Category: brown ale

beer column

my notes from yesterday’s beer column on cbc radio’s on the coast:

It’s officially Fall. That means its time to talk about autumnal beers.  
 
Once the hot weather and long patio evenings of Summer fade into Fall people tend to put down the wheat beers and lagers and instead pick up a spiced ale, or a stout. Often lighter beers, in both presentation and alcohol content, make way for heartier and higher alcohol beers. We’re not yet at the winter ales point, or very high alcohol percentages of barleywines; we’re still adjusting to the colder temperatures and enjoying the leaves falling off the trees. This is an in-between season and that is reflected in the beers that are associated with Fall.

We just had thanksgiving, a time which heralds the return of pumpkin beers to the shelves of liquor stores and the taps of bar-rooms. Pumpkin beers tend to hover around the 5% alcohol mark, but feature heartier malts and spices that evoke the harvest season and crisp fall air. 
 
A few great choices for local pumpkin beers would be:
 
– Parallel 49’s Schadenfreude, an amber lager laced with all-spice for those who prefer a more subtle pumpkin flavour;
– Red Racer Pumpkin Ale, a rich and creamy pumpkin pie in a can for those looking for a just slightly sweet pumpkin beer;
– if vanilla and cloves are more your thing, go for the Steamworks Pumpkin Ale.
 
Brown ales are an often overlooked beer style, but are perfectly suited to the Fall season:
 
– Parallel 49’s Old Boy brown ale is one of their year-round offerings that comes into its own in the cooler weather. ;
– Howe Sound’s Rail Ale Nut Brown, Cannery’s Naramata Nut Brown and Dead Frog’s Nut Brown are nuttier, richer versions of the brown ale. All are available year-round, but are particularly satisfying beers for the Fall season.

Stouts and porters also make their way back into glasses come the Fall.   But what the heck is the difference between these two styles anyway?

I wish it was as easy as 1, 2, 3 or a, b, c, but with stouts and porters it just isn’t. The Porter style was born in the 18th century pubs of London. It tended to be a blend of younger pale ales and darker old ales that the porters favoured. The recipes of the original porters are lost to the annals of time, but the ideals around the name live on and beer lore has it that industrial brewers tried to mimic this blend that the porters of the time favoured and sometimes made a very strong version of the brew which was referred to as a stout porter. Eventually the word porter was dropped and stout became its own style.
 
Fast forward to today and try to tell the difference between the two. Speaking very generally, stouts are brewed with roasted barley. This means coffee and dark chocolate notes as well as a dry bitterness on the palate, so if your dark beer has more pronounced and deeper roasted notes to the nose, as well as a more pronounced dry bitterness on the palate, it is probably a stout. Porters are commonly perceived as sweeter on the nose and palate. Furthermore, the color range for stouts is darker, ranging from dark brown to black, while porters rest more firmly in the brown spectrum. But not absolutely. Cuz it just can’t be that easy!
Stouts contain a wide range of specialty ingredients, from oatmeal, to chocolate, and even to novelty items like bacon and peanut butter. Porters also manifest in numerous forms, from relatively mild to strong, from rather standard production to smoked and barrel aged beers. This diversity makes any simple distinction between the two styles almost impossible. Often it is just down to the brewer and what they want to call the deep dark beer the are brewing.
A few local examples of these arbitrary styles are:
– Crannog’s Backhand of God is an amazingly malty on the coffee side of roasted malts, kind of stout. Deep, dark and delicious. Not to mention totally organic and sustainable. This one is not available in bottles, so you’ll have to enjoy it on tap at various places around town, including the Railway Club;
– also only available on tap is Storm Brewing’s Black Plague stout, which is a dry Irish-style stout with licorice root and cocoa;
– on tap around town as well as available in bottles is R&B’s Dark Star oatmeal stout. Oats give the beer a nice creaminess.
– Powell Street – when you can get it – makes the Dive Bomb Porter, toffee, coffee, cocoa and a little bit of hoppiness in this one;
– for something a little bit different, Cannery Brewing adds blackberries to their porter for a nice bit of fruitiness. I hear this beer makes for great blackberry pancakes!
– for the chocolate lovers out there, Lighthouse’s dark chocolate porter will satisfy your next chocolate craving.
Also of note:  Brassneck Brewing is finally open! The eagerly anticipated joint venture of Nigel from the Alibi Room and Conrad, formerly head brewer at Steamworks and the mastermind behind the pilsner that won best in show two years running at the BC Beer Awards, opened its doors two weeks ago. You won’t find any of their beers in bottles, so you’d better stop by the Main Street tasting room to sample their beers and fill your growlers. You’ll also find Brassneck beers on tap around town.
Speaking of the BC Beer Awards, I’m very much looking forward to them on Saturday. There are still tickets available. Everyone should come out and sample the beers of British Columbia… and enjoy Stephen Quinn as host!
There will not be tickets available at the door, so please go online to to purchase yours – quickly, while you still can!

cask

the cask at the yaletown brewpub last night was stellar!
brown ale done with raspberries
the raspberries were subtle and not sweet
and they put such wonderful flavour into that delicious brown ale
definite win!

the cask at the railway on tuesday was also a good one
central city’s amber ale dry-hopped with simcoe
so satisfying!

yaletown

i missed out on the yaletown cask last thursday
(instead i went to the steamworks bottle launch… more on that later!)
and hear that i really did miss out as nick’s unadulterated brown ale cask was to die for

what will i be sipping this week?

yaletown facebook says:
Cask Night! Every Thursday at 4pm we tap a unique cask, this week is a cask of our Downtown Brown with saaz and spalt! DRINK FRESH BEER!

oooh, i like saaz and spalt hops!
should be delicious!

new belgium

new belgium ales are now available on tap at st. augustine’s
the fat tire amber
and the ranger ipa

(that’s actually the ranger ipa in the fat tire glass)

as i’d had the fat tire on several previous visits to the u.s., i went for the ranger ipa
okay, and also because i love me an ipa!
delicious!
i hope it becomes a regular feature of the st. augustine’s beer rotation
“They protect. They pour. They partake. They are the many and the only New Belgium Beer Rangers. We salute their efforts in the field with the extra-hopinary Ranger IPA. Three pounds per barrel of Simcoe, Chinook and Cascade hops make this 70 IBU brew a thing of beauty. Seek out the Beer Ranger in your territory at newbelgium.com.”
i want to be a ranger!

the beerthirst guys were on hand to launch this first for vancouver
and brought with them glasses, coasters and the ranger himself!

beerthirst also brought in a few bottles of some other new belgium flavours for people to try last thursday
we had the belgo, which was really quite belgiany, but i liked it;
la folie, which is aged for 1 to 3 years in french oak barrels – sour, reddish brown ale – delicious!

and the clutch dark sour ale, which was named after a band
it smells roasty, tastes belgian with quite a malt aftertaste

cask night

i was afraid there would be no cask nights for me this week
as i am filming for outgames tv every evening
i was sad to think i was going to miss out on the offerings
but very happy to have a television gig again!
luckily though, i got done filming early enough last night to hit the railway club for the lighthouse cream ale
those kiwi hops (that’s new zealand ones, not the fruit) sure had a unique flavour!
an enjoyable ale for sure

last week i had no problems in the cask department
i hit three cask nights and tried a fourth cask beer
the third of those three nights was thursday at the yaletown brewpub
where the beer was brown and delicious and the hops were cascades

i brought along all my work folks
who are becoming quite the fans of craft beer in general
and the offerings at yaletown in particular
(especially the growler option – which they all fill with the raspberry wheat ale!)

my lovely work friends

 

another growler convert


in fact i brought in so many people
the manager gave me a yaletown t-shirt!

we tried the deep-fried pickles
which are pretty darned good and paired well with the ipa


deep-fried pickle goodness

i also met my beer geek friends there
i love when my worlds collide so tastily!

the beer geeks

brewer iain hill was on hand to talk about the beers
and try the new fish cakes on the food menu

iain and the fish cakes


since i seem to be on a wheat beer kick
which is weirding me out a little, but i’m going with it
i had a pint of the raspberry wheat ale
and the other seasonal, the cassiopeia wit
i found the wit crisper and more coriandery than the regular wheat on the menu
which meant i was much fonder of it
maybe i do like wheat beers, i’m just particular about them
who knew?

nostrodamus

i didn’t realize when i grabbed the nostrodamus that it’s a belgian beer
all i saw were the words ‘strong brown ale’
and that was enough for me!

it certainly is a strong brown ale
and it is a belgian
made in belgium even!
i enjoyed the taster size glass i had of it
but i won’t be buying it again
i really wish i could get over my inability to enjoy the belgians
it pains me to have to avoid such a large category of beers!

BRASSERIE CARACOLE

Truly artisanal Brasserie La Caracole is located in a small village Falmignoul, Province of Namur, Wallonia in southern Belgium, close to the French border. Their products are being distributed in Belgium, Italy, France, Holland, Switzerland and Japan. Their portfolio consists of four stock ales: Caracole 8% abv, Nostradamus 9.5% abv, Saxo 8% abv, Troublette5% abv All beers are presented in 11.2 fl. oz. / 33 ml. metal crown bottles as well as in 25.4 fl. oz. / 750ml champagne bottles with cork and metal cage. All styles are bottle conditioned (second fermentation with yeast in the bottle), unfiltered and unpasteurized. Nostradamus and Saxo are also available in 20L kegs. The recurring theme on each label is that of spiral snail shell from which the brewery takes its name. Apparently the snail is the emblem of Namur and the word for a snail in local Namurois dialect is “Caracole”.

firefly’s sour beer tasting

after having attended a couple of previous tastings at firefly, i knew that there are some sour beers that i enjoy, and some that i just can’t stand.  but which are which?
thank dog firefly chose to host a sour tasting night!
now i know what i like, and what i’d rather not ever be offered again!

we sampled the following:

dogfish head’s festina peche (4.5%)
upright brewing’s late harvest barrel aged brown ale (7%)
orval trappist ale belgium pale ale (6.9%)
lindemans’ cuvee rene gueuze (5%)
cantillon’s gueuze 100% lambic (5%)
cantillon’s kriek 100% lambic (5%)
brouwerij de ranke’s cuvee (7%)
storm brewing’s blackcurrent lambic

i found the dogfish head to be more tart than sour
using an old style from berlin, they added some peach flavour
and peachy colour
looks more like a very fruity wine in the glass than a beer
it tastes almost champagney
probably not something i’d buy
but enjoyable nonetheless

the brown ale was aged in a pinot barrel
with pomegranate and several other items thrown in there
yeasty spice nose
fruity, can taste the lactic acid, some oak and some spice
also on the “more tart than sour” side
drinkable, but not something i’d buy

the trappist ale, surprisingly to no one, was too belgiany for me
maybe its the brettanomyces bruxellinsis yeast i can’t stand
brewed by the monks, with a nose of wet horse blanket
i mean really, i’m shocked anyone likes this stuff!
but amanda does
then again, she also likes horses so perhaps the horse blanket smell brings back good memories for her

then we moved on to lambics and gueuzes
i didn’t realize a gueuze was just a blended lambic, but there you go, that’s all there is to it
i don’t love the smell of a gueuze, but it sure does taste better than it smells!
somehow the letting it all sour makes me not mind all those crazy wild yeasts
go figure

the lindemans was a bit champagney and definitely sour
its a blend of young and old lambics
very clear and quite sharp
less barnyardy
this i would drink again
and with the fun champagne cork, its a production to drink it so i’m likely to buy it!

the cantillon is a more traditional product
they use a turbid mash to leave more for the brett to eat through
its a blend of 1, 2 and 3 year old lambics
this product can age in the bottle for up to 20 years – go figure!
its cloudy, softer and more sour
apparently it goes really well with seafood and you can make a mean ceviche with it
i’m sold!  i’d drink this again
and probably buy it to take to a party (or make a ceviche)
its fun stuff!

the kriek is from 2009
its a fabulous red colour that matches my hair quite nicely
important in one’s drink i think
its a 1.5 year old lambic put in a barrel with oooodles of fresh organic cherries
very carbonated with a lovely pink head
pairs well with fatty meats like duck, bacon and blood sausage
also works well as a reduction
i really like this stuff
i’d buy it again for sure
the de ranke cuvee is a mix of 2/3 de ranke sour and 1/3 lambic
aged in the bottle
so its quite acidic
uses crystal malts which are kilned so they carmelize and offer sweetness to the mix
quite drinkable
but i probably wouldn’t buy it
and then as a special treat, chris got james at storm to part with some of his blackcurrent lambic for us to try
fabulous stuff!
yes, its barnyardy
but i like it!
i don’t find it to fruity sweet, but everyone else seemed to think it might be
i’m not tasting blackcurrent per se, but definitely fruit
and i like it!
delicious down to the last drop
please sir, can i have some more?