good thing.

George Eagleson: Urban Cowboy

People dressed up for the weather, in windbreakers and parkas and a surprising number of cowboy hats. Many people fought to find a place on the north side of the quad so that they could stand in the sun and warm up. This is just enough adversity to create a shared experience. It’s not so much adversity that it becomes the focal point of the day. It would be hard, for example to properly enjoy cask ale in a lifeboat after listening to the band play Nearer My God To Thee while this ship goes down. It would, however, create a sense of community, at least until the cannibalism set in.

Local Hat Enthusiast Greg Earp

The branding on all of the material involved with the festival was excellent, and most of the credit for this goes to Tomas Morana, who has become something of a savant in terms of graphic design. At some point before the festival, he took the time to design tokens with the event logo on them. These are so vastly an improvement on having paper tickets in your pocket that I don’t know where to begin. In the old days, they used to issue strips of paper with little dotted lines on them so you knew where to tear the tickets. Try finding a single ticket in one of your many pockets after you’ve sampled 14 quarter pints of beer. The tokens are a stroke of genius.

I wasn't going to include this picture, but I did because of tokenism.

Perhaps most impressive was the fact that I didn’t end up drain pouring a single beer. In previous years there have always been one or two beers that I tried that I couldn’t get through despite the fact that the sample might have been five ounces. The leap in quality is tremendous. The brewers are now taking this seriously, and by trial and error over the course of the last seven years most of them have learned how to properly cask beers.

Somehow, both the Central City Red Racer Citra Pale Ale and the Storm Fresh Hop IPA survived the voyage from BC and were excellent. One would have thought that the Trois Mousquetaires Barrel Aged Baltic Porter would have stolen the show in the Quebec tent, but Dunham’s Oak Aged Cranberry Ale was magnificent; tart, with that hint of wood that aids the mouthfeel. I suspect that it may have been bolstered by a touch of wild yeast. All I know is that Dunham clearly bears watching.

Gordo thought he got out of frame. Gordo was wrong.

Niagara College put forth a good effort, and our booth was manned by Gord Slater, who is pictured here in a very dapper hat which was provided by Don Cherry’s Burlington Glamour line of couture (there is the distinct possibility I will be expelled for this joke). The Bultersberg Barley Wine was very good and I feel as though the other beers benefitted from dry hopping. Niagara students Austin Roach and Andrew Bartle collaborated with Volo’s House Ales to create Gold Dust, which was a solid attempt at an American style Porter.

Ontario actually measured up to the other provinces. Mike Lackey from Great Lakes created a 100% Brett IPA which I imagine will take the best name prize: Fangboner. Yes, it’s a silly name. Try saying it aloud in a high pitched voice, or singing it to the tune of goldfinger. It also created an awkward situation when you were being served by one of the girls manning the booth. “Excuse me young lady, could I trouble you for a Fangboner? What’s that? No, just a quarter pint Fangboner. This is the Fangboner? Great. Here’s your token. Fangboner.”

"Hey, what can we call this beer? It needs to be wholesome enough to play in Peoria....I've got it. Fangboner."

Cameron’s continues to do interesting things. Apparently their There Is No Dana, Only Zuur Sour is the result of months of barrel aging. It was tasty. The only legitimate criticism I have for it is that the beer is that it didn’t really peak at any point on the palate; one flavour all the way through. Good beer, though and it gets high marks on the Venkman Quotient.

Don't open the tap all the way. Important safety tip, Egon.

Best of all though was Sawdust City’s I Swear, Sugarpants, It Was Your Idea. I didn’t think much of Sawdust City’s first offering. I think the ingredient from every province thing they did with Great Weiss North was gimmicky and a little busy on the palate. I don’t think anyone knew enough of the ingredients to be able to pick them out. This, on the other hand, was marvelous. It’s a brown ale with coffee malt and lactose brewed with a sort of garam masala chai steep that was added as a flavour addition at the end of the boil. It tasted like a chai latte. I don’t actually like chai, and this was excellent. More than that, it was exciting. I don’t know exactly how he pulled it off and made the flavours work together, but he did.

Looking at this picture, I'm seriously considering taking bets on whether Sam Corbeil owns a waterbed and attends key parties.

This was the best Cask Days event ever. Make no mistake, it will probably be even better next year. I have only two regrets:

1)      We trampled the Hart House quad’s lawn pretty badly. Some landscaper is going to be pissed.

2)      Instead of sampling more beers, at some point I decided to use four tokens to buy a pint of Dieu Du Ciel Aphrodisiaque on cask.

Actually, that second one probably isn’t a regret.

 

Posted in: Bar Volo ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Filling in the Blanks for Ontario Craft Beer Week 2011

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


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

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

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

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

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

Day Six: Bar Volo House Ales Takeover

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

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

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

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

Day Seven: Session 99

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cask Days 2010 – IT BEGINS!

October 29, 2010 11:58 am ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

It’s the end of October, and while for your average pub-goer it’s an excuse to scrape together a last minute costume (“I’m a psychopath. We look just like everybody else.”) for beer nerds it can mean only one thing: Bar Volo’s Cask Days.

This is going to be sixth annual Cask Days, and I feel like this is as good an opportunity as any to talk a little bit about the history of the thing.

It started out fairly innocuously: A relatively small number of casks on Volo’s Yonge street patio. Over the years it has snowballed. Two years ago, it was a weekend long festival and they had something like fifty casks and I recall one of the highlights being a jury-rigged Randall made out of a cafetiere. Last year they had “Cask Week” which featured a selection of English style cask beer during the week, before launching into the main event. People camped out. I know of at least one Liverpudlian who managed to attend nearly every one of the eight sessions. People making decisions like “I know. I’ll drink a whole pint of Peche Mortel. Well, when am I ever going to get this chance again?” and then promptly falling asleep on their feet.

This year it has expanded even further. It was “CASK MONTH” and a steady stream of Moranas have been pouring cask across the province from Van Kleek Hill to Cambridge. This included the decision to pour English style cask all throughout the week prior to the main event. Cask Days is now mobile. If my projections are correct, next year, even if you live in Moosonee, you’re probably still going to be able to enjoy cask beers thanks to the efforts of Ralph Morana.

So come on down to Crazy Ralph's House of Cask!

I worry about Ralph’s mental state sometimes. He takes a huge amount of pride in his pub, as well he should. It’s a fine place to enjoy a couple of beers. It’s just that as CASK MONTH has progressed, I have noticed a thousand yard stare developing and I wonder whether he has an ulterior motive. He has had sleepless nights putting this together and I begin to suspect this is all part of a larger plan to annex Scarborough and rename it The Independent Republic of Caskylvania. At the very least, there’s the possibility that he might start using casks as a weapon a la Donkey Kong. All I’m saying is that if this trend goes unchecked we may discover that the Mayan 2012 prediction actually references the beginning of CASK MILLENIUM.

I kid.

The main benefit of Cask Days to your average beer nerd is that there are always things that you’ve never tried before. It’s also a good opportunity to re-evaluate breweries that you may have discounted in the past. Every brewer and their dog creates new and interesting beers for the general public to try. It’s a good indicator of which breweries are paying attention. Some of the established ones will release special dry-hopped versions of their staples. Some breweries that you have long since discounted as being uninteresting will attempt to change your mind. Generally, the people who have innovated continue to do so with potentially devastating results. Also, this will be the first year where Volo’s house cask is on offer. You don’t want to miss out on this.

STUFF YOU NEED TO KNOW:

1) The event is traditionally cash only. Bring money. Lots of money. Sample tickets are usually ten for twenty bucks and the regular casks are usually about two tickets for a half pint.

2) The premium casks imported from Quebec might be four tickets for a half pint.

3) Yes, that’s expensive. You know what, though? It’s worth it. Think of the effort that goes into this thing. Do you want to try getting a cask of Hopfenstark beer through the LCBO? No? Then shut up about it already.

THINGS TO LOOK FORWARD TO:

The best part about Cask Days is wandering around and trying stuff that looks interesting. Sure,you may regret ordering the “Jack and Coke” ale or the “Peanut Butter and Jelly” ale, but this is not a time for planning meticulously. If you don’t like it, you can pour it out and move on. They have conveniently located potted plants for just such an emergency (also rinse stations).

I won’t tell you what you should try. It removes the fun from it entirely.

I will, however, tell you what I’m looking forward to:

-          Amsterdam CJM Royal Brown Ale. They’ve been going through some changes over at Amsterdam, and they’re now doing interesting things. This will be a chance to see whether it’s paying off.

-          Dry Hopped Trois Mousquetaires Baltic Porter. Best Baltic Porter in Canada. Now with extra hops!

-          Great Lakes Triple IPA! Maybe! I talked to Mike Lackey about it the other day. He’s conscientious enough to send something else if it’s not up to his exacting standards.

-          Trafalgar Bert Well Pale Ale will be the absolute last chance I’m ever going to give Trafalgar and if it isn’t any good I am going to rain down fire and brimstone upon them with such intensity that it will raise the temperature of the blogosphere by several dozen degrees. They are already on double secret probation for Korruptor and I for one have very little difficulty seeing the benefit of hastening along Ontario beer Darwinism.

-          Stuff from Quebec! Cuda! Pionniere! Greg!

This is going to be an interesting couple of days.

Posted in: Bar Volo ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

Toronto Beer Week – Beer Culture Events

September 14, 2010 11:13 am ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

One of the best things about the events listing for Toronto Beer Week is the fact that there are a lot of events that are taking place that otherwise wouldn’t. Just the fact that there is likely to be an influx of interest in the subject tends to mean that there’s a lot of leeway for trying out new things to gauge the level of public interest; While it’s not particularly difficult to get people to drink beer, it’s more difficult to get them to attend an event that’s tangentially related to beer:  Beer and history, beer and music, beer and writing. There are also events that challenge the presumed knowledge of beer nerds.

These are, after all, events that have to do with the ephemera of beer culture. Because they’re all so different, it’s as well to just dive in to the previews.

MONDAY SEPT 20

Highway 61 Southern BBQ

1620 Bayview Ave

First Annual Lager Taste Challenge-  $25/ TICKET

Come out and join us for our first annual Craft Beer Lager Taste Challenge! Where we put your beer palate to the test with 5 different brews. The Top 5 connoisseurs will each be rewarded with great prizes – not to mention that every participant gets a bite and a pint to start! So give us a

shout if you’re feeling lucky at 416-489-RIBS (7427)

Now this looks like it might be fun. I’m not entirely sure how they’re going to go about it, but I suspect that you’ll be given five sample sized glasses of beer and a list of what they MIGHT be. The best part is that because they’re lagers, which beer nerds tend famously to eschew, anybody might have a shot at winning this. Maybe they’ll cover the tap handles with paper bags to give it more of an air of mystery. All I know is that you should try a side order of their baked beans since they’re superbly molasses-y, (which may not be a word).

Accessibility:  4/5

Price: 4/5

TUESDAY SEPT 21

C’est What

67 Front Street East

10:00 – 11:30 pm

Not Always In Good Taste – a beer writers-in-the-round, Free admission.

Writers include: Stephen Beaumont, Greg Clow, Nick Pashley, Ian Coutts, Steve Cameron, Troy Burtch, Robert Hughey, Aonghus Kealy, Josh Rubin

This should be interesting if only for the amount of personality present in the room. You’ve got Stephen Beaumont, who’s about as legitimate as beer writers get. You’ve got Aonghus and Josh from newspapers. Ian and Nick have published books this year. Troy and Greg are bloggers in the process of making good. (I don’t actually know Robert Hughey or Steve Cameron, so I’m loathe to try and sum them up in slightly less than a sentence. Seems dismissive.)  You’ve got people representing all levels of beer journalism. I have no idea what they’ll talk about, but I get the feeling that whatever it is, it’ll be amusing. I hope they field questions. Maybe I should prepare a list. “This question is for the panel: If you were a beer, what kind of beer would you be?”

Accessibility:  2/5 It covers a lot of different readerships, but you’d need to want to know about it.

Price:  5/5 You can’t beat free.

SUNDAY, SEPT 26

Toronto Beer Quest

brought to you by Beerology and Camaraderie

Toronto Beer Quest is an urban adventure where teams of two solve clues about beer, photograph themselves together at the clue location, and reach the finish line to qualify for prizes. The event has one goal: provide a fun way for Torontonians to experience beer through fun, history, and strategy. Prizes, sponsors, and other event developments will be announced on the Toronto Beer Quest Facebook page at http://bit.ly/TorontoBeerQuest.

Event details:

Check-in at 11:00am, event starts at 12:00pm

Tickets are $30 (earlybird) or $40 for a team of two participants at http://torontobeerquest1.eventbrite.com/

I’ve got to say that originally, I didn’t quite get the concept for this one, but I was talking to Mirella Amato  from Beerology on Saturday and she makes an interesting case for it. We’ve all been on guided tours, and I think I’m right in saying that attention tends to wander after a certain amount of time. You might be on the Maid of the Mist, overcome by the majesty and power of Niagara Falls and then twenty minutes later, you just want to take off the poncho and go get a coffee and maybe check your email. In this instance, where there are prizes involved for guiding yourself through the tour, your attention can’t afford to wander. Plus, in order to get a photo at each checkpoint, you actually have to learn things about the brewing history of Toronto. She’s managed to make the guided tour interactive and competitive. Deuced clever and you get some exercise before hitting the bar at the finish line.

Accessibility :  3/5 You need some special equipment and an interest in history.

Price: 3/5

Finally, I’d like to talk about a number of events that are cropping up which fall under this category if only because they are of the “have a beer with…” variety. Meet the brewer. Meet the journalist. It makes it sound as though they should be standing on a pedestal in the corner surrounded by velvet ropes, guarded by large men in black suits.

Ken and Adrian from Black Oak are hitting The Only Cafe on Tuesday and Bar Volo on Thursday. Those events should be fun, not only because they’re approachable and interesting guys, but also because they make some really tasty beers. Please take very small sips in front of Ken; it will save him from thinking about the next inevitable wave of deliveries.

Michael Hancock is going to be at the Monk’s Table on Thursday talking about his favourite subject: Weissbier. He’s a truly interesting guy and one of the most dedicated and exacting brewers I’ve ever met. You could learn a thing or six from Michael Hancock.

Bar Volo has the founder of Trois Mousquetaires  on Saturday and they’ll be launching 8 beers from that brewery. If you’ve ever wanted to see whether your French holds up while drinking a 12% beer, this is your opportunity.

The Local on Roncesvalles has representatives from Great Lakes in on Tuesday to discuss their Pumpkin Beer. Every year the Halloween treats go on sale earlier. There will also be live music, so this will be a good night out even if you don’t want to talk to a brewer.

Next time, I’m going to talk about events that are about beer as a standalone entity.

Posted in: Toronto Beer Week ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

The Ontario IPA Challenge

July 12, 2010 1:38 pm ⋅ 6 Comments ⋅

One of the best things about craft brewing is that it tends to reward innovation. New developments are typically welcomed by the consumer and indeed talked about online ad nausea. This is as it should be. While there was certainly a period in Ontario during the last twenty years where brewing dark ale at your brewery was grounds for public incredulity, we are now at a point where the far reaching influence of the US craft market has created room for seemingly endless expansion.

One of the best things about this development is the fact that it periodically happens to be the case that there is something missing from the Ontario market. For a long time one of the things that was missing was a reliable, hoppy, west coast style IPA. The west coast IPA is clearly one of the most popular styles in the world and imitators have now sprung up on every continent, whether they’re merely using the traditional ingredients or attempting wholesale recipe cloning. It’s no surprise that there isn’t really an approximation of this style in Ontario; our brewers have only really been at this for a short space of time and the English influence on the brewing history of the province tends to mean that the brewers favour English style Pale Ales. Until very recently if you talked to just about any brewer in the province, they would have claimed that there’s no demand for that style of beer in Ontario.

Which is complete and utter codswallop of the most obfuscatory kind.

It’s the single most popular craft beer style in the world. If you walk into a craft brewery in the US, you’d be unable to swing a sack of barley without hitting a forklift pallet full of west coast style IPA. The beer nerds and local hop enthusiasts cleared out Black Oak’s last bottling run of Ten Bitter Years within six days, some of them picking up as many as six cases. The thread on the beer review section of Bar Towel for Flying Monkeys new Smashbomb Atomic IPA is about a hundred posts longer than every other thread (partly due to their brewer’s clever realization that he can drum up interest in the product by actually being willing to talk to the public.)

Clearly there’s no market. Just as there’s no market for water in Death Valley; Just as there’s no market for martially trained amphibians amongst seven year old boys; Just as there’s no market for cheetah repellent amongst fat guys facing a death march across the African veldt.

The truth of the matter is that the market will reward whoever manages to create the first reliably available IPA that has some actual hop character and malt balance. For some people though, the financial reward is simply not enough to provoke them into action. For those people, we have the Bar Volo IPA Challenge, the winner of which receives bragging rights for the next year. Now in the middle of its second year of competition, the IPA challenge started as an event designed to give brewers the opportunity to get out of their comfort zones and try to create something brand new. After all, if you’re in charge of brewing thousands of hectoliters of relatively bland lager day in, day out, forever, the concept of getting out there and trying to do something different has to be refreshing.

And halfway through the second year of competition, they’re starting to get there, God bless them. There are missteps, but they mostly have to do with off flavors from overhopping and malt imbalance and also from the fact that the last week in Toronto was more like Rangoon and therefore unsuited to cask beers. You know there’s something wrong when the beer that you’re drinking reminds you of the liquid penicillin you had to take as a child, or when people around the bar compare a sample of beer to bong resin or a cat box. “Oh, but not in a bad way,” they say, as though Glade is currently working on a frisky feline plug-in. There are also beers that are exactly on target. It’s just that I don’t know what any of them are, since the event was a blind tasting, which sort of prevents me from praising any of them outright. I liked beers #4 and #6, and there were only a couple of drain pours out of the nine offerings. Incidentally, it is considered bad form to attempt to guess which beers are which at a blind tasting, but I suspect that it’s entertaining for the staff to laugh at how far off you are.

More than anything, what this event has taught me is that brewers are exceedingly strange people. The first reliable, hoppy west coast IPA to make it to the LCBO is going to clean up. Instead of taking advantage of this obvious market gap in order to make money, Ontario brewers have literally waited for the invitation to try. Let me be clear: “OK, if I have to, I guess” is not a rallying cry. It’s not going to stir hearts or win wars. The IPA challenge is not about creating a one-off. It’s a mechanism to develop a product line which comes with its own in built pedigree as a result of the bragging rights that the winner acquires. If the schlemiel who wins this event doesn’t end up bottling their beer, they’ll deserve whatever opprobrium they get.

In a world where people are now brewing beers simply for the purpose of acquiring bragging rights in order to promote their breweries, it’s hard to understand why Ontario is so far behind in creating one of the most popular styles in the world. It’s not as though we’re asking for an extreme beer. We don’t need a Hop Mess Monster (which has to be measured in theoretical IBUs because science hasn’t charted levels of bitterness between “extremely” and “tastes like burning”) or a Tactical Nuclear Penguin (registering at 32% alcohol, this is essentially the Scottish equivalent of Zoloft). We just need a west coast style IPA. It has been a couple of years since the extraordinarily slow race to create one started. At this point, industrial espionage and even wholesale thievery would not be frowned upon. Hack the servers over at Central City. Take the brewer from Lagunitas hostage. Annex Sierra Nevada.

Do whatever you have to, but get the damned thing into the LCBO. You’ll be rewarded for the innovation. Y’know. With money.

Now with Podcasting, apparently…

Posted in: Accounting for Taste ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Bar Volo – Your Friendly Neighborhood Nanobrewery

June 29, 2010 4:24 pm ⋅ 4 Comments ⋅

Bar Volo has acquired quite a reputation for itself. Between the annual Cask Days festival, the rotating tap selection and continued importation of rare and interesting bottles, it has managed to rank 61st in Beer Traveler Magazine’s 150 Perfect Places to Have A Beer. I can tell you right now that they’re going to rank higher next time around. Today, at about 10:30AM, Bar Volo started on the road to becoming a functioning brew pub.

Over the last year or so there has been a lot of speculation amongst visitors about the timeline that this process was on. After all, the pilot brewing system has been sitting idle for what seems like a tantalizingly long time. Ralph Morana, the owner and now head brewer, had to make sure to conform to licensing requirements before it was possible to brew on premises. Perhaps more importantly, he wanted to make sure that he had the expertise to do justice to his vision of creating quality cask ales. Ralph has recently returned from three months of intensive training at Brewlab in Sunderland, UK. While he certainly possesses the technical expertise to be able to create his own products, he has wisely enlisted consultants in the form of the Biergotter Home Brew club in order to take advantage of their experience and manpower. You don’t want to try moving a 100 litre brew kettle by yourself. We’ve all seen that public service announcement.

Biergotter consists of Russ Burdick and Eric Ecclestone. For the last six years, they’ve been creating high quality beers with a DIY ethos. Their Hopocalypse and Hopocalypse Redux are legendary amongst Toronto cask ale fans. These beers topped out at over 100 IBU three years before American style IPAs caught on in Ontario. The boys haven’t been resting on their laurels, either. This year they submitted five beers to homebrewing competitions and four of them won

Eric Ecclestone: Local Badass

Eric Ecclestone: Local Badass

medals. They won the American Ale category at the Great Canadian Homebrew Comptetition. Last year they produced 195 gallons of beer. This is not some fly by night operation. These are journeymen. When asked why Ralph had chosen them, Eric responded, “Because we’re the best. Put that in your blag, St.John.” This collaboration has been a long time coming and Eric went on to explain that they’d been looking for a project to work on together for three years.

I’m mostly familiar with Russ and Eric from time spent with them at beer festivals and nights at the pub, meaning that this was one of the first times I’ve seen either of them without a pint glass in their hand. Imagine my surprise upon walking into Volo this morning to find sober people with wrenches, sealing tape, clipboards and yeast slurry laid out in an organized manner. At the time I arrived, Ralph and Russ were hunched over their laptops planning out the brew day and making recipe adjustments. Ralph was decked out in his Brewlab shirt and reading glasses. Russ stared fervently at his Promash software. It was clearly business time.

Today was a first attempt at using the equipment that Ralph purchased last year. While there was a certain amount of time spent on trying to figure out exactly how all the pieces fit together, the most impressive thing about the collaboration is the adjustment of styles that took place during the brew run. Biergotter’s setup is almost entirely manual. If things need to be moved, there’s going to be some heavy labour involved. The pilot system at Volo is a three tiered system designed to allow for a certain amount of stability and automation. A typical brew day for Biergotter takes between six and seven hours, but the technological advances of the pilot system allowed for a significant reduction in the amount of time expended. In terms of the experience he gained at Brewlab which dealt mostly with British Ales, Ralph benefited from Biergotter’s technical expertise with other styles; skimming excess proteins from the brew kettle and adjustments to hopping levels based on Original Gravity, for instance.

Ralph and consultants

Look at all this professionalism.

This is a move that makes a great deal of sense for Bar Volo when you stop to think about it objectively. Because of their reputation for having high quality cask ales available the majority of the time, this will allow them to ensure that there is a constant supply of fresh and interesting products available. The ability to customize recipes and experiment with various styles of cask beer will also ensure continuing innovation and promote discourse about the possibilities of nanobrewing as a viable enterprise in Ontario. The cost of materials for nanobrewing is a great deal lower than the cost of bringing in a cask or keg from another brewery. The system is capable of producing nearly 100 liters of beer which, if you take the inevitable spillage during production into account, should result in four 20 liter pins. It gives Ralph and his consultants from Biergotter carte blanche to experiment, given that if a batch doesn’t work out the financial loss is manageable. It also means that the same quality control measures can be performed from batch to batch and there’s no chance of damage to the beer in transit. When the plans for the system are complete, it will include a fermentation room in the basement regulated to 20 degrees Celsius which will allow for optimal conditioning.

Emptying the Mash Tun

Russ provides stability while Ralph empties the Mash Tun

While it remains to be seen exactly what will result from today’s experimentation, it’s clear to me that there are great things in the works. Tomas Morana let it slip that future plans involve scheduling a lineup of consultants to provide Ralph with their expertise and provide Toronto beer nerds with delightful collaborative brews. There’s even the possibility that they might let Julian near the thing (sometime before he turns thirty).

It’s early days to claim that this is going to be a gamechanger in Ontario. It does provide a framework for people trying to experiment with nanobrewing, and that is useful information to have as the industry continues to expand. This is going to be a success for Bar Volo and for Biergotter. While this brew run may be more about working out the kinks in the system than anything else, there’s always the possibility that you could be enjoying the Saison they brewed today on the patio in a couple of weeks. Coming up to the boil

Posted in: Bar Volo ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,