Review: Lighthouse Belgian Black

Lighthouse gave me a bottle of Belgian Black to review this week. This doesn't happen to me very often. I have long harboured a fantasy of utterly panning a freebie just to prove I have integrity. Maybe that's why I don't get too many. On this occasion, I'm happy to risk looking like a sell-out, because I really like this beer.

A belgian black called Belgian Black. Not much to go on here. I anticipate something like Trois Pistoles as it's the blackest belgian-style beer I regularly drink. That or a dark dark dubbel that's not actually that black once you get it out of the (attractive) matte black frosted bottle.

The beer is brewed with a Belgian Ardennes yeast strain: more evidence that Lighthouse is taking things seriously (they have a reputation for being yeast sticklers). I enjoy Keepers Stout, and I'll drink a Beacon IPA from time to time, but Lighthouse hadn't tempted me too much until they ramped up the quality and invention with the Big Flavour series. Deckhand was a lovely saison and Uncharted is practically the only "Belgian IPA" worth drinking.

So the Black comes with some pedigree, yet still puts the bar into near orbit. It has the charcoal, roasted qualities of an imperial stout — with seared walnuts and some dry cocoa. But where you'd expect a battering ram body to follow, BB is lighter, almost dainty, with a fresh plummy flavour. There's a fair bit of booziness, but it is sweet enough to carry it off. Although not of the same flavour, the mixture reminds me of blackcurrant-liquorice candies I ate as a child — a confectionary contradiction greater than the sum of its parts.

Not only is Belgian Black the best of the "Big Flavour" series (which has had high highs and middling lows), but the style strikes me as the most promising and necessary of all the North American/Belgian crossovers we are mercilessly subjected to. Lighthouse should be doubly commended for underlining that fact with some authority. Nice one.

Review: Southern Tier Heavy Weizen and Lighthouse Shipwrecked Triple IPA

These two beers have nothing in common, but Dave from beerinbc.com and I independently tried them both this week and chatted about them a bit — so they get a dual post. 

Southern Tier Heavy Weizen

Ever since Unearthly Imperial IPA I get pretty excited about each Southern Tier beer I get to try. The Unearthly is one of my IPA benchmarks — such a rich and chewy beer. Their Oat imperial oat stout, Hoppe, and Iniquity (a cascadian dark grandaddy) are all sublime too. Great NY brewery.

Naturally I was excited about this beer. The only other "imperial" hefeweizen I can get regularly is Howe Sound's sublime King Heffy (7% to Heavy's 8%). I like it so much that if I am ever in a BC liquor store and I see someone who cannot make up their mind what to buy, I force them to buy this beer. It's a high bar.

This is probably the fastest I have ever drunk a bomber of imperial anything. The Heavy Weizen's (maybe that's supposed to be one word...) strongest point is its smoothness. It goes down like a vanilla and banana milkshake, and finishes with such a perfect balance it's as if it was never there. Problem is, the King Heffy is very spicy and effervescent and heady and alive. That's a much better kind of hefeweizen. The Southern Tier one is remarkably drinkable, but pretty tame and forgettable. Dave really didn't like it. 

Verdict

Me: Worth a drink just for the scarcity of this style, but I won't be buying another when the Heffy is available. 

Dave: "I wish I had king heffy instead of this shit"

Lighthouse Shipwrecked Triple IPA

When is a beer a double? That's a tricky question. I know that it is an imperial when one bottle makes me want to fight. But a triple? I don't get it. Let's see if their website helps: "Shipwrecked Triple IPA is a strong beer brewed in small batches using twice the regular kettle time, double the Pale Malt and triple the hops of a regular IPA." So mostly it has double ingredients, but triple the hops of whatever a "regular" IPA is (their Beacon IPA, I presume, which is reasonably hopped but not as much as many other west-coast style IPAs). 

This beer looks like Lucozade — the British energy drink that, I've just found out on wikipedia to my astonishment, is actually 0.1% ethanol. Shipwrecked weighs in at a more substantial 10%, so I would expect it to give me lots of energy indeed. 

The aroma off this beer is a briney-piney hop blast. Got a weird seaweedy smell to it, but I might be being influenced by the label. Really solid slug of orangey hops too. Good and interesting so far. Lighthouse are a local outfit and most of their beers are, to put it blunt, pretty run-of-the-mill, so it's exciting and out of character to see them bringing out a massive IPA. 

I didn't dig the initial taste too much at all. It has a coppery, rust flavour to it. The carbonation is quite high and it accentuates the metallic edge. Tons of booze too. But the aftertaste is pretty good. It tastes somewhere between clotted cream and butterscotch. After a good half of the bottle, sipped slowly, the beer warmed up and I stopped wincing at the initial flavour. By the end I was pretty pleased with it. 

Verdict

Me: A flawed but ultimately quite enjoyable imperial IPA. Too many other strong contenders available to make it a regular buy for me.

Dave: "must be drank cold" <- completely contrary to my impression. 

Right, I promised myself a bottle of Driftwood's new Fat Tug IPA after I wrote this. It is time. Bye. 

Driftwood Interview Part 1: Philosophy, Craft Beer, and Chicken Cordon Bleu

Victoria's own Driftwood Beer kindly granted me an interview at their brewery on Monday night. Driftwood is a relatively new brewery in Victoria, but it already has an enviable reputation as a serious craft brewery who deliver traditional styles to high standards, and seasonal brews that sell-out immediately.

It was either my excitement, or the bottle of Brookyln Brewery Local One I had beforehand, but I kept brewers Jason Meyer (CEO of Driftwood) and Kevin Hearsum (president) talking for over an hour. Loathe to leave much on the editor's floor, I will publish the interview in three parts. Today I'll cover the Driftwood way™ as well as Jason's and Kevin's ideas about the beer industry on Vancouver island and beyond.

The exterior of Driftwood is about as anonymous as it gets, tucked into the corner of an industrial complex with only a small sign distinguishing it from a cluster of warehouses. Jason welcomes me in to the 3,500 square-foot space that has housed Driftwood since it was launched in 2008. Kevin is busy hosing something down between two enormous tanks. I feel aware I know next-to-nothing about the brewing process, and am bewildered by the array of tanks, machines, and sheer noise I am witnessing. "Can I get you a beer?" asks Jason. Ah. Familiar ground. I receive a lively pint of Farmhand Ale from a tap mounted in the side of their on-site chiller, and the interview begins.

I ask about the Driftwood philosophy. Jason pours himself a pint and tells me that he and Kevin recognized an opportunity to establish the only producer of traditional Belgian-style beers in BC. In addition to the Southern-Belgian Farmhouse Ale I am happily drinking as we talk, Driftwood's permanent four-strong line-up comprises a Belgian wheat beer (White Bark), an Alt-style amber ale (Crooked Coast), and a "quintessential" Northwest ale with dry malts and bold hops (Driftwood Ale).

Respect for tradition hasn't prevented Driftwood producing some interesting seasonal beers (the Sartori Harvest Wet-hopped IPA being a standout). But Jason is quick to distinguish innovation from gimmickry, something that clearly irks him about current production trends.

JM: This bullshit of honey beers. You gotta use so much honey to make it taste like beer. It's uber-fermentable, it's fructose, it's gonna ferment out. It's just marketing, to me it's kind of crass. It's not sincere or authentic. Our whole MO is authenticity. We don't filter our beers. Yet we don't run around saying "we don't filter our beers," we just don't filter it.

– So you're opposed to trends?
JM: I'm in favour of a trend toward double IPAs and imperial pilsners!

– Driftwood's beers contain special ingredients, don't they?
JM: We brew to traditional Belgian recipes, which include Curacao orange peel and pepper. That's not to say that if an intriguing ingredient presented itself to us we wouldn't be prepared to use it. But there's a line between finding an interesting new botanical or a spice, and choosing an ingredient so you can overtly fly a flag about the fact this shit is in your beer.

Driftwood was established on the principles of providing fresh, quality beer for local people. Jason's enthusiasm is palpable as he recounts how he began brewing at age 19, was influenced by a creative brewing scene in Edmonton ("they were doing stuff like triple decoction mashes, stuff that no commercial brewery can do, it was just incredible"), and gained experience working in several breweries, including Victoria's Lighthouse Brewing where he and Kevin hatched the plan for Driftwood.

It was their experiences working in commercial brewing operations that inspired Jason and Kevin to build a brewery with the needs of workers very much in mind.

JM: We wanted to produce a space, a nice place to be, we wanted the people who work here to be proud of what they do, to promote this because they believe they are doing something meaningful. [At Lighthouse] Kevin spent three years hunched over a plate and frame filter inside a giant walk-in cooler, filtering beer, in the dark.
KH: It sucked.
JM: So when we built this place we designed it with lined walls, to create a decent, open, warm space for everyone. We don't have people working at weekends. We don't want people working graveyard shifts. That puts a limit on how big you can get. But it's a moral and good and fun place to be in.

"Getting big" is not the aim, but commercial success is clearly important when an operation on Driftwood's scale will cost upward of half a million Canadian dollars to get going. I ask whether well-publicized hikes in the cost of hops and other brewing-related crops are a challenge to the sustainability of craft beer outfits, but Jason and Kevin dismiss raw material prices as a lesser issue. Craft brewers might not generally get rich, but a good living is still there to be made with hard work, passion, and most importantly a receptive market.

– So what is the Vancouver Island beer market like?
KH: It's a more sophisticated drinking culture here these days. There are so many taps in this city and pubs are putting new ones in all the time. They're more than happy to put out every new product we make.
JM: In Victoria 20 years ago chicken cordon-bleu was the most exotic food item you could get! But it's all changed now. The internet age has made us more sophisticated, more suspicious of manufactured messages, of commercialism. Now there's a really active support for local producers and we're lucky we fit right into that.

Part two of this interview will be published soon