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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: , , , , ,

Ontario Craft Beer Week – Day Three

June 23, 2011 3:34 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

Let me tug on your coat about something.

A lot of the time, the craft beer movement is defined not so much by the drinkers as it is by the brewers and the people who write about beer. You’ve got a lot of different beer bloggers and columnists and legitimate experts talking about what makes a good beer, or whether a brewery is going downhill. Sometimes, the discussion can get pretty heated. It has done in the states recently. There’s an ongoing flamewar about Session beers (beers under 5% alcohol which can be consumed in quantity over several hours). While that might set the course for trends in the immediate future and bring to light some previously underappreciated offerings of very high quality, it’s an extremely localized form of beer appreciation.

I’m not here to talk to you about that. I’m not even here to talk to you about beer nerds who are looking for the rarest of beers. I’m here to talk to you today about people who actually go out and drink whatever high quality beer is available and enjoy each others’ company.

It’s only over the course of the last four or five months that I’ve become aware of a group called the Toronto Beer Lovers. It’s an interesting group for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that these aren’t folks who are involved in the craft beer industry. These are just people who like good beer and aren’t nerdy enough to spend a whole lot of time arguing about it online. It’s a sizeable group and currently they weigh in at 889 members.

Think about this for a second. If one of the primary ways that people are convinced of the benefits of craft beer is word of mouth, then the Toronto scene has nearly a thousand loosely organized people who are spreading the word. They’re not doing it because it benefits them directly. They’re doing it because they enjoy going out to the pub and trying new things. If they like something, they’re probably going to spread the word. They might even bring their friends along. That’s a bigger deal than you might imagine.

Maybe the most interesting part is that they’re doing it from a consumer perspective; looking for value for money and events where their members are most likely to have fun. Reethi Jagannathan is sort of their de facto leader along with a couple of other people (Craig and Michael) who organize events and gatherings. Because they’re aware of the size of the group and they don’t want to overwhelm a pub on a busy night, they post that there are a certain number of spots open for the event and then people RSVP.

Reethi beat me pretty soundly and advances to face Nick Pashley in the semi-finals.

It works out surprisingly well. Apparently there are about 100 hardcore members and the rest of them sort of rotate through. This not only means that there are always people willing to attend events, but also that there are always going to be new people to talk to. If you go to the same pub all the time, eventually you’ll hear everyone’s stories. In this case, the rotating cast keeps things fresh.

I caught up with them at The Rhino on Tuesday night and hung out for a while. By the time I got there, there were about 20 members of the group. At one end of the line of tables they had grabbed, they were doing a sort of unofficial beer tasting to determine what they thought of the beers that were available on tap. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the things they were tasting. Black Oak’s Marmalade Saison was in the same lineup as a number of the Great Lakes beers that are being featured there throughout the week.

Usually, if you go to a beer tasting, people group certain styles of beer together. That’s not what this was about. This was early in the evening and they had purchased a number of things that just looked interesting and got everyone to try them. It makes a lot of sense. If there are a lot of new beers on tap and you’ve never tried them before, it’s a pretty good way to figure out what you should order. Plus, it creates a lot of discussion, not about the technical facets of brewing or about the IBU content of the IPA, but simply about what people would like to have next.

Tasting a whole bunch of different beers just for fun? Weirdos.

It’s a good reminder that for the most part people just want to have a good time. Beer is many things, but it excels as a social lubricant. Most of the time beer isn’t about art. I write about some high flown concepts sometimes, but I’m going to be pretty quick to concede that a lot of the time, you just want to unwind and have fun. This is beer appreciation as an excuse to bring people with common interests together. And that’s pretty much the whole point of the brewing industry. It’s awesome.

If you go out to any number of the Ontario Craft Beer Week events, you’ll probably meet people from the Toronto Beer Lovers group. You might want to consider joining them. Not only will you drink good beer, meet interesting people and visit pubs you’ve never heard of, you’ll have fun. I did.

Also, it should be pointed out that Robohop from Great Lakes is an absolute hop monster. It’s pretty much the reason that I decided to take Wednesday off from Ontario Craft Beer Week. If you want to wake up feeling like you’ve got a hop vine growing out of your cerebral cortex, then Robohop is the beer for you. Sweet Christmas, is that a hoppy beer. I mean, just take all of the hops in the world and throw them in the kettle why don’t you? Holy jumping cats. Son of a motherless goat and so forth.

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Ontario Craft Beer Week 2011 – Day Two

June 21, 2011 4:37 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

This year, I’m trying to get to as many Ontario Craft Beer Week events as is humanly possible, so you’ll probably see me out and about knocking around the GTA in some capacity or other. Maybe I’ll be complaining violently about having been to so many events. Maybe I’ll be quietly taking notes in a corner. Maybe I’ll be drinking a Pina Colada at Trader Vic’s. Maybe I’ll be drinking a beer at noon on a Tuesday. Only time will tell.

As my editor keeps telling me, “research is important,” and I am one of the happy few who can literally cite drinking beer and carousing with ne’er do wells as research. That said, let’s see what I got up to on Monday.

Beer Cocktails at Burger Bar. 5:00-7:00 PM

This is kind of an interesting event for me, because I’m researching for an article on Beer Cocktails for early next month. I can honestly say that I haven’t been exposed to the idea enough to speak emphatically about it, but it seems to me that it’s one of those things that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t know that the world is clamoring for the beer cocktail.

If you had asked me about them a month ago, I probably would have politely but firmly asked you to go away. At this point, I’m not so sure. I tend to think of craft beer as a finished artisanal product, but it occurs to me that it’s probably not a lot different in principle than adding a syrup to a Berliner Weiss or grapefruit juice to a Radler. I’m starting to understand that when it’s done properly, it’s about adding to the flavours already present in order to enhance the experience. That’s no bad thing.

Mirella Amato and Christine Sismondo were hosting this event and they’d come up with a selection of beer cocktails to show off the rapidly growing phenomenon. My feeling is that if anyone was going to be able to convince me, it was going to be these two women, since between them they have a huge amount of knowledge to draw from.

I didn’t manage to try all of the beer cocktails, since I was pacing myself, but let me tell you a little about what worked and what didn’t.

The Rusty Knot.

The Rusty Knot worked pretty well. It was a cocktail of Lake of Bays Pale Ale with Tawny Port, grapefruit juice and homemade grenadine. I’m not sure that I was able to detect a lot of the Pale Ale within it, but the grapefruit juice offered a pleasing bitterness to combat the sweetness of the 10 year old Taylor Fladgate they had chosen. The Blackberry garnish was visually pleasing, and while I’m moderately colourblind, I think it’s attractive in the glassware.

Sweet Dreams. Not just a clever name, since it hits like a brickbat.

The Sweet Dreams didn’t really work for me. It was Beau’s Matt’s Sleepy Time Stout with Chambord, Crème de Menthe and muddled mint. Christine claimed rightly that the problem in working with an 8.0% percent beer in the summer is that it’s difficult to make it into a light refreshing beverage. I’m not sure that it would have worked with raspberry and mint even in the winter. It’s a little too sweet and the combination of the alcohol and the sugar was overpowering. That might be a beer that is more or less uncocktailable.

The winner, in my estimation:

I think the best example that they came up with was the “Lotus Green” which is made with Great Lakes Green Tea Ale, honey and elderflower. This is an example of a beer cocktail where the ingredients work together to the strengths of the key ingredient. The honey brings out the grassiness of the green tea and the elderflower adds a layer of flavour that plays on top of it. Well done, Cocktailers. (Cocktailsters? Cocktailinistas?)

Great Lakes Beer Dinner at Harbord House 7:00-9:00 PM

My host for this event was David Bieman, who had worked on the menu with the owner of the Harbord House, John, and his chef Jake. The food was quite as good as it was for the beer dinner during last year’s Ontario Craft Beer Week.

Tuna Tartare with various salsas.

The first course was a Tuna Tartare served on Potato Crisps with a variety of salsas. In terms of pairing beer with the course, they went with the Great Lakes Green Tea Ale. It’s a valid choice since most of the time I’m eating raw tuna, it’s either going to be with beer or green tea. I don’t think that any of the salsas overpowered the beer, but the poblano pepper and tomatillo one came close. Interestingly, the one that worked best was the salsa of cucumber and mint, which seemed more inspired by Mediterranean cuisine than Southwestern.

Duck Three ways. Croquettes! Duck and Blueberry Sausage! Smoked Breast!

The Entrée was a trio of duck preparations. The smoked duck breast and duck sausage were very good, but for me the standout were the croquettes. I have to compliment their chef on his seasoning. It’s very easy to oversalt a smoked duck breast, and similarly easy to undersalt a croquette (I suspect the reasoning would be “well, it’s fried and there’s cranberry compote to go with it. Better back off.”)  He got it exactly right for my taste.

The trio were paired with Great Lakes’ Faith No More Saison. I was talking to Lackey yesterday and apparently it’s the summer of Saison at the brewery. They’re going to be producing a bunch of Saisons over the course of the summer and I have to tell you that they’ve come a long way since the first one I tried. This was actually a reimagining of David’s Saison from last year, which was pleasantly funky, but maybe overly honeyed. You could tell from the nose of this Saison exactly how dry the finish was going to be. It was lemon, spice and pepper with a hint of melon of all things in the mid palate. It’s a lot more restrained than the last one. If they move it to production they’ll make a mint.

For dessert, David went all Richard Blais on us.

See, this is when I figured out what was going to happen. Check out the maniacal grin on Bieman.

You should really experience being in a room when one corner suddenly fills up with wafting liquid nitrogen.

Brewer drops science. Worried pub owner looks on.

I don’t know if the sorbet that he made a la carte was all that good, but I can pretty much guarantee you that no one will ever forget the evening if only for the whisking clinic that David put on in the corner.

Eventually, they called in a professional pinch-whisker

Stout Irish Pub Brewing Under The Stars 9:30-10:30 PM

I’ve done a bit of brewing. I’ve even done it on the system that they used at Stout, but I have to commend the idea behind the event. Most people haven’t brewed a beer, or even considered the possibility. How do you reach people who don’t want to go on a brewery tour and see how it’s done? You bring the fight to them during boardgame night on a local patio. It’s a good opportunity for people who are curious to go over and check it out. There was no shortage of brewers to answer their questions. George Eagleson was there, and he was a good choice. No one is too intimidated by George to ask a question. He will probably even give you a hug if you ask a good question. Or for any reason at all.

The Great Lakes pilot system is apparently transportable.

Jason Britton from Cameron’s seemed to be doing most of the explaining, but people circulated and chatted and seemed to be finding out what they wanted to know.

There were also a number of beers available from the brewers who were collaborating.

"What? You want one of these beers? I don't know, man."

There was even a Potato Malt Liquor available from Biergotter. Eric Ecclestone, local badass was heard to remark, “I don’t care if you don’t like it, St. John. Put this up on yer blag and publish it.” I did like it, but I must have made a face when I took a sniff and didn’t recognize the Rosemary used as an aromatic. I spent the next several minutes awkwardly groping for a pop culture reference to defuse the situation.

Eric Ecclestone: Local Badass is a dangerous man with a dangerous beer.

I’m still alive, so I must have done something right.

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

Ontario Craft Beer Week 2011 – Day One

June 19, 2011 2:09 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Do you know how far the perception of beer has come in the last ten years? A very long way indeed, and a lot of that is down to craft brewers getting involved with locations outside of the places that you’d traditionally find them. As I look at the lineup for Craft Beer Week, I’m noticing that there are a lot of events that go outside of the traditional “Here is a pint of beer. It’s better than the beer that you’re used to drinking. Why don’t you give it a shot?”

It’s for that reason that this year I’m determined to seek out some of the more esoteric Craft Beer Week events. There are some that are listed on the website. For instance, Cameron’s is involved with a Polo tournament featuring the Royal Jaipur team. No one saw that coming. There are at least three festivals just within Toronto alone this week: C’est What, Session and the Beach BBQ and Brews Festival. Not to mention the Wine and Spirit Festival. Consider how unlikely that would have been five years ago.

I decided to kick the week off with a fanfare. Literally.

Atmospheric lighting! Mellow, yet reminiscent of a planetarium!

It turns out that the popularity of craft beer has gotten to the point where it is popping up as a draw in places that you’d never expect it. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra had an event last night that was meant to appeal to a younger demographic: a 10:30 PM performance of Mahler’s fifth symphony in C sharp minor. Before that, though, they had a BBQ tailgate party in their parking lot. With beer provided by Steam Whistle.

It’s apparently part of a program called Tsoundcheck, which is designed to make the symphony more approachable. The astounding thing to me is that it works. While the tailgate party was full up, I did sort of hang around the barriers to have a look at the crowd. The TSO’s PR representative had told me that they were aiming for a demographic of 25-40 with their promotion, and I think that it may have actually skewed younger than that.

It turns out that if you combine things that people like (music, beer and food) they will show up in droves. The parking lot was jammed with fashionable young people who had paid 75 bucks to eat barbeque, drink craft beer and then go listen to a symphony.

Not only that, but they licensed the auditiorium at Roy Thompson Hall. You could take a beer in with you! Now, I didn’t think much of that until I walked in the door, but I was early and struck up a conversation with a bartender. It’s not something that they do often, but it seems to me to be the kind of thing they could pull out at will. And it was mostly craft beer! I had a Tankhouse. As the bartender said “It’s quite civilized, if you ask me.”

This is your beer.

Do you know what happens if you let people take drinks into the auditorium to listen to serious classical music? Well, the first thing is that the audience is slightly looser. I sometimes dislike performances of classical music because I feel like I ought to be sitting immobile, which results in an uneasiness. I feel like a slight rustle from the audience will be perceived by the woodwinds, even though I know from having played in wind ensembles that this is not true. In this case, the place was packed to the rafters and the crowd had less inhibition than usual. Everyone behaved themselves. Civilization did not collapse. Peter Oundjian even suggested that we applaud during the breaks if the mood struck us.

The other thing that happens is that since people have drinks to sip, there’s less of the stifled coughing that you usually get in an air conditioned concert hall. You know the kind. The violins descend to a pianissimo pizzicato counterpoint and that’s the moment that you inevitably find that you have a tickle in your throat. Well, not if you’ve got a beverage. You can just take a sip and avoid the annoyed glances from the wealthy dowager in seat 6B.

This is your beer on music.

The other thing that’s worth noting is that Mahler’s fifth is a bloody challenging piece of music. It’s seventy minutes long and has five movements. It was completed in 1902 and was so challenging that it wasn’t premiered in England until the 1930’s. The fourth movement, an Adagietto, was the most accessible part and was usually played as an excerpt before then. It’s technically difficult. The amount of lung capacity needed by the French Horns is such that you had better have an oxygen tent waiting backstage if you’re going to perform it.

The other thing is that it’s not programmatic. That is to say that there’s no story that goes along with it. That might have been alright for Debussy and Berlioz, but Mahler wasn’t having any of that “Prelude To The Afternoon of a Whatsit” stuff. It’s just music. You can ascribe whatever influences from Mahler’s personal life you want, but it’s not designed that way. You can say that it switches from C sharp minor to D major for the final movement and that that’s because he found the love of his life and was recovering from a near death experience while writing it and it’s for that reason that it’s a porthole into the transformative journey of the human soul, but that’s a load of historically revisionist nonsense. It just IS, if that makes any sense.

And it’s beautiful. Not having heard it, you can tell where the musical line is going to go. His melodic lines reach that point and then continue on as if defying expectation. They’ll crescendo to the point where you think that the timpanist is going to wreck his equipment and then back completely off. The finale is so big and brash and joyful and is possessed of so many false endings that it actually made me giggle because it becomes practically a caricature of itself.

The symphony got the longest standing ovation I’ve ever seen at Roy Thompson Hall. Longer than the premiere of Eric idle’s Not The Messiah, anyway. It might have been because of the comparative youth of the audience. It might have been because of the slight inhibition loosening qualities of the drinks they were allowed to bring in. I think, though, that it was because they were expressly informed by the nature of the event that they were allowed to have fun.

Maybe we should look for other ways to get craft beer into cultural venues like this one. It’s not an audience craft beer usually gets, and it seemed to improve peoples’ enjoyment of what is, let’s be honest, a long and challenging symphony. That’s got to be a win for everyone involved.

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

Ontario Craft Beer Week – An Epilogue OR “Look Back Hungover”

June 28, 2010 2:58 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Now that the booths have been packed up at the Sunnyside Pavilion and the events of the week have come to an end, it’s a good opportunity to take a look back and see exactly what Ontario Craft Beer Week accomplished. For me, there were high spots and low spots evident throughout the week, but since I’ve already covered my opinions pretty thoroughly (even I’m tired of listening to my prattle), I’ve decided to abide by a new metric: How successful was Ontario Craft Beer Week in spreading the word about Ontario Craft Beer?

One of the problems in sponsoring a week-long series of beer events in Toronto seems to be the fact that preaching to the choir is unavoidable. Without the ability to provide for large media buys and television spots, promotion is available through a relatively limited series of channels. Bar Towel is a good example of this phenomenon. It operates as a good channel of information and the forums are full of people, both registered and lurking, who are definitely interested in going out to the pub and seeing what’s available. There are thirty thousand registered users, which is a pretty good group. The problem is that in order to have heard about Ontario Craft Beer Week through Bar Towel, you would have had to visit the site; you’d already have to be seeking out information about it. The same can essentially be said for TAPS, which has a fairly devoted online following both at their website, but also on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. You’d already need to be following a national beer magazine in order to hear about the events.

Josh Rubin had a nice piece over at the Toronto Star, which was published five days before the events started. It included a limited list of the events taking place throughout Toronto. I’m googling my spacebar off over here, and that’s about all the mainstream coverage that pops up in the first five pages of results. I know that Jed from the Griffin Gastropub had a Breakfast Television interview scheduled on Tuesday. That may have singlehandedly reached a larger audience than all other attempts combined, but a segment like that is a one shot deal. Once it’s over, it’s not going to get replayed unless it makes the website. I didn’t see it linked anywhere online, so I’m guessing that it didn’t (the BT website is down as of this writing, the servers probably having either been set on fire by the black bloc or bashed by a riot shield). There’s nothing in Eye Weekly and there’s nothing in NOW Magazine. It didn’t even make Torontoist.com. I feel as though it should have been possible to reach a larger audience in the run up to the events.

One of the reasons that this difficulty exists is that Ontario Craft Beer Week was put together in a little under eleven weeks. The initial press release for the event went out on March 31st. The first organizational meeting was apparently in the middle of April, meaning that all of the logistics had to be put together within two months. Given that timeframe, what they were able to put together was beyond impressive. When you consider the number of special brews that were put together for the week and the amount of face time put in by the brewers themselves, it’s easy to see that there is definitely a huge amount of enthusiasm within the industry for an event like this. After all, a high tide raises all boats.

I lack the ability to be objective when I’m out reviewing an event, partially because I’m a complete beer nerd and partially because the notes tend to become illegible after a certain number of samples, but let’s have a bit of a think about who actually attended the events that I covered.

Granite Brewery Taste of All Ontario: Father’s Day crowd, but mostly people who are already visiting the Granite.

Bar Volo Belgontario: Young people who are willing to learn about beer and try new things, and a smattering of die hard beer nerds.

Harbord House Beer Dinner: Mostly people who go to Harbord House (based on the ease with which they launched into conversation with each other.)

Cass and Troy’s Pub Crawl: Bartowelers, industry people.

Project XXXX: They got over 150 people out, many of whom you have to assume hadn’t been there before since it was their largest ever turnout.

Session Festival: For the most part, twenty somethings with disposable income who are willing to try new things.

Out of six events, three of them managed to target non-industry people or people  not actually physically attending a brewpub. Just based on volume through the doors, Session was the most successful event in terms of reaching a new audience followed by Belgontario and Project XXXX. I don’t want to guess at the actual numbers.

Ontario Craft Beer Week didn’t misstep. It did the majority of things right when you take into account the fact that nothing like this had ever been tried on this scale. It used the promotional avenues available, even going so far as to put together a video to drum up online interest. It managed to schedule a number of events of different kinds province wide, allowing for peoples’ differing tastes and comfort levels. It was an incredibly important step forward for the Ontario Craft Brewing industry if only because there is now a frame of reference for events of this magnitude. This was a solid program, and hopefully it will encourage fuller participation from Ontario brewers for the next festival. If they’d had more time to prepare, it would have been better.

Speaking of which, Toronto Beer Week will potentially be the first festival to benefit from this testing of the waters. Here are the lessons they need to take away from Ontario Craft Beer Week: If the goal of the event is to raise awareness and reach new audiences, it is simply not enough to use online, industry friendly media outlets. In order to expand the brand of craft brewing generally, there needs to be mainstream media attention. Additionally, you need to get a combination of the larger beer bars in Toronto, and it wouldn’t hurt to get licensees on board that don’t already cater to your existing audience; maybe some kind of Toronto Beer Week “Craft Beer Challenge,” where you get bars that don’t usually serve craft beer to try it out with their clientele. Maybe get the attention of the Firkin group or something. All I know is that there has to be a certain amount of spectacle to get the general public involved.

Feel free, incidentally, to take advantage of the relative anonymity of the comment section to spitball ideas for Toronto Beer Week either based on what you saw this week or just generally.

I am now going go to take advantage of the fact that Ontario Craft Beer Week is over by giving my liver a well deserved hiatus.

There, there, little liver. You’ll be ok.

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

Ontario Craft Beer Week – Session: A Craft Beer Festival

June 27, 2010 1:32 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

The concept of launching an Ontario Craft Beer Week is a reasonable proposition. Breweries were able to prepare for the event and put together relatively small gatherings at venues throughout Toronto. The Victory, for instance, had craft beers on tap all this week. Being that they had also had craft beers on tap the week before that and for the last couple of years running, it’s not much of a stretch to throw support behind an additional week. It’s not a big ask to get a bar like Volo to display some excellent Belgian style beers, and it’s not much of a coup to get Great Lakes or Black Oak to produce excellent beer. They were going to do it anyway. These are organizations that will throw down at the drop of a hat and which will gladly throw support behind a local promotion. The fact that there’s an Ontario Craft Beer Week just means that they’ll get more attention for doing the things they’re already doing well.

Innovation, on the other hand, is risky. The Session Craft Beer Festival represents a departure from Toronto’s mainstay beer festival: The Toronto Festival of Beer. I have heard the Toronto Festival of Beer referred to by various people as “a gong show”, “a drunk tank” and “that time I threw up a bunch.” Typically the complaints that you get about the TF o’ B are that they don’t showcase any new products, that it’s incredibly noisy and crowded and that because large national brands are in evidence, it’s relatively difficult to promote smaller brands. This week I heard horror stories about serving beer there; tales of debauchery and pointless violence and poor behavior. Any time that you get ten thousand people together and supply them with an endless stream of lager, things are going to get dicey.

Sunnyside PavilionSession set out to remedy several problems associated with the larger festival. For starters, it’s a much smaller venue than Bandshell Park. The Sunnyside Pavilion, which is a marvel of a bygone age when Lake Ontario was swimmable has, according to the security guard I spoke to, a capacity of about 3000 people. The fact that the festival featured only craft beer removed the influence of national brands and also the presence of their proponents. Tickets to the festival cost $35.00 (and to be fair, included a very nice half pint stein), which has to be viewed as a strategic move on the part of the Griffin Gastropub, who organized the event. It’s certainly restrictive in demographic terms; People who are unwilling to pay the extra four dollars to avoid drinking Lucky Lager are certainly not going to shell out $35.00 for a ticket that doesn’t include beer samples. Once you had been admitted to the festival, samples were quite reasonable. The stein was marked at four ounces and eight ounces, but I suspect that the pours were closer to five ounces and ten ounces. A four-five ounce sample was a dollar, or about four dollars a pint. If you think in terms of comparison to Mondial de la Biere’s model, where admission is free but four ounce samples can run up to five dollars, it no longer seems unreasonable. It’s even fairly clever in that in order to get your money’s worth at Session, you basically had to commit to the whole afternoon.

In the run up to the event, I tried to get some of my beer nerd friends to go with me. None of them were particularly interested. For people who pay fairly close attention to the beer scene in Toronto, Session wasn’t much of a draw. There wasn’t a lot of stuff on tap that you couldn’t purchase at the LCBO or find on tap at other venues during Ontario Craft Beer Week. A lack of unique products limited the draw of the festival for a number of people, especially considering that even three unique beers would probably not have justified the price of admission.

This means that two categories of beer drinkers had been eliminated: Beer Nerds and Buck-a-Beer enthusiasts.

His Ompteeness in a candid momentIt’s a clever strategy, if you pause to think about the fact that the folks at the Griffin Gastropub managed to draw a crowd of twenty somethings with disposable income who are willing to try out new things. It’s unlikely that they would have already tried all of the beers on offer and they probably wouldn’t have gone to many of the other Ontario Craft Beer Week events. It’s fairly likely that these people will walk away from the festival having found something that they liked and that they would drink again and even actively seek out. The key accomplishment for the festival is the fact that they managed to reach and address an important demographic which is, if not untapped, then usually not taken seriously. Between the pricing structure which ensured a captive audience for an afternoon and the lovely scenery around the Sunnyside Pavilion, the attendees were relaxed and genial and even avoided having to wait in long lines.

It should have been an overwhelming success, but there was the timing.

To say that the timing was unfortunate is like claiming that war orphans are underprivileged. This was a beer festival in a remote location in the middle of the world cup on the weekend of the G20 when protestors roamed the streets of Toronto. And it rained! On the way to the festival, I caught the bus out of Keele moments after the announcement that all subway services in downtown Toronto had been stopped due to a security incident, giving the 80 Queensway the feel of the last chopper out of Saigon. People stayed home in droves. You can expect a certain amount of hunkering down when there are seven thousand people walking along Queen Street West, smashing windows and setting fire to police cars. By 3:30, people at the festival were obsessively checking their iPhones for updates on the situation. Throughout the afternoon, the crowd did pick up, but not substantially. Even after the sun came out, the festival remained fairly empty. In point of fact, more people may have been arrested in Toronto yesterday than attended Session.

Beer and a lake: An Ontario WeekendIt may have actually worked in their favour. For the people in attendance, there was the ability to talk to the brewers and actually learn about the beer they were drinking. There was in-depth conversation and people enjoyed themselves. I was able to spend half an hour having a good natured conversation, enjoying a tasty beverage while looking out at Lake Ontario and I was never jostled once. For the people who braved the confusion of the events surrounding the G20, it was a delightful afternoon.

To sum up, Session was a good idea that almost worked. It was valiant attempt at a craft beer festival that didn’t quite make it. I suspect that on any other weekend, this would have been a much greater success. I want the festival to succeed if they do it next year, so all I can hope for is that it can be scheduled during a period with less rioting and arson.

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

Ontario Craft Beer Week – Project XXXX

June 25, 2010 3:00 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Project XicansGreat Lakes Brewery hosts a monthly event called Project X on the second Thursday of each month. At its inception a year ago, the idea was that they would show off one cask conditioned ale and a number of their beers on tap. The $10 membership would get you a t-shirt and inclusion on the mailing list, and you would have to pay $10 on each subsequent visit to cover the cost of snacks. I’ve been out there a couple of times, and it has become fairly obvious to me that the event has evolved way past its original model into something unique. The number of cask conditioned ales on offer has gone through the roof. The event is frequently tied to other, larger events. Project XX was a benefit event with proceeds going to the Women’s Habitat of Etobicoke, featuring food and cask ale produced by women (the rather excellently named Great Lakes “Does this muu-muu make me look Hefe?” Imperial Hefeweizen is seemingly based on one of the beers from this event and is available tonight at Volo). This month’s edition not only marks the one year anniversary of Project X, it ties them to Ontario Craft Beer Week.

This month’s edition, Project XXXX is a fine jumping off point to talk about the spirit of the event. Great Lakes is Toronto’s oldest craft brewery and for the most part the thing that has sustained them to this point are the brews that they have produced in order to appeal to the mass market: Golden Horseshoe Premium Lager and Red Leaf Smooth Red Lager. In 2006 they started releasing more substantial fare and their Devil’s Pale Ale and seasonal releases followed from that point on. There’s a Pumpkin Ale, a Winter Ale, an Orange Peel Ale, a Green Tea Ale and the Crazy Canuck Pale Ale, which was released in time for the 2010 winter olympics. For those of you keeping track at home, that’s six beers that have made it into the LCBO in the last four years.

In order to develop new beers, it seems to me that you need three things: A pilot brewing system, competent and enthusiastic brewers, and the willingness to get the hell out of their way and let them experiment. Great Lakes has all three of these things, and Project X exists in order to show off the results of the process and also to recoup a small amount of the R&D outlay. The sheer variety of products that they’ve produced as a result of experimentation just in the last year is massively impressive. There have been Barley Wines, Double IPAs, West Coast IPAs, Saisons, Rauchbiers, Breakfast Stouts, Imperial Hefeweizens, Hoppy Weissbiers, English Milds, and two beers based on medieval styles and techniques: a Gruit Ale and a Steinbier.

Everyone seems to be getting in on the act. I already talked about David Bieman’s Saison over here. John Bowden is responsible for the Morning Glory Breakfast Stout, which was a favourite at Cask Days last year. And then, there’s Mike Lackey. I’ve spent a small amount of time taunting Mike about his maniacal hop obsession this week, claiming that I was going to make sport of him at some point. I came up with a number of potential jokes, which I include here in a Rostand style categorization:

Melodramatic: When he approaches the mash tun, the soundtrack swells with pizzicato strings.

Chuck Norris: Mike Lackey doesn’t love hops. He hates tooth enamel.

Illegality: Mike Lackey’s hops are delivered daily in bales dropped from a low flying plane.

Corporate: Mike Lackey has more hops than a malfunctioning energizer bunny.

Agrarian: Mike Lackey is personally responsible for the continued subsidy of half the hop growers in Washington State.

Concerned: I hope he doesn’t end up in a padded room, rocking slowly back and forth, repeating “Columbus” over and over.

Straight-up Thievery: He must love the little beer nerds, to give them this to drink.

In truth, there’s no reason to mock the guy. He’s the brewer behind My Bitter Wife IPA, My Bitterer Wife Double IPA, Miami Weiss, Lackey’s Caskey, Armadildo IPA and other excellent products. He’s got a signature style and he may be the only brewer in Ontario whose beer is immediately recognizable. His beer is going into round two of the Volo IPA challenge with a commanding lead and I have no doubt that he’s going to win. The best part, as a beer nerd, is getting to see how he’s tweaking the recipe with every new brew run. It’s a useful insight into the refinement process and a great display of his enthusiasm and ability.

Great Lakes' Take on a Fake LakeProject XXXX had a great party atmosphere. Having lucked out on the weather, Great Lakes splurged on a G20 style fake lake of their own. There was a small lakeside area with Muskoka style deck chairs. They were serving pork and lamb sausages with roasted red peppers and a mixed salad with a Green Tea Ale vinaigrette. The Rollergettes, the Great Lakes affiliated roller derby team, were onhand and provided what looked to be the most entertaining impromptu day care service in the GTA. (Roller Derby Daycare. Someone pitch it to Fox.)

Roller Derby Daycare

Taken moments before little Johnny was hipchecked into oncoming traffic.

They invited F&M, Flying Monkeys and Muskoka to supply casks for the event. F&M supplied a Strawberry Blonde lager, which was refreshing in the afternoon sun. Muskoka brought a dry-hopped Cream Ale. Peter Chiodo from Flying Monkeys brought both a cask and bottles of his new Smashbomb IPA (72 IBU, Citra Hops) in order to allow people to do a side by side tasting. The cask version had an effusive mouthfeel and an overwhelming citrus quality, while the bottle version was served slightly colder and seems to concentrate its attack on the mid palate. Great Lakes provided Lackey’s Caskey, My Bitter Wife and Miami Weiss.

If you haven’t been out to Project X yet, you’re missing out. Next month will be different, but no less impressive. It’s definitely worth the trek out to Royal York and the Queensway. Plus, where else can you get great food and sample several kinds of beer for ten bucks?

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Ontario Craft Beer Week – Cass and Troy’s Excellent Adventure

June 24, 2010 4:15 pm ⋅ 4 Comments ⋅

Last night, night four of Ontario Craft Beer Week, was the inaugural edition of Cass and Troy’s pub crawl, which looks to be a continuing feature of Ontario Craft Beer Week. The pub crawl serves a number of purposes mostly because of the affiliations of its hosts. Troy Burtch is the man behind the Great Canadian Beer Blog and in his capacity at TAPS magazine not only a fine addition to the team, but also an inspiration to everyone who has ever dreamed of giving up their day job to get into the industry. Cass Enright is the founder of the Ontario beer website Bar Towel and also the man behind Free Our Beer, which endeavours to expand the amount of choice available to Ontario beer drinkers by bringing beer into the province that’s not yet available through the LCBO.

The crawl, which was announced last week, allowed representation for Bar Towel and TAPS magazine during the week. Upon joining the crawl, each guest was issued a wristband (to allow for discounted pricing at some of the stops) a raffle ticket for the giveaways throughout the evening and a snazzy new Bar Towel keychain. The crawl also allowed for members of Bar Towel to put faces to online handles. There’s a certain amount of anonymity on online forums that creates a decent amount of disconnect even between people who are in complete agreement about the fact that death is a favourable alternative to having to drink Schlitz. In this case, rather than having their remarks listed in chronological order by bulletin board software, people were able to voice their opinions at the same time without making Cass moderate them. The pub crawl turned out to be a relative who’s who of beer drinkers, beer writers, beer purveyors and industry professionals, all out for a night on the town. It’s an interesting exercise to discover that someone you know from a pub is the same person that you’ve been arguing with online.

The first stop of the tour was the Victory Café, a beloved Mirvish Village institution which serves a number of very decent craft beers, not to mention the fact that they have a guest cask tap. The cask of the day was Neustadt Double Fuggled, which is slightly reminiscent of Deuchars IPA and therefore a thing very much to be desired on a hot, muggy day. As guests of the pub crawl gathered in the front room of the pub, which rapidly surpassed maximum capacity, Cass and Troy explained the format of the crawl and people tended to have to introduce themselves twice; once using their real names and a second time using their online handles. It’s a fairly bizarre procedure and should have been a tip off about the level of nerdery which became evident later in the evening. Seemingly minutes after introductions were made, Troy took the reins and announced that it was time to move on to the second stop, Caplansky’s.

Caplansky’s, if you haven’t been yet, is a wonderful deli in the tradition of Schwartz’s or Yitz’s. The specialty of the house is the smoked meat, as it should be. If you’re ordering it in any cut other than fatty, you’re doing yourself a disservice. It’s moist and juicy and seemingly impossible to eat without abandoning dignity and just diving in. They  had four craft beers on tap and I opted for the Denison’s Dunkel. It’s an excellent idea during a pub crawl to lay down some fodder relatively early in the evening so that you don’t end up staggering around saying things like “This guy… I love this dude… this is.. the guy…(blurghhhh).”

The third stop was Ronnie’s Local 069, which I skipped. I should perhaps explain the reasoning behind this decision. It was hot and muggy out to begin with and Ronnie’s is an extremely cramped and crowded place. With the humidity it was over thirty degrees out and the back room that we were going to be sitting in was essentially a sauna at this point in the evening; a sauna that smelled more than faintly of cat urine. I was worried that it was actually the stench of the alpha hipster marking his territory. You can pick the alpha hipster out of the crowd by the fact that he has the most obviously ironic moustache style, the tightest girl jeans and the most obscure tattoo sleeves. His mate will be the one in the least form fitting dress, which has been fashioned out of either burlap or sackcloth. I’m sure the CBC will eventually produce a field guide in a Hinterland Who’s Who format. (Now say what you will about me: I was born with a silver spoon lodged squarely in my forebrain. I’m midtown Toronto white anglo saxon protestant yuppie bourgeois reactionary scum. In high school I was voted most likely to turn fifty before I turned thirty. Some people are afraid of the unknown. I’m just leery of d-bags.)

After a brief stroll through Kensington Market, I headed to the fourth stop on the crawl: The Embassy. This was more my speed. Black Oak Summer Saison on tap. Geometric designs on the walls. Mood lighting in a Victorian space. It’s a nice pub and one I’d gladly go back to. It was at this point in the evening that Cass made an announcement regarding Free Our Beer. They’ve acquired a second brewery; Picaroon’s which is based out of Fredricton, New Brunswick. Cass will be spearheading the import of five of their beers, highlighted by their Imperial Pilsner. I keep hearing good things about them, so this should be a win for Cass. This was also the point in the evening when the crowd began to thin out. Depending on your size and how gung-ho you are about the pub crawl experience, the fourth hour can certainly represent something of a rubicon. Troy was no longer able to move the crowd along with the efficiency displayed earlier in the evening as stragglers delved into conversation and revealed which World of Warcraft server their alt characters were on.

The final stop on the pub crawl was the Cloak and Dagger, which is pretty much what you want in a late night pub. The dark oak paneling tends to absorb the light from the room, they offer 23 beers on tap and employ a very competent Jack Black impersonator as entertainment. Almost to a man, the remaining crawlers ended up ordering the cask ale: Lackey’s Caskey. You may recall that this was on offer the other night at the Harbord House. This version was almost certainly better. I find cask ale from pins to somehow contain less flavor than those drawn from a handpump, probably due to some of the oxygenation that occurs during the pumping. This was smooth, hoppy and delicious and probably would have worked with the cheesecake. They also had Duggan’s #99 double IPA, in which I feel Mike has doubled the amount of malt rather than the amount of hops. It’s drinkable, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to order it again.

The pub crawl was a vast success. People chatted and schmoozed and drank and enjoyed themselves and each other’s company. If the other events this week are a showcase of Ontario beer, this was a showcase of Ontario beer drinkers. By and large they’re a jovial, pleasant and extraordinarily nerdy group of people to spend time with.

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Ontario Craft Beer Week – Harbord House

June 23, 2010 2:45 am ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

One of my goals in covering Ontario Craft Beer Week was to try and get out to a number of different kinds of events. I knew that I wanted to cover an event that had food pairings involved, and it was hard to narrow down the field. Mirella Amato is hosting a Neustadt tasting and sausagefest at The Only Café on Wednesday and yesterday there was a lobster boil at the Cloak and Dagger. The option that looked the most interesting to me was a cask beer dinner at Harbord House. Harbord House has been on my radar for a while because I have a group of friends that frequent the place pretty regularly. One of them happens to be the reigning cribbage champion of the pub, the prize for which seems to have been a year’s supply of beer. Despite the prospect of free beer for cribbage, I’d never spent much time there.

Harbord House occupies a space that was formerly Rowers Pub & Grill. It’s been open for two and a half years, and has been serving exclusively Ontario craft beer since its inception. They’ve had cask beer for about a year now and their standard choice is Wellington Arkell Bitter. They’re marketing themselves as a gastro pub, and the label is not misapplied as a brief look at the menu certainly indicates. Anybody that uses Berkshire pork shoulder for a pulled pork sandwich is ok in my book. I came to the conclusion that I’ve been missing out, and figured that I should see whether my friends knew something I didn’t.

The other thing that intrigued me is the fact that a cask beer dinner is a relatively risky proposition. It’s a condition of cask ale, as a result of it being an unfiltered product with live yeast, that you don’t necessarily know exactly what you’re going to get until the tap goes in. The beers were all from Great Lakes, which was an encouraging sign since they’ve been producing consistent cask ale for several years at this point. The owner of the pub, John, explained to me that this was the first time that they’d attempted a dinner of this kind. It’s a fairly difficult logistical situation to pull off a five course menu for over thirty people. Great Lakes supplied two cask beers that they had chosen and John had insisted that they brew a beer that he had tried the previous year at Caskapalooza.

While the brewers had supplied some suggestions for food pairings, the menu was designed by John and their chef, Jake.  I suspect that the process of creating a dinner like this must be a lot of fun if you’re working in a pub environment with a relatively small set menu and a few daily specials. The end result was certainly ambitious; the food prep started three weeks ago. Our guide for the evening and my dining companion was David Bieman, a sales representative and brewer for Great Lakes. David is definitely a good choice to host an event like this. He had worked on an organic farm in British Columbia prior to getting into the brewing industry, so he has a unique perspective. The man’s a wealth of information and he fielded questions both ably and entertainingly from diners throughout the evening.

Charcuterie PlateThe first course was a charcuterie platter, accompanied by the Rauchbier that John had persuaded Great Lakes to brew for the event. As you can see, this was an expansive platter. It included house made smoked hunter’s sausage, chicken liver pate and a scotch quail’s egg accompanied by stone ground mustard, red onion jam, sweet cornichons and toast points. As a pairing the Rauchbier went very nicely, although I felt that it could have stood to be a little smokier. David actually agreed with me, but made the convincing point that given its place on the tasting menu, it might overwhelm the palate on subsequent courses had it been more aggressive. The other consideration to be made was the fact that for many of the guests, this would probably be their first experience with a Rauchbier. Subtlety is often more persuasive than a blow on the head.

Just in case anyone was overwhelmed, the tasting menu proceeded to a palate cleansing second course; a salad of watermelon, feta and mint chiffonade drizzled with a balsamic reduction. It was light and fresh and while the pairing for this course was water, which was a very good idea considering, David pointed out that a something in a flavoured beer might work very well the dish in another setting.

The third course was a seafood salad of crab, tomato and capers topped with a pea and potato pancake and a pan seared scallop with a mint and pea reduction. It was the only course paired with a draft beer, Great Lakes Golden Horseshoe Lager, which I thought was completely appropriate. What with the flavors of crab and scallop being fairly sweet and subtle, the contrast that was being aimed at was with the saltiness of the capers and the acidity of the tomato. A more strongly flavoured beer might have gotten in the way, and it’s an important consideration when attempting to pair beer with food that sometimes the focus is going to be on the dish rather than the glass.

David's SaisonThe fourth course was a roasted loin of lamb with fingerling potatoes, asparagus, quenelles of chevre and crème fraiche and a light mustard sauce. It was paired with a Saison that David had brewed himself. He was quite modest about the Saison, and explained something of the design process. This was only the second attempt at a Saison for David. The first time around, a year ago, he had wanted to include a variety of spices in the brew and the end result was not encouraging. This time however, he decided that restraint was called for and opted simply for honey. The Saison came out at about 6.0% with a noticeable honey sweetness at the start, which fades away to spice in the mid palate. The pairing is inspired, given that both the Saison and the chevre include barnyard notes, meaning that you get similar yet distinct tangy flavours from them which compliment the slight gaminess of the lamb. Also, I should point out the plating which places quenelles at 12, 3, 6 and 9 on the plate, interspersed by a sauce of a contrasting colour. It’s nicely artistic without seeming forced.Roasted Loin of Lamb

Dessert was chocolate cheesecake with a strawberry and orange compote (Coulis? It’s been a while since I leafed through Harold McGee), which was paired with Lackey’s Caskey, which derives a citrus flavor from the hop varieties employed. I think that the pairing could have been improved upon by a more pronounced orange flavor in the dessert. The dessert and the beer were both very good, but I’m not sure the combination worked.

Looking back on the evening, I can say that I’ve definitely been missing out on Harbord House. The five course dinner was ambitious and the ambition paid off. It’s an effort that John and Jake should be very proud of. While it seemed to me that the guests were mostly regulars of Harbord House, this won’t be the case next time. When word gets around that they can hold a beer dinner of this quality, they’re going to have lineups for tickets.

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Ontario Craft Beer Week – Belgontario @ Bar Volo

June 22, 2010 3:30 am ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

One of the things that tends to define Ontario craft beer is the history of the province. While Toronto may currently have one of the most diverse populations in the world, it’s worth reminding ourselves that for a long time we were wall to wall redcoats. You don’t need to look very far for reminders. The annual beer festival in Toronto is held at Fort York and, as Alan McLeod points out in the Ontario Craft Beer Week editions of his blog, Kingston spent a long time as an edge of the empire garrison town.

We were British and Quebec was French. It almost certainly accounts for the fact that Quebec craft brewers have traditionally been more willing to experiment with European styles. France is bordered by several nations with distinct brewing traditions, and as such their descendants are more comfortable with their styles. England is an island, and they were content with ale. So symbolically was Ontario beer an island for many years. I don’t mean to oversimplify. There have been lagers and pilsners (Kitchener used to be Berlin after all, and there’s a lot of history between Queenston Heights and the banishment of the stubby bottle), but the mainstays have been English style ales.

That’s one of the reasons that the Belgontario event at Bar Volo is so fascinating. It’s a showcase for the experimentation of Ontario craft brewers in traditional Belgian styles of ale. It’s really only in the last five years that this kind of expression has been possible in Ontario, and many breweries have been experimenting with these styles for less time than that. Bar Volo has put together an interesting lineup that includes products from: Amsterdam, Beau’s, Black Oak, Duggan’s, Grand River, Mill Street, Nickelbrook and Publican House. It’s a great opportunity to see what these breweries have come up with.

One of the problems that you run into in attending an event of this nature is the fact that unless you’re very careful and order small samples of everything, it’s basically impossible to try all of the beers on offer. This is not a series of low alcohol milds. Belgian ales tend to be pretty high octane, and the styles on offer vary wildly. I eschewed the Black Oak Summer Saison because I had tried it fairly recently; It’s a tasty pint of beer, and it suits a hot summer night very nicely. It’s not so complex as to be inaccessible to people trying it for the first time, but it’s a success within the style and is one the only Saisons in Ontario. Black Oak produces cask varietals of this beer using various fruit flavours. I avoided the Grand River Ploegers Vlaams Rood for the reason that I find sour ales can have unpredictable effects on my stomach when mixed with other styles. To highlight this point, I should mention that one of my friends chose a food pairing of sour patch kids. I’m not sure you’ll find this as a suggested pairing in any instructional book.

I tried the Amsterdam Oranje Weiss, which I suspect clocks in at around 5% alcohol. It’s a drinkable wheat beer flavored with orange. I found that the flavor was reminiscent of a slightly watery freshly squeezed orange juice and that masked any banana or clove flavours typically associated with a weissbier. It’s a little bit like a beer mimosa, if that makes any sense. I’m not sure I would order a full pint of this one, but I have to hand it to Amsterdam for stepping outside of their comfort zone in order to produce it.

I found Duggan’s #10 Trappist Dubbel to be slightly disappointing, but mostly for semantic reasons. It’s not exactly cricket to use the term “Trappist” for beers produced outside a select group of monasteries. Technically, I think it falls somewhere between copyright violation and heresy. The beer itself is pretty good, but I went to it straight from the Amsterdam, so my tastebuds were shocked a little by the roastiness and coffee flavours on the first sip. It’s a well made Belgian brown ale, and in truth it’s impressive that a Belgian Dubbel can come out of a brewpub that has been in operation for such a short space of time.

There are two Belgian style trippels on offer. The Publican House Eight or Better Trippel is a good approximation of the style, but I was distracted by the presence of the alcohol within it, which made it seem downright boozy. The Mill St. Betelgeuse was overly sweet. It’s practically like candy, and I can’t claim that this particular brew run is their best version of this beer. I had it on tap last year in a blind tasting with Urthel Hop-it and Delirium Tremens and it was nuanced enough to stand up to them. It feels like a recipe tweak gone awry.

By far the most interesting beer on the list is a collaboration brew: Vrienden from Beau’s and De Koningshoeven. It’s the first collaboration for De Koningshoeven, which you have to admit is a heck of a get for Beau’s who are relative newcomers in Ontario craft brewing. Fortunately for me, Steve Beauchesne was at the bar drinking a pint of it and was pleased to explain how it came to be:

Vrienden

Freedom from oppression for tulips and beer. Good trade.

The Dutch have always been grateful to the Canadian troops who liberated the Netherlands in May of 1945. In order to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the event the Dutch Embassy approached Beau’s and asked them to brew a beer as part of the celebration. They could have done just that, but in order to make it authentic and also to engage in the spirit of the celebration, they wanted to collaborate with De Koningshoeven. After a small amount of exhortation on the part of the Dutch government, an agreement was reached. Unfortunately Lodewijk Swinkels, the brewmaster for De Koningshoeven, was unable to make it to the brew day because of the cancelled flights in the wake of the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Matt O’Hara, the brewmaster for Beau’s, kept in touch by phone and email and proceeded anyway. Eventually, Lodewijk managed to cross the Atlantic and gave Matt his blessing. Matt has apparently been walking around with an elated grin on his face ever since.

It’s not like Belgian style Witbiers that I’ve seen in Ontario before. It’s not just citrus and coriander; there’s subtlety here. It’s relatively light in alcohol and very refreshing. It contains maple syrup and juniper berries in order to reflect the input of the respective countries involved.  It’s a pleasing colour and nicely opaque. I guess that technically this beer could actually bear the label Trappist since it involves De Koningshoeven, but that would be showing off. This isn’t about showing off. It’s about the mutual past of the two countries and exploration of common ground.

I can’t say that Vrienden is the best beer on offer at the Belgontario event (It’s actually edged out in my mind by Beau’s Belgian Imperial Stout). What I can say is that it captures the spirit of the event very nicely. If the event is about pushing past the ale styles traditionally associated with Ontario, then Beau’s has achieved that goal admirably, using as their inspiration the legacy of one of Canada’s greatest triumphs.

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