beernesday

Beau's Brewing Co. is located in Ontario.  I'm in BC.  So while I'd love to say that I got to sit down at the brewery with the lovely Beau's folks for this interview, I did not.  We went the new-fangled cyberspace way and conducted it over email. But!  But, I will get a chance to talk to Jennifer Beauchesne and brewer Brian O'Donnell in a few short weeks when they travel all the way across the country to attend the Great Canadian Beer Festival - and all I have to do is hop a ferry over to Victoria! (Full disclosure here:  the lovely Beau's folks sent me some beer samples, I get a media pass to attend GCBF because, well, I am a beer blogger you know, and I contributed to the Rwanda kickstarter.  Now you know.) I'm sure everyone's heard of Beau's, even way out on the Left Coast, but just in case you're hazy on the details:  Beau's is an organic brewery, established by the Beauchesne family in 2006 in Vankleek Hill Ontario (which i...

Apparently I am over my seasonal denial and  willing to admit that it’s not summer any more.  So I guess it's time to talk about winter seasonal beers. As you may recall,  I’m not at all a fan of the heavy-handed use of vanilla in winter ales.  I find that cloying and annoying. Vanilla isn’t a traditional winter ale flavouring.  Spicing beers is fairly traditional – before the wide usage of hops to bitter beer it used to be herbs and spices and tree bark that were used.  It was a natural progression from there to add some spices to a nice winter ale, but these spices tended to be nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice . Vanilla is a recent trend, and seems to have really caught on here in the Lower Mainland.  For those who, like me, aren’t big fans of the vanilla trend, there are more traditional winter ales, and other experimental ales around, in a variety of styles and flavours. One such beer is the Postmark Red Winter Ale.  The new bre...

here are my notes from yesterday's beer column on cbc radio's on the coast: As the year draws to a close, let's recap the beer happenings in 2014. 2014 has been quite the year for craft beer!   So far 20 new breweries have opened up across the province. I’d like to welcome the newest Vancouver craft brewery:   S trangefellows!   Strangefellows is now open on Clark Drive in East Vancouver .   They are still jumping through hoops to get their lounge endorsement, so currently they’re just serving up growler fills.   Iain Hill, formerly of Yaletown BrewPub, is the brewmaster and he is well-known in the craft beer world for his incredible sour beers.   Strangefellows will have a barrel program, so look for sour beers from them in 2015.   Currently they have a deliciously hoppy pale ale on tap that is a mere 3.8%, a wit, a lager and a brown ale. Also freshly opened are Category 12 Brewing in Central Saanich and Sherwood Mountain Brewhouse in Terrac...