Skip the traditional pumpkin beers this Hallowe’en and head straight for this imperial stout from Southern Tier. It does have that most seasonal of gourds in its list of ingredients and the label has a certain honesty about its gimmicky nature. The rest of this week’s First Draught is over on the Post City Magazines website.
Beer
standard Mikkeller k:rlek
By choosing Mikkeller, Denmark’s second-best-known brewery, for their current feature, the LCBO seems to have earned a tentative thumbs-up from Ontario’s beer geek community. More than anyone, that’s who the brewery feature is aimed at. These are six unusual, wacky beers that will only be on shelves for a single season. The k:rlek American pale ale is my favourite from the lot. The rest of this week’s First Draught is over on the the Post City Magazines site.
standard Beer with Thanksgiving Dinner
Thanksgiving dinner is both a golden opportunity and hard-sell for beer. As with other “big meals” this is traditional stomping ground for wine, but there are several factors that cross signals for the boozy grape juice and point in the direction of beer. Head over to craftbeer.ca for my complete guide to serving beer with Thanksgiving dinner.
standard Delirium Tremens
This the 117th First Draught column, and for the first time in two and a half years, I’m going to recommend a beer for which The Beer Store is the only retail source. Post City Magazine’s website has the full version of this week’s First Draught beer column.
standard Melville’s Ginger Beer
The one recommendation I’ve made in this column that I wish I could take back is from May 2012. Freshly back from visiting London for the first time where our hosts introduced me to it, I was excited to see Crabbie’s finally coming to the Ontario market. As far as ginger beers go, that one is saccharine and fairly one-dimensional, so I’m happy that as the selection has grown it has also improved. This week’s First Draught is on the Post City Magazines site.
standard Oktoberfest
The next time you open a wedding invitation from a cousin who wants you to travel to Bermuda to help celebrate their big day and feel like things really have gotten out of hand, know that it could be worse. Oktoberfest, the world’s biggest festival and originally a celebration of the Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig’s marriage to Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, is still running more than 200 years after they tied the knot. Read the rest of my Oktoberfest guide on craftbeer.ca.
standard Chimay White
They seem like news and happen so infrequently so new releases onto LCBO shelves tend to get the majority of the beer coverage in Toronto. Chimay’s tripel is a great example of how some of the best beers, often at great prices, are steady regulars that don’t get press releases or media tastings. This week’s full First Draught is over on PostCity.com.
standard Beyond the Standard Porters
Porters are one of the oldest beer styles – IPAs, abbey tripels, and pilsners are all green by comparison. They are sometimes described as stout’s weaker and less well-known cousin, often associated with London and industrialization, and otherwise fairly difficult to define. In Tasting Beer, Randy Mosher wrote that “studying the history of porter is like staring into the multidimensional universe of theoretical cosmology, with multiple shifting parallel worlds constantly warping and shifting the flow of time.” Its history has also not been a straight line; the style nearly died and was revived in England during the 20th century. It’s […]
standard Hofbrau Oktoberfestbier
Every shorter guide to Oktoberfest should mention that Munich’s annual beer festival is the world’s largest fair; the beer is called Marzen because it was traditionally made in March and cellared over the summer; and most of the sixteen-day stretch actually falls in September. Jump over to PostCity.com for the rest of this week’s column.
standard Toronto Beer Week 2014 Guide
The idea of holding a beer week is to make it so that the uninitiated, the pitchers-and-wings-after-softball crowd, can’t possibly avoid the fact that something special is happening. With saturation comes awareness, I suppose. The rest of the guide is over on Post City.