Recently in Beer Category

With all of the mega-brewers heading in the same direction (i.e. mergers) we will eventually have a monobrew that doesn't offend anyone, nor does it excite anyone. Thankfully, we have a bevy of microbrewers that are creating something unique for those of us that appreciate choice in our life. One of those microbrewers has just started production 20 minutes from my doorstep, so I thought I'd venture out and support some local talent. Now let us see if Iron Spike Blonde is worthy of the trip to St. Thomas.

With the temperature getting hotter and hotter every day this summer, the efforts to find something cool and refreshing gets easier and easier. Basically, anything cold will work, but beers from Belgium tend to have a knack for summer thirst quenching. Belgium lambics are spontaneous fermented beers with a characteristic sour finish. Many lambics incorporate fruit into the aging process. This results is a great, refreshing beer for those hot summer days. Depending on where you live, the hard part may actually be finding one of these great beers.

The dog days of summer will soon be upon us and we’ll need plenty of refreshing drinks to take the edge off the heat. Cocktails like Mojito’s and Mint Julep’s are obvious choices, but a nice cold glass of beer isn’t a bad choice either. Now the choice of beer style is very important. You can choose a bland, pale, artificially carbonated, adjunct loaded, rice beer like Bud Lite. Blah! Or you can go with the ubiquitous Mexican Cerveza, like Corona, with its ever popular lime. Boring, and lime does not belong in beer people! Or you can choose a good weisse beer (Witbier, Biere Blanche, White Beer or Wheat Beer) like Blanche de Chambly from the Unibroue brewery in Quebec.

Now here is a beer that sounds interesting. Enough with the million different pilsners and light beers, we need more experimental beers. We need things that will test our palates and make us go “wow, I never thought that would taste so good!”. I am the type of person that will seek out interesting spirits and beers just to see what they taste like. I rarely ever have the same beer in my fridge from week to week. Life is too short to drink one brand of beer, only rum and coke and eat your steak the same way every time. So, I’m lucky that I live about 90 minutes from Toronto, North America’s fourth largest city, because there are a number of great micro brewers, including Black Oak, making some interesting beers. Double Chocolate Cherry Stout is one of them.

There are many styles of beer, there is American beer, German beer, Czech beer, Belgian beer and of course there is English and Scottish beer. Scottish beers tend to be ale's with a lot of character, much like the Scot's. They are warming beers for cold nights. Innis & Gunn have created a beer that is aged in oak casks. It was an accident, as many great things are, since the "beer" was originally used to impart a beer type flavour to a brand of scotch whisky, with the beer being thrown out. Eventually, some sympathetic workers realized that throwing away good beer was wrong and Innis & Gunn Oak Aged Beer was born.

It seems like the fight between David and Goliath, but in reality it’s just a battle between beer brewers. Obviously, there are the megabrewers like Anheuser Busch and InBev which generate beer as a branded commodity and target the mainstream market. Then there are the smaller brewers who craft their beers more as an art and target people who appreciate variety and flavour. Brooklyn Lager obviously falls into the smaller brewer category, but they are a growing by leaps and bounds and are now considered one of the top 40 breweries in the US. Also, they just recently entered the Ontario market with Brooklyn Lager. I was happy to pick up a six pack to see what’s brewing in Brooklyn. 

Pilsner, the lager that makes the world go ‘round. I like a nice crisp lager and based on my bartending observations so do a lot of people. Some of the most popular beers are pilsner style lagers, like the original Pilsner Urquell, Labatt Blue, Steam Whistle, Beck’s and many, many more. Now add Stratford Pilsner to the growing list. So, what can a small microbrew hope to do to gain market share against the international beer behemoths that spill more beer in a day than this brewery makes in a year? Well, hopefully make a tasteful beer that doesn’t use cheap adjuncts and maintain consistency from batch to batch. Is that too much to ask for?

When you say beer, most people think lagers like Molson Canadian, Budweiser, or Heineken. Even if a person thinks ale, they’ll be thinking of a pale ales or amber ales. But there is so much more the beer world has to offer. There is of course the stout category which most people have tried, but there is also a very impressive category dealing with beers from Belgium. Actually there are number of categories like lambics and Trappist beers, like Chimay. I was recently introduced to a number of beers that I haven’t had the opportunity to try before. One of them was Chimay Grande Reserve, but because availability is unpredictable, I sought out something similar and found Trois Pistoles from Unibroue.

In the world of beer there is a huge selection of beers that can meet most drinkers taste. You have the light beers like Bud Lite and Coors Light, which are fairly tasteless“training” beers. Then you move into the beers that have a little more flavour like ales (Labatt 50 & Molson Export), lagers (Blue & Canadian) and modern pale ales (Kieths). Next are your darker beers like porters. Then you hit the big time with stout. It’s jet black and bitter with a smooth mouth feel and thick creamy head. Well, most people associate stout with Guinness, but there are many more stout styled beers on the market. One of my preferred stouts is McAuslan St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout from Montreal.

Sake is a traditional spirit from the East, most notably Japan, but China had it’s part in the creation of this drink. Now sake breweries are popping up all around the world. Yes, sake is more like beer than it is wine, even though it is referred to as “rice wine.” More on that later. When I went on my recent summer “booze cruise” looking for unique spirits and beer, sake was one of the items I picked up (Momokawa Diamond Sake, from Oregon). Trying new things is part of the fun of being a bartender, and knowledge is power, so the more I know about spirts the better off I am. So, let us see what sake has to offer!

As some of you may have noticed, I haven’t been posting as much as usual. Part of the reason is because of the new job at Mint, which is using up some of my time. The other part is that it is summer, and I’d rather be outside, instead of in front of the computer. But don’t worry, my time away from writing is being well spent collecting information for new posts. In the last three days I’ve picked 14.5 kg (32 lbs) of blueberries, so there will have to be a blueberry cocktail creation. I’ve taken a tour of the Kittling Ridge distillery / winery in the Niagra region. Picked up a nice bottle of fortified dessert wine there. Then I headed off to the Black Oak Brewery in Oakville, but no one was home, so I just picked up a six pack of their Pale Ale at the Toronto LCBO. Then I hit the Summerhill LCBO and purchased a bottle of good sake.

With the opening date for the new restaurant, Mint, coming up quickly, the choice of beers I want to stock is something I've been thinking about. The two beers on tap have been predetermined, Stella Artois and Alexander Keith's IPA, so that left me with the bottles. Aside from a short list of standard beers, I wanted to pick four or five beers that represented some great micro breweries and provide a range of flavourful beers. The first four that I've picked are Steam Whistle Pilsner, Robert Simpson Confederation Ale, Blanche de Chambly (wheat beer) and the beer I'm reviewing now, Cameron's Auburn Ale. In the future I'd like to add a few more beer to the list including Black Oak Pale Ale, Mill Street Coffee Porter and McAuslan Oatmeal Stout. But for now, let's look at Cameron's Auburn Ale.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had the opportunity to sit on a tasting panel to blindly compare and rate a number of beers at the Steam Whistle Brewery. The goal of the tasting was obviously to see how people perceive Steam Whistle, compared to other beers in the market. There were 15 people on the panel and oddly, it was fifteen guys and no girls, even though Steam Whistle is a girl friendly beer, even my wife likes it. I guess guys take their beer a little more seriously. Everyone on the panel seemed like a pretty good bunch, who enjoyed finer micro-brew beers. The one thing that worried me was that tasting beer blind might lead me to rate a “bad beer” as a good one. I generally like more flavourful beers and it would be a funny result if I rated a cheap, light, megabrew as my favorite.

Hands down, my favourite beer. Now don’t get me wrong, I appreciate many beers but there is something about Steam Whistle that makes me loyal. The company does things right. They focus on making one great product, and if you are saying that one products can’t make a successful company, just look at Heineken. They have a great image and brand. It reflects a more simple time period and doesn’t depend on the tried and true scantily clad girls to make their product popular with guy’s. Then there is the beer. It’s clean and crisp with flavour, it’s not a watered down mess, nor is it a strong and overly hoped beer, just for the sake of it. It has balance.

Where I work, Moxie's, they have two house beers, that are only available at Moxie's restaurants, on draught. They are Big Life Euro and Big Life Amber. These two beers are brewed by Big Rock Brewery in western Canada, who also make Grasshopper Wheat Ale and a number of other standard beers like pale ale and lager and a traditional ale. Since Moxie's restaurants are poping up all over the place, I figured it was time to take a look at their house beers and see if they lived up to the claims they make about them.

I'm often torn between a crafty cocktail or a good cold beer. Both are great, and both have a time and place. If I'm hitting a bar, at the beach with friends, it's beer. If I'm going out for a fine dinner, it's usually a cocktail and wine. Manhattans, or a properly made Mai Tai, seem to hit the spot. After dinner, a good cup of coffee is always welcome. But even more appealing is a coffee flavour beer, which gives you the best of both worlds. Luckily, there is a company called Mill Street Brewery, out of Toronto, brewing this beer. Is it possible to bring two distinct flavours, like coffee and beer, together and make it taste good?

While I was perusing my local liquor store I came across Monty Python Holy Ale. How could I not pick up a bottle or two of this beer. Monty Python made me laugh many times so I felt obligated to at least try the beer. According to Black Sheep Brewery, Holy Grail Bitter was specially commissioned to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Monty Python. They describe it as a distinctive taste with plenty of fruity hops, and is full flavoured with a dry and refreshing bitterness.