Toronto Beer Week begins

Toronto’s first beer week begins tomorrow and it looks like an amazing lineup all week – brewers from far and wide are in attendance at events to showcase beers and food pairings.  I’m hoping to get to a few choice events and will keep you posted on what’s happening.

You can check out the event lineup here.

A day in the life

I live 40 minutes from the Niagara College campus, which is a fair hike and usually gives me enough time to put away a traveller of good coffee and sing along to an album on my ipod during the drive.  This usually puts me in good spirits for the day.

I arrive on campus and head into the library to find Elliot at the computer terminals, watching beer review videos on Youtube and compiling his want-list for the afternoon’s beer run to Buffalo.  Being in Niagara, we’re only 30 minutes from the border and an immensely more substantial range of microbrewed, craft beer.  I could lecture on the inadequacies of Ontario’s liquor laws and how they prevent consumers from having choice in the marketplace, other than Labatt and Molson product, but I feel I would be repeating myself.

Down in the cafeteria, I sit down to my morning breakfast sandwich, while my carpool buddy, Jack, looks over the Hamilton drinking-water report I’d requested the day before from the Hamilton municipal water department.  The chemical content looks pretty good for lager – albeit with a slightly elevated alkalinity and some traces of Uranium.  We discuss memorable drinking waters and he mentions that friends in water science consider Hamilton’s water to be a model for clean water in North America.  Being the majority ingredient for beer, you can imagine how important it is to have a good source of clean, potable, odourless water with the right mineral content for your brew.

Off to financial maths class and we gather up six travelers to join the international beer run.  We pose for a shot in our unladen car.

After the obligatory harassment from U.S. Customs (I’ve never been straight through), we arrive at Mister Goodbar, the home-away-from-home bar of our compatriot, Austin.

Mister Goodbar is down the street from Buffalo State College and features a good selection of Southern Tier, Lagunitas, Ommegang and Flying Bison brew.  The setting is heavy on wood and dank – a good example of an American college bar.

We dive in, ordering a slew of different bevvies and quickly sink into the deep padded barstools and our beer.  The beers are sniffed, slurped and passed around with tasting notes.  Good hop and malt content dominants what people like about their beer.  Lack of body is a beer’s primary failing.  The barkeep gives us a few tasters to wet our whistles for a second round.  The jukebox jumps to life and we make our second picks.

Lagunitas Czech Pilsner and Southern Tier Double IPA prove good choices for me.

Enough standing on ceremony, we head down the street to do what we came here for – buy lots of the great brew unavailable to us in Canada.

Locked and half-loaded, we head back to the border to pony up our tax dollars to the government.  We swap beers from six-packs and eye each others beer selection.  Dog Fish Head, Sierra Nevada, Magic Hat, Lagunitas, Brewdog, Southern Tier, Stone and Rogue feature heavily – usually in hoppy ales or stout varieties.

So, I have some homework to do.  Time to get studying.  Cheers!

First Press

The brewmaster program had a bit of ink spilled about it in the Welland Tribune – you can check it out here.

Black as death, twice as strong

If death were a brewmaster, this is what he would make.

This has got to be one of the most interesting expressions of barley wine (extra strong beer) that I’ve seen.  It hovers somewhere around the 18-22% ABV (Alcohol By Volume) and yes, the first sniff is like smelling black paint mixed with paint thinner.  But after that it opens up into toffee-coffee malt flavours so dark they must be from the 9th circle of hell.

It’s another beer from one of my favourite breweries – Dog Fish Head.  They seem to be pushing the envelope of beer flavour in all the right directions.  Doing things that seem absurd until you stick your nose into their brew and take a good whiff.

A very interesting brew, I think I’ll try using this as a desert beer or in cooking.

Learning to brew – week one

One week into Niagara College’s Brewmaster program and I’ve got to say, I’m impressed.

Beer is studied as an art, science and business.  Sensory evaluation classes focus on flavour profiling and palate development.  Beer ingredient classes break the grain, water, yeast and malting down to their chemical makeup.  Communications and financial mathematics classes teach how to market and keep the books on a brewery and its product.  And in the on-campus brewery, we brew our beer (although not yet, as the equipment is being built).  Luckily, this gave us a chance to go to the manufacturer and will let us put the brewery together ourselves.

The lecturers have about 60-odd years of experience between them and are clearly passionate about every aspect of beer, its culture and history.

Oh, and my colleagues are, without exception, hardcore beer enthusiasts.

Yep, it’s a fine course.  Plus the campus is manicured by the horticulture students and food is provided by the culinary students.  And there’s an on-campus winery, should the thirst for grapes arise.

Here’s a few pictures:

The campus.

Our equipment-maker, Mario Criveller, who seems to know as much about beer as steel manufacturing.

More photos to follow…

The night my tongue O.D’ed

This is a hop.

It’s one of the four ingredients that go into a traditional beer recipe.  The purpose of the hop is to add bitterness, floral aroma, give head retention and prevent the beer from souring.

I love hops.  But last night, hops did me wrong.  It was a hop overdose.

A lot of microbrewed craft beers like to see how far they can push things with hops – grading beers on an IBU scale from 1 to 100.  Some beers brag of IBU’s in the 200’s and up.  Past 100 and it becomes untestable and purely theoretical.  But it makes for some good marking to hit the ‘hop head’ crowd.  But there are only so many hops a head can take.

The beer was Southern Tier’s Indian Pale Ale (IPA).  It’s made in Lakewood, New York.  It smells awesome – like sweet, aromatic flowers.  By the time you get to the bottom of the bottle, you’ll be clawing at your taste buds to remove the bitter, sticky residue that has settled on your tongue.  Like I said, I love hops, but you can have too much of a good thing.

I’m happy about this.  Exploring new beers and learning the boundaries of what my palate likes is part of the journey.  I like hops, but not enough to sit down to a hop salad with a side of hops in a hop-reduction sauce.  Give me some meaty malts and sprinkle of yeast to give the meal some variety.

I should remind people that Southern Tier make one of my favourite beers, the Oatmeal Stout – and while I applaud them for seeing how far the envelope can be pushed, they’ve gone over the top with this IPA.

Pre-education and tentative plans

Orientation at Niagara College’s Brewmaster program starts tomorrow.  Here’s a photo of me before I go to school.

I made a beer run to Toronto’s largest LCBO to pick up as many new beers as possible.  Although their selection was large, there weren’t nearly as many gems amongst the collection as I saw in Buffalo.

The two gems I did find were Hockley Valley Brewing Company’s full lineup of dark brew and Dieu Du Ciel’s latest offering of a range of tasty beverages from Quebec.  If you can get your hands on DDC’s Corne Du Diable (Double Indian Pale Ale), I recommend it strongly.  Hockley Valley’s Black & Tan and Stout are likewise fantastically rich.

The LCBO can get in most of the selection available in the U.S., though it must be privately ordered by the box.  So if you’re into your beers an inch in Ontario, you into your beers a mile.

I have some tentative plans to spread good beer by way of a Dundas Beer Club, hopefully starting in late October with some spicy, autumn ales.  Stay tuned.

The Best I ever had…

There are a lot of great beers, wines and food in the world, but one thing I’ve noticed every time someone begins a sentence with “The Best (whatever) I ever had was…”, the story is usually 30% about the food and drink and 70% about the setting.  When a friend recently told me about the best wine he’d ever had – he described the music, the weather, the people and the setting that accompanied it at great length.  I thought about the greatest meal I ever had.  It was a salami sausage.

The best meal I ever had was in the Basque country town of Zarutz in northern Spain.  My wife and I were backpacking from Amsterdam to Santorini.  I had purchased the salami earlier that afternoon from a barrel-chested Basque countryman in San Sebastian.  Unable to find decent accommodation in San Sebastian we boarded a train for the surf-town of Zarutz and on the train met a girl who agreed to share a campsite with us and split the cost.  It was late at night when we arrived at the packed campsite and we were tired from walking in the heat of a particularly hot Spanish afternoon.

We pitched our tent on a clifftop site looking over the beach where the Atlantic ocean met the Spanish shoreline.  Everyone settled down for the night for a quiet drink so I opened my backpack and retrieved the salami and a bottle of red we had been carrying with us since Bordeux.

It was dark and I was exhausted.  The girls took splashes of the Bordeux in plastic cups but refused (on vegetarian grounds) the salami.  I peeled back the casing on the salami and took my first bite.  I’m told I was then quiet for some time.  I was eating the greatest salami of my life.

The spicy pork sausage was intense.  The spanish paprika’s sweetness vied for supremacy with hot spices.  Amidst this epic assault, a barrage of buttery-soft pork fat explosions sounded like artillery on my tongue.  I took a sip of the red and everything got real quiet.  The pork sausage remounted for another charge.  I bite in again.

Soon I was halfway through the sausage, its juices running down my chin like a ripe peach.  The only visual memory I have of the event is a snapshot of this barely-lit, half-peeled salami that looked like fruit in my hand and the faint purple haze of the sun setting over the Atlantic ocean.  The smell was of sweet paprika, pork and ocean breeze.  This was one of the greatest food experiences of my life thus far.

To take the same ingredients and change the setting would have changed the experience completely.  No one, that I have met, has recounted the greatest meal of their life as being had in front of the television or in a mall foodcourt.  If the food is great, the setting has poetry to it and we have belief in the authenticity of our experience – the meal  can become something transcendental.  One that people recall for years afterward.

It’s something I’m keeping in mind when I try new beers.  The setting should be one to let a phenomenal beer become the best beer I’ve ever had.  So far, the beers I’ve enjoyed the most have been in the company of friends on patios and around kitchen tables.  I noticed this today after separating 30-odd finished microbrew bottles into a liked and okay pile that most of the bottles in the okay pile were had in quiet at home alone.  The pile that I liked – almost exclusively with friends.

Or maybe I just save the good stuff for company.

Oh and if you’re wondering about the best beer so far – it was Southern Tier Oatmeal Stout and was had with English Stilton cheese around my kitchen table with friends.

Cheers!

Here’s a picture of the campsite view the morning after.

Part Three – Leg of Lamb

Part Three of Jamie Waldron’s demonstration on the finer points of butchering a whole lamb.  This one covers one of my favourite cuts for a sunday roast – the bone-in leg of lamb.

I’m still searching for a beer that trumps a big Aussie red for a meal like this.

Know Your Butcher – Part 2 – Lamb Loin Chops

Though not about beer, we can all agree that meat and beer belong together.  Here is a section of video I shot showcasing Jamie Waldron’s butchery prowess as he breaks down a whole lamb.