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Tag Archives: Dieu Du Ciel

Mondial for n00bs: A guide to not getting ganked

May 26, 2011 10:13 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

Sometimes, when it’s been constantly rainy for a week and you’ve developed a slight case of the sniffles from being outside signing up pubs for Toronto Beer Week in the pouring rain (some pubs don’t really check their email with the frequency that you might wish. That’s alright. They’re busy folks.) you develop a small amount of melancholy. It’s the kind of blue funk that sits over your head when circumstances you have no control over contrive to make life more difficult than it actually needs to be. It might manifest in any number of ways: Shouting profanities at commercials that use Buffalo Springfield songs to promote yogurt. Writing angry letters to the manufacturers of a store bought peanut sauce because it ruined your stir fry. Shaking your fist at a vast, indifferent sky that responds only with light drizzle and sheet lightning.

It’s at times like this that I like to break out the ol’ Mondial beer list. It serves to remind me that in a couple of weeks I’ll be in the land of saison and poutine, gladhanding French-Canadians and enjoying an extremely conservative amount of debauchery.

As everyone knows, the Mondiale de la Biere in Montreal is justifiably regarded as the premiere beer event in Canada. What no one really knows yet are how the changes that they’ve made will affect the festival.  For one thing, they’ve moved it indoors. I’ve gone for the last two years and was just getting comfortable with the outdoor layout. For another thing, it’s the same weekend as the F-1, so it’s hard to say exactly what that’ll do for attendance at the beer festival. It could be worse. Last year the Habs did pretty well in the playoffs and it looked for a while like Montrealers would either be drowning their sorrows or toasting their victory in absurd numbers.

Since it remains to be seen how those variables will change the event, I can really only give you a few pieces of helpful information.

1)      Drink early.

There is no lineup at noon. This is the lineup at 4 PM. Questions?

It’s important to show up early in the day if you have your heart set on trying a lot of different beers. By about five, the place is usually jammed pretty solid and lineups become difficult to navigate often reaching the point where it’s impossible to tell which lineup is for which booth. If you’re like me your favored size of humanity is considerably smaller than throng, and you’ll want to be able to actually see into the booths to gauge what’s on tap. It’s best to show up when the festival opens on the Wednesday, walk around and figure out where everything is.

2)      Start slow.

This is really important. You don’t want to walk up to the beer tent and order the highest octane product right off the bat. Chances are it’ll be incredibly flavourful and potentially boozy and it’ll ruin your palate completely for the next couple of samples. You also don’t want to run the risk of passing out in front of the Quebecers in the middle of the afternoon. I usually look for the Hopfenstark stand in order to see if they have their Berliner Weisse. Sorta wakes up the palate, plus it’s actually good enough that you might decide to stay there for the rest of the day.

3)      Proper Preparation

The PDF listing all of the beers that are available at the festival is incomplete and contains much that is apocryphal. There is no way that you’re going to be able to try everything that you want to try. It’s hard to tell how many tickets each sample will cost, so you can’t even plan monetarily. The Quebec brewers are by and large a talented bunch of folks and they will just whip out beers that you have never heard of. It’s a marquee event and they like to show off their skill. There’s a lot of pride, but in a very sort of laid back way.

The best thing to do is to print out the PDF and cross off every macro product you see. Then cross out everything you can buy in whatever province you’re from. Then cross out everything you’ve tried before (maybe creating a top ten list of things you’d want to try again as you go along.) In my case, this has allowed me to winnow the list down to about 60%.

From that point it’s personal preference. You might like a certain style. There are a lot of English ales this year, so I’m going to be looking at Milds, which is a style that fascinates me. Maybe you want the best of everything. You want to try only the beers that score 99 or higher on ratebeer? You’ve got some internet surfing to occupy you at work for the next week. And it won’t help you. The selection this year is so good that even that criteria applies to about 15% of the beers on offer. Try to get through all of those in one sitting and you’re likely to end up staggering through Westmount at 5AM with your shirt tied around your head, loudly proclaiming yourself the King of Smoked Meat to anyone who will listen.

Make sure you’ve got a couple of days. Go slowly and be prepared to fail utterly at trying everything.

4)      After Parties

If you’re a sensible adult person, you’re going to want to put in maybe three hours at the festival itself during the day. There’s a lot of stuff to do in Montreal, and a lot of good food. There’s great opportunity for people watching. Since you’re reading this, I’m going to assume that you’re not a sensible adult person, but rather some kind of beer-obsessed party-Viking who believes themselves indestructible.

If you’re going to go out and check out brew pubs, there are always some that put on events. Dieu Du Ciel usually has something going on the first night of the festival. The event usually starts at nine and while I don’t know what it will be this year, I can tell you to get there three hours early. Just absolutely jammed with people. Benelux has an interesting looking one on the Saturday featuring beers from Vermont (I hear great things about Alchemist).

I like Broue-Ha-ha. Not just because the Thursday is the anniversary party for their brew pub. Not just because they serve a wide variety of Quebec beers and last year they passed around duck legs as a bar snack to celebrate. Not because they have a damn beer Winnebago. Not even because they show ridiculous 1980’s Andy Sidaris action movies. I like it because the combination of all those things is so overwhelmingly weird that it’s impossible not to just give up and enjoy the place.

It's a Beer Winnebago! Sweet merciful something!

5)      Bring Water

Oh, for the love of God. Please. Bring a two liter bottle of water with you to the festival. Your immediate future will be much improved. You might need a palate cleanser or a rinsed glass. You will certainly need to hydrate.

Posted in: Mondial 2011 ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , ,

The Ontario Beer Revolution – Distribution

August 24, 2010 2:42 pm ⋅ 7 Comments ⋅

While it’s very important to take into consideration the wishes of the consumer when discussing Ontario Craft Beer, one of the things that you have to factor into the consumer experience are the various methods of distribution for independent Ontario Breweries. I know that there are an ever increasing number of pubs carrying craft beer and I think the we can leave them out of the discussion for the time being since they deal directly with the brewers whose products they’re selling. Additionally, we can take for granted the on-site brewery stores as being part of the solution. They are, after all, one of the only tools of promotion for some of the beers manufactured by Ontario Brewers (Look at Black Oak’s Ten Bitter Years, which won a Tappy for best seasonal beer and was only available through these two avenues of distribution.)

The discussion always comes down to the two government sanctioned retail outlets that are licensed to sell beer: The LCBO and The Beer Store.

Over the last couple of years, what with hanging around and paying attention to increasingly agitated conversations within earshot, I’ve heard a lot about LCBO policy as it regards various issues. I suspect that many of the things that I have heard in passing are exaggerations, if not totally apocryphal (The LCBO never actually gave anyone a swirlie during recess.) I know that some of the things I’ve heard are completely accurate and those are things that have to do with the difficulty of doing business. Consider momentarily that there are two independent companies that exist solely to bring products from other provinces to Ontario: HMH Negotiants and Cecktor Ltd. According to RateBeer.com Dieu Du Ciel, which is brewed in Montreal, is available in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Puerto Rico, Alaska and Australia.

It was unavailable in Ontario until last year despite the fact that we share a border with Quebec. Consider momentarily the number of additional Canadian breweries that are unavailable at the LCBO, or the difficulty of conforming to packaging guidelines. There’s currently a shipment of Dieu Du Ciel in a warehouse somewhere that was meant to be released on August 15th, and each and every one of those bottles has a little adhesive strip over the top of it, ostensibly to ensure that there has been no tampering.

It’s easy to suppose that the LCBO is run by foul tempered ogres, but I don’t think we should attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by bureaucracy. The fact is that they’re the single largest importer of alcohol in the world and they’re also a giant bureaucracy with concerns about labour problems, image management, and an increasingly litigious public. If you walk into the Summerhill store, which is a flagship, there’s relatively little floor space given to beer. I’m not saying there isn’t a lot of variety, but in terms of the building, it’s not a lot of space. That’s a good way to think about the LCBO: Beer makes up maybe 15-20% of their stock. I’m guessing that just in terms of day to day business they have more pressing concerns than Craft Beer; Not getting sued; Not violating trade or labour agreements; Managing what must be a labyrinthine warehousing and inventory system. If I had to guess, I would probably say that Ontario Craft Beer is somewhere around 21st on their list of priorities behind work stoppages and acquiring revenue for Dalton McGuinty.

I have observed that it’s possible to affect change, but it takes a lot of work and it happens slowly. Large bureaucracies are resistant to change at the best of times and in the case of what is essentially a governmental monopoly like the LCBO, there’s not really a great deal of impetus to change. Public demand might eventually have an effect on the selection of craft beers available, but it will not happen immediately. You can’t say that the LCBO is intentionally making it difficult; They are simply not motivated to make it easy.

“If only,” I hear you say, “there were some organization that was licensed by the AGCO that existed specifically to market beer in locations that were not attached to breweries within Ontario.” Well, there is, and its familiar orange signage and the clickity-clack of its conveyor belts are iconic. The Beer Store! I think we can safely assume that they have our best interests at heart. After all, they’re owned by Labatt, Molson and Sleeman.

Let’s talk about these three purely Canadian institutions who own The Beer Store: Labatt was purchased by Interbrew in 1995 and is now part of Anheuser-Busch InBev, headquartered in Belgium. Molson merged with Coors in 2005 and is now a huge bi-national company. Sleeman is, of course, a Guelph institution owned by Japanese brewing giant Sapporo. Of the three controlling partners, currently about half of one of them is Canadian owned. Why would Ontarians permit foreign interests to run what is essentially a governmentally licensed agency? Why isn’t this being examined thoroughly? Surely there would be some outcry if OHIP was run by Blue Cross or if the functions of the Ontario Provincial Police were outsourced to Hyderabad?

In addition to my cynicism about the intentions of these companies, I feel I have to point out a policy listed on their website:

“Operated on a cost recovery basis with a standard service fee schedule, The Beer Store is a unique retailer. Unlike other retailers, including the government owned LCBO, The Beer Store does not pick and choose the products it sells, nor does it set the prices at which those products are sold. These choices are made by individual brewers.

The Beer Store system is open to any brewer in the world with common rules for users and service fees based on volumes sold. … Any brewer in the world can sell their beer through The Beer Store provided the product has been approved for sale in Ontario by the LCBO (i.e. has met LCBO quality control, labeling and price approval requirements).”

It is written to sound like it’s an equal opportunity retailer. Not so. In order to get a listing, you first have to meet LCBO product guidelines and then you have to pay for the privilege of being listed, based on the volume that you will be able to sell. Each brewery chooses its products and is also responsible for their own marketing. See if you can think of the last time you saw marketing for The Beer Store. Not only that, but there’s a top ten list of most popular products prominently displayed immediately in front of the entrance. I’m sure that holds no sway whatsoever over the public. Small breweries can’t compete in The Beer Store in terms of marketing, price point or shelf space. Consider the listing fee: A trifle for a multinational company whose executives can afford to travel first class; A seriously limiting consideration for a brewery whose president also makes the keg deliveries.

In terms of Ontario Beer Revolution, this is the rhetoric that you need to use: Why won’t the provincial government license an Ontario Craft Beer Store to promote craft brewers? I have never heard a good reason to preclude this development. Is it because they are too invested in the entrenched foreign-owned monopoly that they have allowed to develop at the cost of locally owned interests? This is the kind of strategic rhetorical argument that could put enough pressure on the AGCO to make an Ontario Craft Beer Store happen if it’s played correctly.

Posted in: The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ 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.

Posted in: Reviews ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Mondial de la Biere – Wednesday (Saison Day)

June 2, 2010 10:56 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

If you’re like me, you’re not particularly good at travel. There’s the alternation between procrastinating by watching an entire season of Arrested Development and packing; The panicked last minute attempt to find approximately as many clean socks as you’re likely to need (followed by the impulse to forget the entire process and attempt to buy sandals in French upon arrival); The sudden awareness somewhere around Cornwall that you’re almost completely certain that you left the back right element of the stove on even though you can’t ever remember using it.

It’s not really a huge surprise then that I somehow managed to leave all of my research in Toronto. I figure that it is either sitting at the bottom of the garbage chute in my building (a victim of my frenzied attempt to clean the place up before leaving) or in a shirt pocket somewhere. Eventually I went with a series of ticks next to things I wanted to try, putting lines through everything else. I’m sure that the ticks would have been enough but there’s a certain amount of joy to be found in striking a line through something you don’t like. It certainly doesn’t matter now.

In the absence of a carefully thought out plan I simply decided that today was going to be Saison day. For those of you not acquainted with the style, It’s a pale ale from the french speaking region of Belgium. It’s very much a summer beer. It tends to be fermented at a much higher temperature than regular ales, meaning that it would be possible to produce it during the hottest parts of the year. It tends to use specific yeast to give it tart flavour, sometimes going as far as using Brettanomyces to give it a serious Wallonian funk. People refer to barnyard aromas when talking about Brettanomyces. If you don’t know what that means, you should plan a trip to the sheep pen at your local petting zoo.

I decided that I was going to start the day with the Hopfenstark Berliner Weisse. It’s not made in quite the same way as the Saison, but it’s in the same flavour range, providing a tart refreshing flavour at about 3.2% alcohol. One of the most important things about attending a beer festival is pacing, so starting out with an extremely low alcohol beer is a good idea. It provides you with a sense of perspective. At least it should have.

When I got to the festival some of the booths weren’t set up yet, and Hopfenstark was one of them. Plan B sort of went out the window at that point for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was that I had no starting point. The other problem was that this year the festival organizers in their seemingly Machiavellian wisdom have chosen not to provide anywhere to sit. This is a massively destructive broadside to an intellectual approach as it means that you’re constantly walking around faced with shiny, distracting reminders about the fact that there all these other beers to try. It tends to provoke you into thinking about what’s next rather than focusing on the sample that you’re currently enjoying. It’s more than mildly exploitative of the fact that beer nerds tend to exist at the same mental level as a six year old at a theme park. That may help explain the increasingly schizophrenic list and the order in which I tried things. Samples are 4-5 ounces unless otherwise noted:

Allagash Black – 2 Coupons – A dark belgian style with a lot of roasted malt. I found the presence of the malt a little harsh. Somewhere around 7.0% alcohol. Not a good choice to start the day for that reason.

Cheval Blanc Saison Blanche + Brett. – 2 Coupons – Remember about the Sheep? One of the things about Brettanomyces is that it’s hard to predict exactly what will happen. This ended up being less tart and sour than sort of unpleasantly bitter. I somehow ended up with a full glass of this and couldn’t finish it.

Dieu Du Ciel Solstice D’ete (I think it’s a maple saison with blackberries)– 4 Coupons – I liked this one, but became distracted by the thought that one of the aromas reminded me of the smell when you unwrap a babybel mini. I am not sufficiently advanced to offer a guess as to what chemical compound causes that aroma in beer. I suspect that people who are advanced enough to guess would point and laugh at that assessment.

Beau’s Matt’s Sleepy Time Belgian Imperial Stout – 3 Coupons – 8ish% alcohol. I liked this and compared it favourably to the Allagash Black. Same sort of Belgian influence with the dark, roasted malt flavours, but it was smoother and less aggressive. It might be less authentic, but I didn’t really care because I had heard about….

Samuel Adams Utopia – 7 Coupons/~1.5 oz – 27% alcohol. This is one of those incredibly rare beers that you continue to hear about when people start talking about top ten lists. It comes in a bottle that looks as though it should probably be attached to a camel and filled with myrrh. It causes the same spreading warmth as Irish whiskey. The aroma caused me to giggle like a Pillsbury schoolgirl. The intentional scarcity created by the limited brew run probably makes it more gimmicky than it needs to be, but I noticed that people more finicky than me begrudgingly admitted it was a bargain at 7 coupons since a 26 ounce bottle can sell for up to $250.00 in some states. A ridiculous and irresponsible choice of beverage for one in the afternoon on a hot summer day.

Dieu Du Ciel Yuzu – 2 Coupons – ~4.9% alcohol. It’s a beer flavoured with Yuzu. I had it last year and didn’t really get it, but I tried it again because my friend Eric was enjoying it and I wanted something light after the 27%. I still don’t get it.

Dieu Du Ciel Pioniere – 4 Coupons – 9.5% alcohol. If Peche Mortel is an Imperial Coffee Stout, then this is an Imperial Coffee Double Black IPA. If you’re going to the festival, you should try this for sure. I’ve never seen anything else like it. Stefan, one of the nearly aggravatingly competent brewers, explained that this batch was less hoppy than their initial run. I think that’s not a bad thing necessarily. After all, if it were hoppier they’d never be able to do a dry-hopped cask version without being charged with assault.

Hopfenstark Berliner Weisse – 3 Coupons – 3.2% alcohol. The festival organizers had finally delivered the kegs to the Hopfenstark booth, so I was pleased to try this beer which I remembered so favourably. The truth is that you could probably drink it all afternoon without ill effect, so after a monster like the Pioniere it was a refreshing change. Light and tart. A reasonable choice for a hot summer day.

At that point the handwriting in my notebook degrades significantly. This is probably due to the fact that a sound tasting strategy involves moving from light alcohol beers to high alcohol beers and from lightly hopped beers to heavily hopped beers. It does not involve anything like what happened today.

Ah well, there’s always tomorrow.

Posted in: Mondial 2010 ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Mondial de la Biere – Tuesday

June 1, 2010 11:49 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

There are a lot of examples in sport and in Hollywood of complete mastery of a skill. In just about every version of Robin Hood there’s a moment in the archery contest where Robin manages to not only hit the bullseye, but also split the arrow of whichever poor hapless Sherwoodian jabronie he happens to be up against. You’ve seen the trope before. Whether it’s the Waco Kid squeezing off a shot and blowing up the fake version of Rock Ridge from miles away or making the Kessel run in under twelve parsecs, it’s clear that the regular rules don’t apply in some cases. My favourite version is a possibly apocryphal story about Gretzky; When asked about an impossible slapshot he had scored on he claimed with his typical modesty that he had just had to turn the puck sideways in midair.

This kind of legendary status doesn’t get started without reason. At Bar Volo in Toronto, people talk in hushed tones about Dieu Du Ciel. You hear things:

-Peche Mortel is made with so much coffee that people have been known not to be able to fall asleep after consuming a whole bottle.

-If you’re going to visit the brew pub you should probably get there when it opens because the tables are jammed from three in the afternoon until three in the morning.

-Jean-Francois and Stefan beat the devil in a brewing contest and were awarded a solid gold mash tun.

I don’t know for certain how these rumours get started. I myself have been accused of having an illicit affair with the girl on the label of the Aphrodisiaque bottle. Well, sure there have been longing looks and the occasional crying jag, but this is Montreal, not a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel packed densely with magical realism. Which is, in many ways, a shame.

Aside from a brief jaunt to the brew pub during Mondial last year, I had never been. At the time I visited they were getting ready for an evening of Japanese beers and the rumour about the place being packed wall to wall with people was borne out. Today I bought into the lore and decided to show up when they opened. I’m not sure that I can claim that it was an average day for them. After all, they’re putting on their best products in order to impress the beer nerds who will descend upon them like a swarm of ravenous red nosed locusts tomorrow. I had six ounce samples of the following things and I jotted down some thoughts:

Deesse Nocturne – I’m pretty sure that this is the Aphrodisiaque Stout, but without the cocoa and vanilla. I had this first and I have to say that it’s probably the best stout at this percentage of alcohol that I’ve ever tried. It’s thick and creamy and there would probably be a prolonged Quiet Man style fistfight over it if you dropped a keg off in a pub in Barrytown. I earnestly worried that this first beer might be the best of the week.

Bohemian Lager – This was offered on cask and tap, so I opted to taste them side by side. I would wax rhapsodic about it, but that’s the kind of cheap joke I’m trying to avoid. The tap version is bright and flavorful and a good deal hoppier than I had expected from the style. The cask version was less filtered resulting in some protein haze and the yeast character was a lot more pronounced. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen cask lager before, since Volo mostly has ales on cask. I do know that ale drinkers tend to decry things that are pale and fizzy. This was neither.

Barbarossa Roggenbier – My only experience with rye beers on tap have been versions from Ontario. One was a Mill Street product and the other was brewed at TAPS in Niagara Falls. I remember Kevin from TAPS telling me at the time that it’s a hard style to brew because of the beta-glucan content of rye as a fermentable grain. If beer is liquid bread, this beer is a loaf of Bavarian farmer’s rye but without the rusk flavour you sometimes get. I don’t know enough about the style that I can claim it’s a perfect example, but it’s probably closer to the platonic ideal of a Rye Beer than anything I’ve tried before.

Caserne 30 -  I had just tried four beers that were pretty exceptional and then I discovered that they were brewing styles I had never even heard of. This is a Bavarian style smoked wheat beer. I had tried Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier, but this is an entirely different beast. It’s definitely an attention grabber. Up until this point I had been taking a sip of whatever I was sampling and then reading the newspaper or talking in crippled albeit cheery French with the bartender. This beer caused cognition of anything else to cease. I would take a sip and then attempt to read a paragraph and then throw down the paper and stare at the glass in disbelief. I’m not sure if there’s a term for irrational anger caused by extraordinary quality, but it’s about time we had one.

I paid up and tried to leave, but then two things happened. First, the bartender decided that I must be a bona fide beer nerd after I asked about hop varieties and started giving me things to try. Second, the Mothers of Invention album Overnite Sensation came over the stereo system. There was a Japanese tea flavoured beer which paired with Camarillo Brillo; By the time I finished the sample of Peche Mortel we were just about done with Dinah Moe Humm (a song which can be accurately if dishonestly described as being a study in gender relations and interpersonal gamesmanship).

I have come to the conclusion that the reputation is completely deserved. They seem to be able to do exactly what they want in terms of brewing completely to style. They’re not only splitting arrows, they’re banking them off the castle wall from several hundred yards out. For me, it was the Caserne 30 that proved it. I have never had a smoked weizen before. I may never see another one elsewhere. It doesn’t matter though because I can’t imagine how the Dieu Du Ciel version could be improved upon. Game over, man.

I returned to my hotel room and managed to prove at least one of the legends about Dieu du Ciel incorrect. There is not nearly enough coffee in the Peche Mortel to prevent me taking a prolonged snooze. It’s important to rest up. After all, tomorrow is Saison day.

Posted in: Mondial 2010 ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,