Street Beer

After a dizzying experience hosting my daughter's (4th) birthday BBQ at a beach (we lost her twice and a crow ate part of her cake), I find myself at home, several hours later, microwaving some left-over street meats and contemplating what to drink.

"It's time," I said to my wife.
"You're going to drink that can of Cariboo I found in the street aren't you?"
"Yes!"

I was interested in Cariboo back when I worked in the Hillside Liquor Store. HLS's fridge is divided into sections according to how cheap or rubbish a beer is. Starting at the posh end of the store you have the bombers and quality imports, then the good BC micros like Tree Brewing, then the crappier ones like Granville Island, then your Kokanees and Buds and Canadians and all that shit.

Finally, at the end, you get the weird ones you don't really know where to place: Bowen Island, Moosehead, Wildcat. These beers are cheap, but their labels are at least more interesting than the bland landscape of silvers, reds and blues in the macro fridge next door.

Cariboo is one such beer. "Brewed with spring water" it announces, above a jaunty picture of a leaping Cariboo and a cute, curly yellow logo (that looks like it says "Cariboos" to me).

Maybe it was the glimmer of yellow on green that caught my wife's eye as we walked home one night last month. I picked up the dented can, musing that a hammered student had probably let it slip from his grip and written it off as burst on his way to urinate on someone's porch. I stashed it in our kid's stroller for a laugh more than anything else and we walked on.

But here I am, feeling as battered as the can, munching a reheated burger and sucking gratefully at the simple yellow goodness of Cariboo. Nice.

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small beer would like to hear reader's reviews of beers that you found on the floor, if you'll admit to it of course…

Photosymphony

Hello reader.

I feel suitably recovered from becoming a dad for the second time to get back to important activities once again. A slow start perhaps, as I will just be posting a collection of recent beer photographs just now. But this doesn't mean I've been slacking — why, we brewed our own espresso dunkelweisse and wrote an article about it and got a double spread feature for Monday Magazine's beer issue.

Not bad for a dude covered in babypoo. On with the show:

Westy 12 bottle cap shot. Beer courtesy of legendary wife.

Yummy Spring Rite, Driftwood's Local Malt Abbey Ale

The five grains used to brew our Espresso Dunkelweisse.
From front to back:
blurry malt, husky grain, fullcup malt, vague wheat and barely-visible stuff

Dave and I celebrated my son's birth with two lovely barley wines,
a decent stout and a punchy little stogie.

Went crazy with the Lightroom settings. Can't remember what this is. 

Pliny Proves a Point

What dreadful timing, and how annoying: a bottle of Pliny the Elder made itself available to me today. This is sincerely not good.

The reason I'm probably the least excited beer drinker ever to anticipate his first taste of what some people consider to be the finest IPA (indeed, beer) currently made, is because of my last blog post. In it, I whined about the lust for exclusive, exotic beers that drives many to ignore the quality and potential of their local breweries.

And here I am, staring at the one beer that might send me weak at the knees and make me look like a proper prick for getting on my high horse about localism: this thing was brewed 1,400km away and took ten weeks to arrive here (brewed 02.24.2011 according to the label). It is among the most coveted of North American beers that are regularly produced (probably losing out to Dark Lord with its freakishly over-attended launch parties). And to rub it in further, this most fetishized of beers arrives as a direct result of the trade made by Dave that inspired me to complain in the first place.

No sense beating myself up about it, let's drink this thing.

All right, I know it would be convenient for my argument to give a less than stellar review, but I have to say this is not as incredible as I hoped it would be. Yes, yes … vindication has touched my lips and its taste truly is sweeter than Russian River's finest. This beer is good, very tasty in fact. As expected there is a strong grapefruit flavour and a stewed pear sweetness, maybe a little coconut — quite my favourite style of IPA. But it is not explosive, not zingy, not particularly sexy.

I sip it slowly as Dave (bless him for sharing this with me) and I hammer some baseboards into the walls and it improves with warmth: a little spiciness from the 8% abv opens the flavour up a bit. I almost get giddy, but it is oddly muted, as though I am drinking it through a muslin gauze.

I have no reason not to believe all the people who rave about this beer, but I think this one has probably deteriorated somewhat. It is likely the storage or transportation — possibly a less-than-perfect batch — because Dave has heard on good authority that the brewer himself prefers this beer after 2 months in the bottle (which this is). There are probably ten IPAs that shook me more forcefully than the beer in my hand, and all but a few of them were from closer to home.

Beer Miles

I was round Dave's house the other day and he handed me a parcel containing several beers he was planning to mail in a trade arranged with a remote beer drinker.

"Do you think this will be OK to send?" he asked.

What Dave meant was "are my bubble-wrapping skills sufficient to prevent the recipient of this parcel from having to mentally reconstruct from the aroma of stale hops and soggy paper what this bottle of Driftwood Singularity might have tasted like whilst plucking shards of shattered bomber glass from his fingers."

"No, you'll probably need to buttress the ends with a wedge of cardboard," I said.

But it occurred to me just then that it might not be OK to send it for another reason...

Permit me to generalize, but beer lovers tend to wear on their sleeves a strong social conscience and eco-friendly credentials. Ask a "crafty" why they eschew macro breweries and they are likely to cite unethical business practices, environmental disregard and crummy working conditions — not just the piss-poor quality of the product.

Here lies a hypocrisy most of us share: we expect to be able to — and frequently do — drink beers from hundreds if not thousands of miles away. One fallout from the so-called "craft beer revolution" (let's not flatter ourselves) is that certain beers, the rarer and more remote the better, have become ludicrously fetishized. Many drinkers feel compelled to try them all, whether for the experience, to boost their BeerAdvocate Beer Karma rating, or to earn a pointless Untappd badge. Should we do it? And is it worth it?

The biggest issue is that the environmental cost of transporting beer — a product with a high weight:value ratio — is significant. I'm fairly green-minded; not because I am particularly morally virtuous, but because any other stance in the face of current evidence seems to be grossly irresponsible. I drink my fair share of imports, but I'm very pleased when local brewers produce previously unavailable styles so that I don't feel the need to. The green beer point has been made on several other websites already.

But there are other reasons to stick to local where possible that have nothing to do with the environment but everything to do with improving the quality of the beer you drink. Here are a few I can think of:

• The beer is almost certainly going to be fresh. This is critically important for many styles of beer. How on earth can people expect to evaluate and review a cultish double IPA from the US, for example, if it has been sat in a warm warehouse at customs for six weeks before you get anywhere near it?

• Supporting local producers is not just a kind thing to do, it will also put money in their pockets that they can use to expand their offerings — meaning a local source of quads, sours and imperial pilsners is much more likely to emerge.

• You will usually get better value.  I recently came across a bottle of Phillips Amnesiac going for $16 in a bar in Ontario where local (and better, in my opinion) equivalents were sold for under a tenner. There are exotic imports selling for a packet in your local beer store that are considered to be very ordinary by those who live near the breweries — bear that in mind.

• Finally, I don't know about you, but I get a shed-load more pleasure drinking a beer made by a guy who I either know or am likely to bump into in a local pub on any given night.

All I'm saying is don't get too caught up on acquiring the hard to come by at all costs. The grass is greener at home. And if it really isn't, then bloody water it.

Sumpin's Up with the Wacky Hops

Last time I had a Lagunitas it was the weird Brown Shugga — kind of a schizoid beer with a mess of hops and malts and no real character. I was ready to call foul after the first bottle, but as it came in a sixer I had five more to get through. By the end of the pack it had grown on me. It was a similar experience to listening to Soulfly or Merzbow or some other thrashy, distortion artists — blunt and unapproachable until you let your inhibitions down and go with the madness.

The Little Sumpin' was a refreshing contrast. Billed on the bottle as a straight out "ale", this is a zingy fresh IPA with a lemony backbone. Recipe is very close to Central City's Red Racer, I'd guess. Just the right thing for my homemade beef and chocolate chili. I wouldn't usually be concocting such a sledge-hammer of a meal this time of the year, but Victoria seems to have forgotten what season it is. Here are a couple of pictures of young T pouring me a perfect Lagunitas to go with dinner.

Lovely stuff, but I'm a cantankerous type and I'm going to whine about the label. There's a trend these days to add a jaunty twist to ingredient lists, and it is cheesy and boring. "Hops, Malt, Hops, Hops, Yeast, Hops, Water, and Hops" reads the label. Haha. How WACKY! It would be fine if it were just a few guffawing brewers pulling each others' fingers at the back of the classroom, but the temptation to add a cheeky riff to an otherwise worthy bit of packaging is proving too much for today's brewer.  Even the generally dignified Driftwood recently felt the need to add "Shwack 'o Hops" to their cute ingredient icons.

I understand that beer labels are important, especially in a saturated craft market increasingly fuelled by hipsters, social media bandwagoners and other image-receptive types. Sure, the need to stand out has prompted some beautiful label designs (the awesome pourcurator.com knows). But I get tired of the pun-ridden names, derivative graphics, and particularly the pornographization of the humble hop.

Hops really are the double-D tits of beer these days. If there's a beer in a brewers' stable that has a ker-azy label or a hyperbolic name — it's generally the IPA. Some of them are pretty well-done, but for every Perpetual IPA there's a dozen that are less-than-inspired: Hop Circle,  Total Eclipse of the Hop (I'm sorry Howe Sound, it just makes no sense!), Hop-a-Doodle-Do (oh please). For any brewery marketing types hunting for an easy selling name, might I suggest a few ideas from my own inner-Loaded Magazine-reader "Hopic of Cancer", "Bilbo the Hoppit", "Hop Killah", or, my personal favourite, "A-Hop-Bop-a-Loo-Hop-a-Hop-Bam-Boom" — unless these are already taken. I mean it's just so completely childish and unoriginal and cheapening and...

...Woah, hang on. I just saw this.

I take it all back.

Get yer hops out love.

Is this wrong?

#1

#2

#3

On right: plain 50/50 Pothole Filler vanilla ice-cream smoothie.
On left: smoothie floated on top of half glass of stout using back of a spoon.

I'm going to repeat this with a handful of black cherries and a splash of port. It's a way of hedging my bets: If the liver doesn't finish me off, the coronary will.

M for Innovation

Just watched the Oscars, so awards are on my mind. Winners are mostly of two categories: flatly predictable and staggeringly unjust (see A Beautiful Mind, Scorsese's Taxi Driver losing to Rocky, and Braveheart FFS). How could a Colin Firth period drama featuring a disability not win an oscar? Winning an oscar is so easy, you could do it on concept alone, watch:

Title: Marie

Synopsis: Marie Curie is a fiercely committed woman who endures the accidental death of genius husband Pierre, and a progressive illness caused by exposure to radiation during her nobel-award-winning research, to invent radiation therapy and X-rays that save the lives of street urchins with shattered legs etc. 

Critical scene: Aware she is dying, Curie stoically keeps working, you know, for the children. The camera fades out as Curie glances at her dead husband's photo, illuminated only by the blue-ish light given out by the lethal polonium isotopes in Curie's tireless hands.  

Starring: Kiera Knightley (young) and Meryl Streep (Old) as Marie Curie; Javier Bardem as Pierre.

You know I've just won an oscar, right?

This year, however, the Oscars got something right. Black Swan is an innovative movie perfectly executed, and Natalie Portman thoroughly deserved the oscar. 

Now, I don't know about you, but when I think about "Innovation" and "Perfect execution", I also think about Molson's M beer (sorry, that link was as convoluted and unnecessary as Inception). Mostly because someone recently gave me a can of M for free, and the label boldly proclaims its innovative qualities. The beer is "Microcarbonated", which means one of two things:

1. the bubbles are smaller

2. the carbonation process is managed at the "micro" level to be precisely consistent

The result is, in their words, "a lager with an exceptionally drinkable taste". Now, putting aside for a moment the niggling fact that "taste" is a metaphysical concept, and can therefore not be "drinkable" (beer is drinkable, Mr Molsons' marketing copy-editor, and I bet you earned a bucket for that blurb), I'm wondering what this all means and whether the beer is actually really that good. Thankfully, I can test the latter first hand, and I'll get to that in a bit. Not the former though, as it is "patent-pending", so we don't know exactly how (or why) Molson's invented a process that makes smaller or more consistent carbonation. But we can talk about the science of carbonation itself. 

First off, nobody puts bubbles into beer. Beer is carbonated by natural or artificial means, which means that beer is partly a carbon dioxide (CO2) solution. Some beers have more CO2 in them, which means they produce more bubbles and feel fizzier when we drink them. Large disruptions (e.g. shaking) and smaller ones (e.g. imperfections in glassware) disturb the delicate equilibrium of the CO2 solution, and bubbles form. All bubbles form the same size: small. However, other factors determine whether they grow larger or remain tiny:

1. liquid agitation: shaking produces more bubbles which join as they bump into each other, producing bigger bubbles.

2. surface tension: as a bubble forms, CO2 from the surrounding liquid will naturally tend to join the bubble as it causes small agitations in its path through the beer. Proteins in the beer determine how tough the skin of the bubble is, and therefore how likely it is to accept more CO2.

3. atmospheric pressure: drinking a beer up a mountain makes a bubblier beer (probably, I did no research for this bit).

"Perfect" carbonation

Now, we can be fairly sure that Molsons are not taking very careful steps to ensure that we all drink our beer in the calmest environment possible, so we can rule out #1 as a factor. Plus, altering the protein makeup of beer is part of the brewing process itself, and therefore in no way innovative. So I presume Molson's have just figured out a way to accurately carbonate their beer to a very specific concentration of CO2 (I'll be cynical and guess it's just some sort of clever gas pump) Now, I'm not sure if Molsons' are aware, but Sodastream has been doing this for years. Trust me, my brother and I drank enough experimentally-carbonated substances (e.g. "Fizzy Tea!", "Fizzy Milk!" and "Fizzy Heinz Baked Beans!") as kids to know that you have a great deal of control over the fizz-factor with one of these babies. Plus, this all raises the obvious question: "just because you can consistently produce X level of carbonation, why the hell does that entitle you to claim that that level of carbonation is better than any other?"

Microcarbonation in action, I guess

So I am confused as to what exactly Molsons have done that warrants patenting. It's not even that innovative; not like breast-milk ice-cream, for example. Maybe the genius of this innovation just has to be sampled. Here goes...

(Minutes later...) I just finished it. It tastes pretty much like any other adjunct lager. It is about as fizzy as a fountain coke at McDonalds, which I have always found to be a perfectly lovely level of carbonation. I'm extremely pleased with this lager because it was free. In any other circumstances, I'd pass. It's not great, but hardly terrible either, and the slightly grim aftertaste is nothing like as bad as that left by the Academy's shameful failure to award the outstanding 10-nominated True Grit a single damn statue.

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Afterword: I asked the fine folk of #beer chatroom to name some recent genuine beer production innovations. If they ever get beyond suggestions like "vortex bottles" I'll actually produce a post on the subject...