The Background

Lake of Bays has had a fairly eventful five years. When you consider that they launched in 2010 and are now selling their beer in the United States, they must be doing pretty well. They have somehow managed to get five core products into the LCBO and a seasonal SKU and a mini keg SKU and a series of NHL Alumni Association SKUs and a CFL Alumni Association Football Growler SKU. Eventually, they’re going to have a Les Stroud Survivorman SKU that will probably be seen walking away from the camera and then coming back to the camera and then playing harmonica next to a lonely campfire.

I love me some Les Stroud. He grumbles very little for a man with dysentery being chased by a jaguar.

The question that I suppose you have to ask yourself is: “Given that a five year old brewery is producing five core brands and four seasonals and a seasonal beer every quarter in addition to one offs in the Wild North series, are all of these beers going to be good?”

Well, it’s difficult to say, isn’t it? Having celebrity associations with your product is demonstrably an excellent way to get a look in from the LCBO. Just ask Sam Roberts, Tom Green, and K-OS. On the surface of it, having the NHLAA in play is an interesting way to guarantee public interest in Canada. This is a country where every child is issued a copy of Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater with their government toque. The problem is that they have now issued seven of these beers and they have to have a new one every quarter. They’ve had a series with goalies and now they’re on to gritty players in their True Grit series.

How long can you milk the gimmick? It’s for charity, which is good, but at some point you’re going to have issued enough of them for a game of shinny.

Consider how many people have drunk beer out of that thing. Consider how many taxis it has been left in.

The Beer

I’ll give the NHLAA series this: The graphic design has been uniformly pretty good.

The pour is a pleasing light orange with considerable head retention. I’m assuming that the stability there is from the protein in the wheat they’re using. The aroma has buttery oak and vanilla, but there’s also a certain amount of maple character present. The citrus from what I’m guessing is the chinook comes through as orange zest, but has to fight its way up through the woodier elements to emerge in the foreground. Warming up, the caramel malt character begins to come through on the sip and lingers through a smooth mid palate until the swallow at which point a lump of peppery bitterness sits in the throat as the finish trails away. The finish is long and, by contrast to the aroma, stingingly bitter.

As it warms further, you begin to get the Perle hops, but the spiciness there in contrast to the oak and citrus puts me in mind of English Leather rather than a beer. Taken all together, it’s not balanced. If you were to plot the beer on a graph, the high points are the aroma and the finish with a deep valley in the middle.

Additionally, I’m not exactly sure how this expresses particular Cheliosity. How is an Oak Aged Pale Ale particularly Cheliesque? How does one arrive at which beer best interprets Cheliosness?

The Arbitrarily Chosen Score Based on Various Criteria

Today, due to our Hockey theme, we’re going to be using the Shaffer-Zevon Big Book of Enforcers as our guide to assigning a score to this Lake of Bays product. What else can a blogger from Canada do? This scale assigns a score from one to ten based on the severity of the penalties accrued by the goon in question. This can range anywhere from a quiet word from the ref (1) to Gross Misconduct and ejection from the league (10).

Lake of Bays Cheli’s Oak Aged Pale Ale is symptomatic of a brewery that is trying to do too much. The wood is certainly there, but it doesn’t work terribly well with the beer. The execution could use work and, conceptually, there might be a reason why we don’t see a lot of oak aged pale ales on the market. They do tend to be suggestive of cologne if they’re out of balance. I think this kind of problem could be rectified with more development time, a factor that Chelios’ own training regimen might suggest as a solution. It’s the kind of thing you want to address if you’re going to launch an Oak Aged Amber Lager in the fall. It had better be at least as good as Rickard’s Oakhouse if you’re going to charge that much more for it.

This beer is therefore given the score of (3): A bench minor penalty for too many men on the ice.