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Tag Archives: Mondial De La Biere

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: , , , , , ,

Adventure, Excitement and Weird Old Broads

June 16, 2010 3:27 pm ⋅ 4 Comments ⋅

Family vacations, by and large, are the type of situation where you don’t get a lot of input into the schedule if you’re a teenager. You’re at the mercy of other people’s idea of a good time; this is probably due to the fact that a teenager’s idea of a good time tends to involve either watching TV or buying illegal fireworks.

I remember one particular jaunt west during the mid 90’s, where there was a significant amount of outdoorsy sightseeing activity. The part of the trip that stands out in my mind is sitting in the middle of the Columbia Icefield with a very badly sprained ankle. Oh, sure. There were other parts of the trip that were memorable. Uncle Wade driving with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake up mountain roads with a casual disregard for the speed limit, making him the only person in the car ignoring the thousand foot drop off into the valley below. A deer, which must have been trained by ninjas, stole a snickers bar out of my hand while I wasn’t paying attention at a rest stop. I have yet to live down the Chocolate Espresso Pate incident from the Hotel MacDonald in Edmonton (which produced slightly more hyperactivity than sudden Ritalin withdrawal in a class of Toronto sixth graders. We’re talking Gregor Samsa levels of transformative ridiculousness.)

But, if you’re sitting in a significant amount of pain in the middle of an icefield, while the tour guide and several concerned onlookers have a very serious discussion about how they can possibly get an ice pack up in the next tour bus, that’s going to be memorable. Especially when the absurdism of sitting squarely in what can be considered one of the largest ice packs in the country starts to sink in. It’s the kind of thing that makes a particularly sarcastic teenager say, while removing a sock in order to plunge a rapidly swelling ankle into a glacier, “Whose idea of a good time is this, exactly?”

I’ll tell you who: Weird Old Broads.

And I said as much to Mom and her friend Lynn, whose trip this was. “Weird Old Broads,” I said. Looking back, I suppose this could have gone any number of ways. It’s kind of an inflammatory remark. They weren’t really that old and the level of casual misogyny implicit isn’t really characteristic of my thought process. I was having a very bad day. I suppose I could have ended up grounded, but instead they took to the concept immediately. They ran with it. They practically took it on as a mission statement: WOBs.

WOB World, they called it. It’s a perfect catch-all. They get to do whatever they want and offer nothing by way of explanation other than the title. It’s a license for adventure and eccentric behavior. Want to go sing Sacred Harp in Alabama for two weeks? WOB World. Want to host an extraordinarily elaborate Robbie Burns dinner complete with piper and broadswords in the front room while in period dress? WOB World. Want to possess more technological information and gadgetry than the majority of IT professionals and read technical manuals for fun? WOB World.

The strangest part of the whole thing is that they’ve discovered craft beer. I shouldn’t make it sound like a recent development. They were brewing Czech Pilsner at a brew your own place in Etobicoke a decade before it was cool. They’re critical of things that they don’t like. Aside from “Beats working for a living” one of the most common things said refers to poorly made lager: “This horse is diabetic and should no longer be worked.” They’re slowly developing a taste for hoppy West Coast IPA’s. Their current favourite beer is Sierra Nevada Torpedo, but they keep a dozen or so varieties around just for kicks. They’re in their early sixties and they’re more adventurous than 95% of Ontario beer drinkers.

They send updates from the road. I’ll get emails from brew pubs all over New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and Maine. I’ll get gloating text messages from brewery tours. One time, they called from a Wegman’s in Syracuse to taunt me about all the things they could buy that aren’t available in Ontario. They listed the available beers! Cruelty! When I went to Mondial, I thought it would be quite clever to reverse the process. After going to Dieu Du Ciel, I went to a nearby Depanneur to buy some things to take them and called to gloat a little bit, as was almost certainly warranted. “That sounds great. I hate you,” they said. “But I’m bringing you things!” I said. I thought we’d have a nice quiet afternoon and everyone would get to try some very nice beers.

What I didn’t know was that by the time I got to the house in Kingston, it had evolved into a dinner party and beer tasting which I was meant to host. Guests were members of the clergy from St. George’s and the bartender from the pub across the road from St. George’s. The menu was already set. I had to come up with beer pairings for the food courses on short notice with what was available. And I was going to have to talk competently about the things that we were drinking. I don’t know about you, but I’m not at my absolute sharpest after four days at a world class beer festival. I spent the early part of the afternoon muttering quietly under my breath and trying to figure out how not to look like a complete mook.

Here’s what I came up with after searching the cellar:

A selection of beverages

The menu had twinned appetizers of bocconcini skewers with capers and sundried tomatoes and another kind of skewer with cucumber, sausage and chevre. I figured that since there was a certain amount of salt involved there it would be a good idea to start with something refreshing, so I went with a trio of Pale Ales, explaining the increase in hoppiness and colour in terms of a movement from the east coast (Shipyard and Magic Hat) to the west coast (Sierra Nevada). I followed it with the Charlevoix Hercules Double IPA between courses to give an example of increased hop bitterness and character.

The main course was Beef tenderloin with Asparagus and Tabbouleh. I had the Trois Mousquetieres Rauchbier and a Trois Pistoles to work with. I think the Rauchbier would have gone better if the beef had been grilled instead of roasted, but I think I got away with it. For Dessert we had Atholl Brose and  Dieu du Ciel Aphrodisiaque. It didn’t work even remotely, since the dessert had whiskey, raspberries and toasted oats in it. The flavours didn’t mesh, but by that point in the evening, no one really cared. Plus, it meant there was more Aphrodisiaque for me.

The most important thing ended up being not that I managed to look like I know what I’m talking about, but rather that everyone had a good time and hopefully learned a little bit despite my propensity to ramble. I mean, how often do you get presented with a wonderful meal and a captive audience to proselytize to about craft beer? In what world is this experience possible?

WOB World, brother. WOB World.

Posted in: WOB World ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Mondial – Friday (Awards Day)

June 5, 2010 4:07 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

There are a lot of lessons that they teach you in high school which are proven to be unlikely ever to have any application to your life. I am not entirely sure that I will ever have any use for Fermat’s theorem or the ability to calculate gravitational acceleration, but these things lurk somewhere in the dark recesses of the grey matter. One lesson that they attempted to teach was simply this: There is frequently some benefit to performing community service. Volunteering for a cause or organization that you are interested in not only prevents you from sitting around like a useless lump, but also engages you with the public at large and might even make you some friends.

While the choice of volunteer activity is up to you, I have to suggest that free beer is an unlikely benefit of working for Habitat for Humanity even if the sense of moral edification is worthwhile. They just don’t want you operating a nail gun while hammered. If, however, you volunteer to put in about six hours at the TAPS magazine booth there are all sorts of great benefits.

They asked for volunteers at some point last week, suggesting that there might be a free t-shirt in it for anyone who cared to help out. I figured that it might be a good opportunity to see what it’s like for the exhibitors at a large beer festival from a sociological perspective. It was a great chance to find the answers to questions like: At what point in the afternoon does the behaviour of the crowd begin to change? At the beginning of the afternoon there’s a certain amount of politesse and sidestepping involved in navigating through the crowds. When does the barging and muttered profanity start, and is it the result of a critical mass of population in the venue or just too much time spent at the Molson booth?

What I didn’t bargain on was having as much fun as I did. Interacting with the public and trying to sell subscriptions was informative. The vast majority of the people who came to the booth were extraordinarily polite and well informed. Everyone involved with TAPS really enjoys working for the magazine. It’s always a pleasure to see fulfilled people working happily towards something that they believe in. I liked working with them so much that I ended up doing a second day, and not just for the exhibitor wristband that allows access to the complimentary beer fridge in the back of the venue.

Being involved even cursorily with a media outlet at a festival like this is a positive boon. For one thing, when the awards are handed out for best in show, you tend to be amongst the first group informed of the judges’ decision. It’s a dead certainty that whichever beers are chosen are going to have a significant run on them in the next couple of days, and the in short term you learn which things you need to try. With the T-shirt, the wristband and the steno pad I was taking notes on, people tended to assume that they should be giving me things for free. Who was I to dissuade these generous and recently lauded proprietors?

The platinum award, the be all and end all of the festival was awarded to a beer from A La Fut. It was a Belgian Triple brewed with “Brett”. After three days of trying various sour beers, I decided to give this one a miss for the simple reason that overdoing it on sour lambic style beers tends to cause heartburn that is beyond the reach of medical science. I had tried rather a large number of them and was becoming concerned about having to freebase Zantac later in the week. I heard fantastic things about this beer and I assume that it will survive until my next visit.

Aside from the winner, there are also awards given out to number of other beers. Assured of their quality, because of the rigorous judging process I chose the ones that sounded the most promising based on what I had heard during the day.

St. Bock Malediction – This is a lot of fun. St. Bock was noted until a couple of years ago for their extensive cellar of rare and desirable Belgian beers, but they have expanded to become a brewer of beers. In this case, they have created a Marshmallow Stout. It’s 4.5% and contains cocoa, vanilla and marshmallow notes. I suppose that it’s intended to be comparable to drinking a mug of hot chocolate, and it certainly evokes childhood memories of coming in from the cold after sledding. Were it just gimmicky, it might be worrying, but it’s actually a quality product. Plus, I think it’s a Gozer the Gozerian reference.

Calling down a marshmallow curse

Benelux Cuda.and Congo – Benelux had two IPA’s that won awards, each of which are pretty unique. The Congo is a Belgian IPA, which is made using the regular grain bill for their belgian styles and fermented with the Benelux yeast. In order to make it an IPA style, they up the hop bitterness to about 40 IBUs. Many of the brewers at the festival were attempting to add hops to Belgian beers, but this version found a niche where the concept was accessible.

The Cuda is probably the more interesting of the two because it uses a wider variety of hops in an attempt to create an American style IPA. It clocks in at around 6.5% alcohol and remains fairly light in color at 8 SRM. I talked to the brewer and the hop combination is Amarillo, Centennial and Citra. I think that the Citra must be the aroma hop because of the tight lemon and citrus aroma. At 70 IBU, this is a very nicely balanced IPA.

Benelux's American Style IPA

Having tried a couple of the Benelux brews, I regret slightly the fact that I was unable to stay in Montreal for the Cask tasting they’re having tonight. In a couple of hours from now some very lucky people are going to get to try the dry hopped version of the Cuda. I, on the other hand, have supplied the family in Kingston with a six pack of Dieu Du Ciel Aphrodisiaque and some Charlevoix and Trois Mousquetaires products. I guess sometimes Quebec comes to you.

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

Mondial de la Biere – Interlude

June 4, 2010 9:45 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

One of the best things about Mondial is the fact that you tend to see everything related to the beer industry in Montreal at its absolute best. The brewers are happy because they’ve usually just spent a couple of weeks producing special products in order to impress and delight. The servers are happy because they’re almost certainly going to end up with a huge payday in tips. The customers are happy because of the brewers and servers, creating a feedback loop of high spirits which tends to lead to irrational exuberance and bonhomie.

This was certainly the case Thursday night at Broue Pub BrouHaha. Due to the fact that the anniversary of the pub’s opening tends to fall on the Thursday of the Mondial de la Biere, it becomes that evening’s destination for scores of beer nerds and also for those residents of the Rosemont area. The brewer had celebrated by bringing in some of his favorite beers from other brewers around Montreal and also by creating a few of his own for the occasion.

The pub is a split level affair. The bar is in the downstairs section, with an open plan floor and slightly overcrowded seating. It looks as though the album Rain Dogs should be playing over it at all time s, a fact which seems not to have escaped the owners as there’s a velvet painting of Tom Waits in the corner of the room. The upstairs level of the pub can more accurately be described as a Lynchian nightmare. There’s brown tile that looks as though it was rejected by a hospital in the early 1970′s and instead of paint or wallpaper they’ve opted to use floor length black velour drapes all the way around the room. In places where a bank in the ceiling protrudes, the sides of that protrusion are covered in fake cedar shingles. Aside from the candles, the only light in the room is the one shining directly at the pizza oven and the dull thrum of a sodium streetlight which shines through the propped open emergency exit.To suggest that it’s merely ugly would be comparable to calling Clint Howard aggressively handsome; A pointless exercise in disingenuous blather. It’s an impossible assault on the eyes and simply occupying the space tends to make you begin to doubt your own sanity.

I suspect that the reason it continues to exist is the fact that a lot of people are contributing to making it happen. This was their third anniversary an it’s very clear where their priorities lie. I suspect that all profits that have been made thus far have been channeled directly into research for new products and improvements on the brewery. All other thoughts seem to have been ignored totally, and this is the reason that the place works. They have a loyal if eclectic clientele of people who genuinely appreciate what they’re attempting to do. These are people who might even be offended if someone suggested a remodel. The customers are almost exclusively local as evinced by the annoyance of a local softball team that had trouble getting a table (in uniforms elaborate enough to make me suspect they were actually filming a remake of The Warriors.) No one in the bar is over 40. Our waitress wore enough plaid to qualify as a refugee from a Pearl Jam tour.

I sampled a couple of the house beers, and one that was from an off site brewery. The Luxura Double IPA is about 10% alcohol and has a significant amount of hop bitterness with some citrus notes and a nicely balanced malt. The Gaz de Course is about 13% and is in the style of an American Barley Wine. It’s too smooth if anything, which makes it dangerous and has a mellow sweetness instead of the harsh alcohol you might expect. The Vent des Anges was something entirely different, a sour beer at 8.5% the aroma of which, according to my tasting notes, reminded me of a cedar closet from childhood. It’s the kind of beer that dares you to forge an understanding of what the brewer is trying to accomplish.I’m going to call Brettanomyces on that one.

At approximately 10:30 a young man in an Iron Maiden shirt walked over and pulled down the roll-up screen and started a projector. The screen showed videos and still images over the course of the next couple of hours that were excerpted from 1980′s french language action films and various performance art installations. Periodically they would show entire levels of early nintendo shoot-em-ups being navigated perfectly.

Eventually they brought over some complimentary anniversary snacks. A plate of duck legs with a brash Jalapeno BBQ sauce. We were about halfway through them when a video came on the screen of a man in a g-string and cat mask slathering himself in several litres of peanut butter while sitting cross legged in the middle of a tarp. He was surrounded by a group of unmoving senior citizens seated in a semi circle on blue plastic chairs. They betrayed no emotion whatsoever. Nothing creates a shared bond amongst pub-goers like a mutually experienced sense of disgust. It also reinforced in my mind a valuable lesson learned years ago: If what you’re seeing is forcing you to do a double take, it’s probably past your bed time.

What you should know here is that Brouhaha is ugly, but it’s also far from unlovable. The number one priorities seem to be the quality of the beer being brewed and simply having a good time. I can’t say that it’s like this all the time as I’ve only ever been on special occasions, but it’s practically brew pub as performance art. It dares you not to enjoy yourself. I suspect that it would be impossible for it to exist anywhere else, and I know one thing for sure: You can’t do that in Toronto.

Posted in: Mondial 2010 ⋅ 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: , , , ,