Wondering What To Get for V Day? 

Fear not, beer is DEFINITELY the answer. I mean, no doubt most of us ladies love chocolate. But beer with chocolate notes? That’s a win. Especially appropriate for a holiday that falls mid winter, and well let’s admit - a holiday many of us might spend by ourselves at a bar. If this is your scenario, you are certainly allowed to gift yourself a beer on this occasion.

Which brings me to a round of suggestions for stouts & porters, which are great winter warmers. And if you are planning on having oysters as part of your romantic-night meal, you are in luck - the creamy mouth feel of a stout pairs fantastically with those delicious bivalves. Here are some of my favorites that I have tried, as well as a few I have yet to try but are certainly on my list of things-to-drink-before-the-snow-melts-2013.

The Grid lays out a few good selections. Amsterdam’s Tempest Imperial Stout has definitely been on my list for some time now, however I can’t say i’m a fan of recommending serving beer “warm” (what does that even mean, you microwave before serving? Gross). Additionally, if you are looking to start experimenting with cellaring/vintaging beers, this would be an excellent place to start. I would also like to add a couple other of their selections to my want-to-try list - Lion Brewery’s Sinha Stout, and Great Lakes 25th Anniversary Bourbon Barrel Aged Imperial Stout is a definite must. Frankly, I like everything they make - try their Harry Porter as well if you haven’t. Last pick of mine on this lit is Granville Island’s Lion Winter Ale. Not a stout or a Porter, but a very interesting, chocolatey ale. And it pairs fabulously with an aged hard cheese. Try it with a Dutch Beemster.

Still others I would love to try, and would make a handsome gift would include Muskoka Brewery’s Winter Beard - Double Chocolate Cranberry Stout. Though the price tag might make you shiver, your recipient will truly appreciate this bottle. Howe Sound Brewing’s Pothole Filler Imperial Stout is another pricey choice - but with a 96% on RateBeer you can feel confident those hard earned looneys (loonies? IDK, new to this bird coinage) will be well spent. An last, the much harder to find (only on tap, only this winter, and likely only around Ottawa) and probably also the most adventurous pour would be HogsBack Brewing Co’s Aporkalypse Now. That would be a bacon-oatmeal stout. Yep, you read that right. And can you please just look at the adorable farmer couple posing with their prize pig? That little pork chop it’s just the sweetest thing, and I would be delighted to taste his bottled demise.

So that rounds up the want-to-try’s, and I will leave you with two other options that I HAVE had - and are delightfully fantastic. The first would be Grand River’s Russian Gun Imperial Stout. Made in southern Ontario and encapsulating a historical reference, this beer will warm any beer geek’s (or geek-geek’s) heart. And it comes with an irresistible price tag. Might as well buy 6. Also fantastic is Saw Dust City’s Skinny Dipping Stout- a perfectIy suggestive name for the occasion. I definitely taste some cinnamon in there, and I definitely like it.

On a closing note - major props (yes, I really did just use that phrase) to all the Breweries on this list for resisting the urge to give rhyming names to their stouts (Although Lights Out Stout is fantastic to hear in a Canadian accent).

NEW YEAR, OLD BEER

First blog post of 2013 is admittedly my first post in a long while. There are many factors at hand, including my laziness (this always seems to set in heavily at the end of the calendar year), the tumblr app being the absolute WORST (should’t we PD users have equal blogging rights to laptop & desktop users?) - well maybe only second worst to Bell Canada. Seriously, the internet is better in Peru. This may be unfair to the (one) other internet provider in this country, but at any rate it’s a total joke when you need to restart your internet (3 times) every time you want to use it. Oh, and then there’s this whole thing up here where big breweries strangle the budding beer scene up here (though I think the bar owners who buy into those shenanigans are complete losers as well).

Oops - new year, I’m supposed to be bright, shiny, and new. Right. Well I decided to start of the new year with an old beer. Something I’ve never done before, but I am sure glad I did. This black beauty is a Metric Porter brewed by Great Lakes Brewery for Toronto Beer Week 2012. For those of you not in the know, that’s a festival run by a great group of volunteers (including moi), that promotes craft brewing in Canada with a slew of events across our city’s great pubs, and seems to have been overlooked in this article. But don’t worry about that, I’m here to tell you what’s what. 

And lucky for me, my first go at aging a beer was pretty successful. The important elements of a high ABV (this clocks in around 8%), deliciousness, and big body were all there. And I also managed to hold on to this guy since September. Way to go me! The alcohol notes seemed to be played up a bit more, and the head a bit thinner. Also this was the first time I ever sniffed a beer and literally inhaled it, though my nose. Which was off putting amazing. AND the first time I ever tried writing tasting notes! Which will get it’s own dedicated blog post, in the near future. And it won’t be boring - I swear! - like you reading my tasting notes or something. I wouldn’t do that to you.

Excited? Well, then this petition is for you. Spread the word!

The New Beer Scene in Old London

And it sounds damn tasty. Even better, the article includes the must see pubs in the city. This might be a good enough reason for me to swear myself as a loyal subject of the queen. Maybe. Via the NYTimes.

You betcha. A friendly reminder to avoid the big two on this holiday, and to enjoy some real American #beer.

Happy 4th of July!

Malters Bring Terroir to the Beer Bottle

So happy to see @NYTimes giving some love to my favorite small business, Valley Malt.

- article submitted by @cutandbake

Though I thoroughly appreciate this list of best beer bars as curated by @blogTO, readers be warned: the food at Victory Cafe is appalling, and they forgot my favorite @bellwoods beer. Other critical points include myself questioning their thesis that Ontario’s craft beer scene “has exploded.” 30 breweries in the most heavily populated province would leave me to believe that we aren’t quite there yet.

- article submitted by mr. right

nycultureaddict:

Jalopy hosts the Brooklyn County Fair this Saturday, sponsored by delicious Six Point Craft Ales, with a great line up of bands playing:

8pm - Rebecca Pronsky

9pm - Frankenpine

10p - Big Slyde

11p - The Newton Gang

12a - The Defibulators

Saturday, January 22 
8pm 
Jalopy Theatre 
315 Columbia Street 
Brooklyn 
Tickets $10.00

(Source: nycultureaddict)

brewyork:

Here are the beer-related goings-on after work tonight:

• At Bar Great Harry (280 Smith St., at Sackett St., Carroll Gardens), it’s their annual Sixpoint night from 6-10pm, with an impressive tap and cask list. Grab some Dr. Klankenstein, Double Sweet Action, Missionary IPA (from Pacific…

It is always fun to let some one else do your work for you. Today’s post has been outsourced to Mr. Chafin - you can read his writings in the New York Press and follow his blog GentlemansTimes on Tumblr for savvy food and drink reviews, witticisms, and other glorious typological enlightenment.  Voila!

***

I was recently in a stark white room, reclining on a couch and a bit soggy from spilling free beer all over my sweater, when more or less out of nowhere owner of Dogfish Head Brewery and host of Discovery’s new beer reality show Brew Masters Sam Calagione stood up on a box and began speaking. Well-built and genuinely enthusiastic about brewing beer, drinking beer, and talking about beer, he only mentioned his brand-new, soon-to-premiere TV show in passing before excitedly moving on to taking audience questions, which he seemed a bit disappointed there weren’t more of. He said he hoped some of his beers would offend us. He called the suddenly-controversial 4Loko “the opposite of a roofie,” not entirely disapprovingly, and spent the next hour bartending and chatting.

The event, at the Levi’s-sponsored space in SoHo, was titled simply “Beer and Stinky Cheese.” It was billed as a tasting of some rare and potent Dogfish Head beers, to be served with a selection of cheeses and chocolates, a sort of beer appreciation party, encouraging the masses (or at least the few dozen people who were able to RSVP) to think of the new crop of flavorful and potent beers being brewed by Dogfish and others more as drinks to be sipped, savored, and paired with an appropriate food than guzzled and forgotten. I’m not sure if Calagione’s appearance was exactly a secret, but it certainly wasn’t being publicized in advance. Forget him, though; this is a beer blog, so let’s talk about beer.

There were four on offer that night: Burton Baton, Fort, the 120-Minute IPA, and the World Wide Stout. I’m a sucker for IPAs, so it shouldn’t really be a surprise that the 120-Minute IPA, billed as “the world’s strongest IPA,” was my hands-down favorite. It’s full-bodied as the best IPA, with a flavor that’s more about jaw tingling than “notes” of anything particular (in my notebook, I scrawled “a mouthful of carbonated mouth pain”). The Burton was also good, a dark beer with as much barely as an IPA has hops, making it less spicy and giving it a rounder, more refreshing flavor. The Fort was my least favorite by far. It’s a raspberry beer (again, “the world’s strongest,” although I wonder how much competition there is on that front). It smelled of cheap vodka and tasted like cough syrup, and was so cloudy that it looked as if someone had poured dirt in it.

As for the stout, well, I don’t exactly remember drinking the stout. Here is where I should mention that all of the beers were 18% ABV (about 3 times as strong as a regular beer), except the Burton Baton, which was “only” 11%. I was at the event for about 2 hours, and about 20 minutes after leaving I found myself standing in the street with my shirt off and yelling at the top of my lungs.

In closing, I would just like to add that Sam Calagione is a very nice man. His show has the same producers as the obscenely watchable Anthony Bourdain vehicle No Reservations, and if watching it is anything like getting plastered on delicious free bottles of $20 beer, then it will be a very, very good show, indeed.

brewsbeerales:

Tomorrow, Tuesday November 23 at 6-10pm Bar Great Harry will be hosting a Sixpoint event featuring 10+ lines of their rare stuff. Here’s the link and here’s the facebook event. Below are the beers that will be available.

1. Cask oyster bad-ass motherhumpin stout
2. Double Sweet Action
3. Sweet Re-action
4. Sehr Pilsner
5. Belgian Rye
6. Belgian IPA
7. Pumpkin Brewster
8. Signal
9. Klankenstein
10. Missionary IPA
11. Bengali IPA

 

(Source: orders-oftheday)