Sometimes, when I make a Collaboration beer there’s a hidden double meaning. 

For example, Amsterdam Revelator, Shacklands Golden Mouth, and Granite Fisher King are all secretly St. John beers. John the Revelator, John Chrysostom, John Fisher. They fit the tradition they’re in as well. Bock, Golden Ale, English ESB. I had toyed with trying to call Second Wedge Zivotni “Svatojanske Proudy,” or St. John’s Rapids which is part of the Vltava upstream from Prague. There’s a lovely passage in Smetana’s The Moldau named after it.

I’d been waiting for someone to put it together, but we’re not big on hagiography in 2025.

Rorschach’s Fancy Lads Peanut Butter Boy is part of a second group of meaning: Historical tribute.

It’s hard to overstate the impact William Mellis Christie had on the city of Toronto. I feel the impact of it every time I walk to school to teach at George Brown. While I’m at 300 Adelaide East in the culinary building, across the street at the corner of Frederick is the Christie Cookie Factory. As industrial buildings from the 19th century go, it’s picturesque with lots of windows arched in yellow brick. The design is so iconic that the Toronto Sun headquarters on King Street aped the look a hundred years after its construction. 

When I walk people past the building, pointing out architectural detail, I let them know that it was the biggest cookie company in the world for a not inconsiderable amount of time. Christie and Brown were displaying their wares at the CNE before it was technically the CNE. If you look through the archives of the Globe and Mail, you’ll see that the company made a really wide variety of cookies to appeal to Toronto’s English, Irish, and Scottish population. They made over a hundred brands. Cookies are for everyone, but the idea that you’re going to make Shortbread is a very British Isles idea. Currants are a dead giveaway.

By 1900, they had 375 employees and had expanded to Montreal. While there’s remarkably little information out there about when individual brands might have been introduced, it’s notable that an early version of peanut butter was invented by a man named Edson in Montreal in 1884, designed specifically for confectionaries. You’ve got to imagine the Pirate cookie was invented shortly thereafter.

It was, at one point or another, the best selling cookie in Canada. It’s constructed similarly to the oreo, but the oatmeal biscuits have a ridged diamond pattern criss-crossing them, and a touch of honeyed sweetness balanced by a little salt. The peanut butter filling is remarkably temperature stable. It’s not hard to see the appeal. The little devils are moreish, I think mostly due to the combination of sweet and savory.

Christie eventually had factories across the city, including one at the far end of the Queen Streetcar in southern Etobicoke and one on O’Connor that is now Peek Freans. The company was purchased by Nabisco and eventually by Mondelez International. The Pirate Cookie has fallen from favour, largely due to the proliferation of nut allergies in the general population. It has not yet disappeared.

This makes me happy because I remember snack time in kindergarten at Bishop Strachan (Yes, I went to an all girls school. It was the style at the time). We would sometimes get half an orange or half a banana (dipped in lemon juice to prevent browning, and probably unripe as yet). Sometimes we would get, if we were lucky, a Peek Freans Fruit Creme or a Chocolate Bourbon biscuit. On really good days, arranged on a tray in the hallway on the second floor, we would get Fudgee-O or Pirate cookies.

The reason Peanut Butter Boy took so long to emerge is simple: The cookies are hard to find. I had been calling the Mondelez factory outlet over on O’Connor once a month or so. I don’t get over there so often since Muddy York Brewing moved to Stouffville. Apparently they make about two large batches a year. 

It’s to Matt Reiner’s credit that he had peanut butter flavouring on hand at Rorschach, literally behind the counter. For a man who makes very underrated classic lagers, Matt was briefly forced by the pandemic to change direction and make heavily flavoured, somewhat gimmicky beers. Things with pastry flavours and lactose and extreme amounts of puree. If that’s the sort of thing you enjoy, he’s making some of the best beers in that wheelhouse in Ontario. If you like Japanese lager, he’s making a great one of those as well. We like the fact that he’s game for anything.

Peanut Butter Boy splits the difference between the two skill sets, if they are actually separate. When Robin and I brought the idea to Matt, he probably had it sussed in no more than 15 minutes. Peanut Butter Boy is essentially a custom double decocted Marzen base with Pilsner, Vienna, and Munich malts and a little Fawcett oat malt more for verisimilitude than anything else. How do you make something taste like oat? Add oats. The decoction helps emulate the honey sweetness in the biscuit. We then took what was a very creditable German lager and dry-peanut buttered it with some PB2 powder and a splash of vanilla.

It probably shouldn’t work, but in the spirit of the Fancy Lads project, subtlety has won the day. With Lemon Lad, the first beer in the series, we aimed for a restrained Tavener’s Lemon Drop character with just enough lactose to speak to the corn starch and sugar powder in the tin. With Peanut Butter Boy, it is more obviously a peanut butter beer, but the staggering thing is that it is somehow sessionable and pretty food friendly. I think it would work really nicely with Dandan noodles or a West African Peanut Stew. It goes with Karaage, but what doesn’t? 

For this, we can thank Mr. Christie, who made good cookies. 

Part of the proceeds for Peanut Butter Boy go to Safehaven, which “is a not-for-profit that has provided residential, respite and transitional care to individuals with medical complexities and disabilities for over 35 years.” You can check them out over here.