“A beer for every season and a season for every beer” would be a great way to think about the beer calendar, except that autumn gets a disproportionate share of the pie. As the trees start to think about dropping their leaves, pumpkin beers, porters, and Oktoberfest lagers pop up on shelves. The dry hopped harvest ale is a comparatively smooth transition from refreshing and bitter summer beer into the more substantial fare. You can find the rest of this week’s First Draught story on PostCity.com.
Beer
standard How an LCBO “Beer Guy” Decides What His Store Carries
If you regularly visit more than one LCBO location you may have noticed how much beer selection can vary between outposts of Ontario’s government-monopoly liquor retailer. It has to do with a variety of factors— including neighborhood demographics and the size of the store and its warehouse space. But the factor that often has the greatest effect is how committed the store’s “beer guy” is to bringing in good beer. Follow this link for the full story.
standard Beau’s Kissmeyer Pale Ale
Many craft brewers started brewing at home or had a great marketing idea they used to find a niche in the beer market. A small, exceptionally well-trained group left a career with a macrobrewery to open their own operation. After 16 years at Carlsberg in Denmark, master brewer Anders Kissmeyer joined this last group when he founded his own Copenhagen brewery, Nørrebro Bryghus in 2003. Read the full article here…
standard Great Lakes Canuck
Etobicoke’s Great Lakes Brewery has rebranded their well-regarded American-style Pale Ale. The “Crazy” has been dropped from the name and Canuck Pale Ale has a new can design. The kitschy Canadiana has been replaced with an image of Gordie Levesque, who was introduced by a brewery press release as “a burly lumberjack that enjoys a good pint in the great outdoors.” Read the full article here…
standard Brown Ales: A Dark Horse Summer Beer
With their orange slices and added spices, wheat beers get most of the play in the summer beer rotation. Low-proof pale ales and crisp, juicy saisons also do their best to quench hot weather thirst. Brace yourselves for possible controversy: I think brown ales are a dark horse candidate to join this group of the integral beers of summer. You can find the full article, including my two picks, on the Food Bloggers of Canada website.
standard Southern Tier Compass
During his prodigious career, Michael Jackson wrote several of the most interesting and educational books about beer. I’m dutifully working my way through all of them, but somehow the idea of his that floats to the top of my memory is his suggestion that unsweetened fruit lambics are the ideal drink to hand to guests as they arrive at a summer party. Head over to Post City for the full review.
standard Side Launch Wheat
For a while, the top-rated German hefeweizen in the world was made in Ontario. Michael Hancock’s Bavarian weiss — formerly known as Denison’s Weissbier — has been renamed Side Launch Wheat,and while it has slipped to number three on RateBeer, it’s still a textbook example of the style. Find the full review on the Post City Magazines site.
standard Bitburger Pilsener
Compared to London porter or Berliner weisse, the connection between pilsner and its birthplace is much less obvious. In the 1840s the leading citizens of Pilsen in the Bohemian province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were fed up with their locally brewed brown ale and hired a Bavarian brewer to build them a new brewery. Josef Groll moved to the city that is now in Czech Republic and created a beer that is now known as Pilsner Urquell. The full review is at PostCity.com.
standard Tree Pineapple Hefeweizen
The case of legislative intoxication that struck North America in the early 20th century — otherwise known as Prohibition — may have been less severe in Canada than the US, but we are still dealing with the hangover. For instance, and you may not realize this, it is illegal to buy beer in Nova Scotia and bring it back to Ontario. The laws vary depending on the destination province, but generally it is legally easier to bring alcohol over the Canada-US border than from Gatineau to Ottawa. Find the full review on Post Magazines’ site.
standard A Walk in the Orchard and Herb Garden
In the world of craft beer, “adjunct beers” is a dirty word. In the glossary to Tasting Beer, Randy Mosher introduces the term as “any fermentable added to barley malt, especially rice, corn, and roasted unmalted wheat, roast barley, sugar, etc.” Usually, it’s used to refer pejoratively to beer that includes rice or corn for economy’s sake or to appeal to lowest-common-denominator palates. So, Molson Canadian and Labatt Blue are adjunct lagers. Head over to the Food Bloggers of Canada site for my full review.