Category: blog

apologies

friends, abject apologies for my absence of late
i am in the midst of having a website made (check out the progress)
and there have been some issues with integration with the blog
which locked me out of the blog for a time
(and there were the holidaze and all that jazz in there mucking stuff up too, i can’t blame the website for my whole absence…)
hopefully it’s all back to normal from here on out
oh, except for the fact that i’ll be going away for a couple of weeks in a couple of weeks
but more about that later

in the meantime, here are some lovely beers that have been arriving at legacy liquor store in vancouver over the past few weeks:

Phillips Brewing Black Jackal Imperial Coffee Stout – $6.95

This sweet little collaboration between Phillips Brewing Co. and 2% Jazz Coffee Co. is as dark as the underworld Anubis himself guards. Rich and roasty on the nose with intense aromas of espresso bean and dark malt, on the palate even more roasty espresso and of course roasted malt come through. A nice dry finish wraps this dark elixir up, the perfect partner brew for those that love all things dark.

Evan Doan | Beer Team | Legacy Liquor Store

Wolf Brewing Imperial Maple Stout- $9.95

From the city of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island comes a Maple Stout of darkest brown. Its bouquet is slightly smoky with robust notes of coffee, maple syrup and a touch of chocolate, while on the palate this full-bodied stout is mouth-coating with big flavours in play—coffee and a whole lot of maple highlighted by smoke and chocolate. Enjoy this brew, but take it slow because this Brewmaster’s Reserve will knock your socks off.

Chris Bonnallie | Beer Supervisor | Legacy Liquor Store

Brasserie Dieu du Ciel Dernière Volonté – $16.95

A Belgian IPA from Quebec—what more could you ask for? This cloudy, unfiltered gem is peachy and blond in colour; exotic fruits own the nose with ripe nectarine taking the forefront bolstered by plum and apple. Lively and fresh on the palate, with notes of citrus and hop that eventually wrap up dry, crisp and refreshing, this simply amazing Belgian-inspired beer is both complex and ridiculously refreshing.

Joel Wilson | Beer Team | Legacy Liquor Store

Granville Island Barley Wine – $10.35

Our friends down on Granville Island have crafted the perfect robust brew, amber in colour with big notes of vanilla, toffee, burnt brown sugar and bruised fruit. The palate closely resembles the bouquet, but with a more prevalent appearance of hazelnut. Enjoy this treat today or let it age and drink later, but make sure you grab a bottle before it’s gone because this brew is perfect for keeping you warm in cold weather.

Evan Doan | Beer Team | Legacy Liquor Store

Central City Imperial Porter – $16.15

Originally only available at Central City, this stunning porter comes in 650ml bottles ready to please the palate. As dark brown as one can get without being black, it has a nose that packs a boozy punch with a nice hop and biscuity malt. Delicate roasted malts and American hop harmonize perfectly with the upfront alcohol, making it the perfect brew for sipping on a rainy January afternoon.

Chris Bonnallie | Beer Supervisor | Legacy Liquor Store

Shmaltz Brewing Death of a Contract Brewer – $8.85

Celebrating the birth of their new brewery and the end of contract brewing, Shmaltz Brewing has carefully crafted another fine beer deep black in colour with amber highlights and a hoppy, roasty nose featuring everything from earthy hops to roasted coffee malts and so much more. The flavour profile lives up to the nose with more citrus, pine, spice, roasted malts, chocolate, caramel and anything else you’d want in a celebratory beer that’s a real treat for anyone.

Joel Wilson | Beer Team | Legacy Liquor Store

Lighthouse Desolation Oyster Stout – $7.55

When oysters hit the brew something magical happens and a new frontier of flavour is reached. A deep and opaque brown in the glass with a touch of salinity that fades as it warms up into notes of roasted malts and soy, this brew is smooth with an almost vanilla-like presence, molasses and a finish fringed with oyster salinity. An excellent imperial stout and an even better imperial oyster stout.

Evan Doan | Beer Team | Legacy Liquor Store

Longwood Winters Own – $7.55

These cold winter months can chill you right down to the bone, but this winter beer will bring your temperature right back up. A German style wheat bock, this seasonal brew is malty, spicy, fruity and refreshing. Slightly cloudy with a bouquet of vanilla bean, banana and spice, all of which follow through on the palate in addition to a nice dry finish, a glass of this gem will help you shake off Old Man Winter’s touch.

Chris Bonnallie | Beer Supervisor | Legacy Liquor Store

Shmaltz Brewing Jewbelation Reborn – $15.05

No longer bound by contract brewing, Shmaltz has stepped up their game with the ownership of their very own brewery. To celebrate, they’ve brewed a huge beer with 17 different malts and 17 different hops. Nearly pitch black in colour with all sorts of chocolate, roasted malts, char, coffee and a punch of citrus on the nose, the palate of this colossal beer is all of the above with a bit more of the citrus, tangerine, orange and pine. Powerful like a black IPA, this brew is plain delicious.

Joel Wilson | Beer Team | Legacy Liquor Store

whining

i hate when i get super busy at work
putting in over-time, skipping lunches (the time off, not the food!)
and the blog suffers
(as does my sleep and my social life)

luckily for me
(but again, not for the blog)
i am off to america this weekend
canadian thanksgiving spent in america where they extol the virtues of a mass murderer with a civic holiday… sure, why not?
they have good beer there!
and i aim to drink a bunch of it
while not thinking about work once

i am headed to seaside, oregon
with a stop in seattle and astoria and cannon beach and anywhere else we find along the way
for beer drinking!

i just have to get through the work day tomorrow unscathed…

2013

well hello there 2013!
welcome!

new year, new direction
i will be doing away with some of the things i’ve been doing on this blog
those things that seem to just be taking up space, like the beer geekery posts i put up on weekends
they were fun, but i’m feeling like they cluttered up the blog – made it harder to scroll through to find actual content
so they have been discontinued, buh-bye, gone

i will probably be posting less frequently as well
but the plan is that when i post it will be ever so informative and brilliant
and you’ll be riveted by my every word

in the meantime…
its january
that means i’m doing my annual cleanse
yup, a whole month without beer
(and many, many other tasty substances)
day three… i haven’t yelled at or hit anyone yet, so there’s hope for us all…
i even went out with people who were drinking really good beer last night and didn’t buckle
i am ever so virtuous
aren’t you impressed?

curious

i am curious by nature
aren’t most humans?
and i love getting the behind the scenes stories on things
like the 12 beers of the apocalypse from elysian

ROBIN HOOD’S BARN
Dick’s Last Blog

Now that the end is in sight-of the world of course, but also of the pretty substantial undertaking that has been the 12 Beers of the Apocalypse-it’s probably safe to spill a little of how a lot of it has come together. Some of the beers have been reinterpretations of beers we’ve done in the past-Nibiru not so unlike Toro Oro, another Belgian-style golden ale infused with yerba mate; not actually so unlike New Belgium’s Jonny’s Voodoo Ale, for anyone who remembers that delicious and innovative beer; Doom itself a hop, skip and a jump from Sextacula, the beer we brewed for our fifteenth anniversary, which itself was a bigger version of Triacula, crafted originally for an Iron Brewer competition at the Beveridge Place. There is truly nothing new, in case you haven’t heard, under the sun. But isn’t the sun supposed to nova or something anyway?

There’s a lot of interesting background for some of the beers as well, and bringing them out every month has often been a logistical challenge as we locate and then mobilize some pretty esoteric ingredients, incidentally getting government approval along the way for both label and process. Never mind the brewing-though you probably haven’t seen an array of roasted chili powders like the one that went into Peste outside of a Mexican spice market, or just about anything, for that matter, quite the color of Torrent. Ditto the mass of golden raisins left in the fermenter cone after Doom was transferred. Wasteland brought together all the dried elderflowers available in the United States at the time it was brewed, winging in from around six suppliers to make the super-fragrant scene at Airport Way. Compared to all those, Omen was pretty straightforward, with something like 750 pounds of raspberries added to an ordinary Belgian-style stout. Blight? Just another pumpkin beer brewed with dark brown sugar and super-fiery Vietnamese cinnamon.

But as I said, getting the ingredients hasn’t always been easy. The inspiration for Mortis was Idefix, one of the first beers we brewed in Seattle with our friends from New Belgium. Making eight barrels of sour persimmon ale was only a mildly arduous endeavor, thanks mainly to our sous-chef Kevin Jackson’s willingness to blanch and puree fifty pounds of Fuyu persimmons. Making 120 barrels was a different story, as the 750 pounds of persimmons had to first be procured and processed, and then introduced to the brettanomyces fermentation already underway. We got the fruit from the same guys who supply the lion’s share of the pumpkins for GPBF, and tapped into a food processing contact from our friend Howard Lev of Mama Lil’s Peppers. So in a bit of a hurry (persimmons don’t ripen until late October, and the beer was scheduled for release on November 21), I gave a call to George Wolf of Wolfpack Foods in Gold Bar, up off Route 2 on the way to Stevens Pass.

“Let me tell you how we do business,” George told me over the phone, “you come up here and we get to know each other a little bit. We talk about what it is you want us to do for you, we agree on a price, and then you go back and talk to your folks and make sure we can proceed.” Yikes, I thought, I really don’t have time for this. But I drove up to Gold Bar, had a fairly pleasant chin-wag with George, his daughter and his forewoman, and got the gist of what they were going to be able to do for us. A week later I drove back up with the persimmons and stuck around while a couple of buckets’ worth were chopped, blanched and processed into puree. I spent the next few hours at the public library in Monroe hammering away at a chapter of Starting Your Own Brewery, the book I’ve been working on for Brewers Publications, while the folks back at Wolf Pack fit our job in between some pepper spread and a curry sauce. At the appointed time I went back and loaded 23 5-gallon buckets into my Element and headed back south to Seattle. There was an adventurous moment when I swung out to pass a car on the highway and had a hard time getting the job done with all that extra payload, but the less said about that the better. The next morning we scissor-lifted the buckets up to the catwalk and dumped them into the fermenter.

Finding a source for the golden syrup we needed to brew Doom was surprisingly easy. The British specialty foods webstore we’d used before to get it for Tri- and Sextacula had only grudgingly and unreliably been able to provide us with ten or twenty pounds at a time. This time we needed 660 pounds, but lo and behold I found a manufacturer of a Canadian version just up the road in Vancouver, BC. The trouble was that since sugar cane doesn’t grow in Canada and the sugar to produce the golden syrup needed to be imported, they couldn’t directly export to the United States. So they steered me to a sugar wholesaler in Surrey who could at least sell it to me. Arranging to bring it into the States was pretty much up to me. I spent a total of the better part of an afternoon talking to folks at McGilvrey Sugar, Customs and Border Patrol and the Food and Drug Administration. I filed documents online scheduling my border crossing and inspection and dickered with CBP about the tax status of my prospective cargo. I had a breakthrough when I called straight to the border crossing in Blaine, Washington and we established that I almost certainly wouldn’t be turned back, as long as I was willing to pay as much as $80.00 in duty. That’s all this was about?, I thought.

So once again I hopped into the Element and headed north. Getting the syrup went without a hitch, this time 24 buckets’ worth, and when I got to the border I was instructed to stand in the wrong line for nearly an hour. I rousted somebody at the FDA counter and managed to convince them there were no bio-terrorism issues with a bunch of sugar, and impressed them just a bit that I had accurately anticipated-and filed for-the time of my crossing. Then it was over to Customs, a consultation in a phonebook-sized manual of product classification, and a payment of 25$ for a simple vehicle crossing, and I was back on the road and on American soil.

It’s often a challenge getting specialty ingredients, no matter what your size. But it’s a far cry from throwing a handful of something odd into a 5-gallon homebrew batch to mobilizing and introducing several hundred pounds of it into a 60-barrel brewhouse, or a fermenter a couple of stories tall. As I put it in a talk I gave at the National Homebrewers Conference back in June, an ingredient can become weird simply by being unwieldy in large quantities. Still, if the results justify the effort, it’s worth continuing to knock ourselves out figuring out new ways to make beer. I think these twelve beers have done that. Too bad about the end of the world and all.

-Dick Cantwell
Founder and Head Brewer