A Good Beer Blog – Page 104 – Second Gen (2003-2016, 2016- )

Do Olde Geuze And Oysters Go Together?

I was out hunting for some Caribbean stout to go with the PEI oysters I picked up at the incredibly jambi Mike Mundell’s shop this afternoon. Without success. What to do?

I love oysters. I used to live in view of the Gulf of St. Lawrence on PEI’s north shore and heading over to Carr’s at Stanley Bridge for a half dozen Malpeques to suck back with my home brew. Despite the trade’s odd view of what makes for a benefit, the oysters know not what is done in their name. Quietly in their rocky shells they ignore such things, preferring to be pretty damn tasty and – at a buck and change – a great value.

So, instead of a strong sweet stout, I thought I would try them with a geuze, in the case a half bottle of Drie Fontienen’s Oude Geuze, the beer I had last New Year’s Eve. This one was bottled back on Friday, February 1, 2008 when I was having an Old Guardian for the twelfth edition of The Session. Let’s see what happens in mid-summer two and a half years later..

Wow. That is quite a combination. The barnyard funk of the geuze hits the oyster’s wharfy skank head on in your mouth. One of my more intense taste experiences when I think of it – which is all I can do given it is happening in my mouth right now. All that is missing is an overly aged chunk of blue cheese to make this as overwhelming an experience as it could be. But the aftertaste is creamy, like two waves counteracting each other leading to calm. The oyster brings out the apple notes and places the acidity in context. I am happily reaching for the next meaty oyster.

Success. Each assisted through the difficulties the other can pose. A vital combination.

Friday Bullets For A Week Off In July

It’s been a weird week off. Chopped up. I even had to go to work but that was my fault. Didn’t check the schedule. Picked the wrong week. Assumed. But we carried on. A cold moved through but we carried on. Started in fine style at the Dinosaur BBQ, too. Vintage base ball coming up on Sunday. Spent the week being scared to hell by Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. Still ate bacon and green onion cream cheese on bagels from Ithaca Bakery. But I knew it was wrong. And exactly how wrong: real wrong.

Construction paper 1930s Soviet arctic exploration art. Neato.
I don’t write that much about my town. I don’t write much about much come to think of it. But look at the video of Elton John at the rink. Where do rock bands play in towns without hockey teams?
Sox are 4-6 in July. Not pleased. Bought the lad Sox socks at Cooperstown and they play like this???
Still don’t know what to make of Obama. The Gulf oil crisis is his first crisis begun under his watch. If the oil has now actually been capped after 86 days, getting a 20 billion dollar fund mid-crisis is a pretty smooth move. No one is really talking about health care socialism anymore, either. He may pan out OK.

Gotta go get the car in for a tune up. That outta spice things up.

Teach Your Children Well – BBQ Version

Every holiday should include a lunch at Syracuse’s Dinosaur BBQ. I had a Tres Hombre but as I I left meat (I’m embarrassed even thinking of it) I was not as hombre as I might have been. The beer is an Ape Hanger Ale that’s made, I am pretty sure, by Middle Ages as a special house brew. It followed a Syracuse Pale ale that I had standing out in the street waiting for a table. You go to hell and/or prison in Canada for standing in the street having a beer waiting for your table. That was the best Mac and Cheese I ever had, by the way. The lad knew enough to not leave any.

Friday Bullets For A Heat Wave And The Heat

I watched Lebron. Then I didn’t. Yawn. Going to The Heat. Yawn. Stay in Cleveland? Jump up and down saying “Cleveland Rocks!” and bring out Drew Carey to sing “Cleveland Rocks!” with you and then promise to make something big happen in your home state and screw big cities and screw big money and look in the camera and say “I am the greatest” invoking Ali himself…. that’s what you do when you call a personal hour long press conference live on TV. Going to the Heat? Yawn. Burn baby burn.

Hey, I Like This Gig Update: new Tory Senators suddenly not backing Harper’s Senate reform.
Jack Hughes Update: Cavs owner goes absolutely MENTAL over Lebron’s decision.
Spy Swap!!! I don’t really care that much except that it is fun to write “Spy Swap!!!” I so knew that Flea’s cake candidate Anna Chapman was Anna Kushchenko. I did. I just didn’t tell you.
This is a fun web toy to play with at work today … until you remember that it describes out the history of nuclear testing.
Will the US catch up to Canada on same sex marriage? Isn’t that so 2004?
You know you have been suckered by the seduction of mobile internet when you actually think you can walk around France streaming a radio station from Alberta for free.
How do you “challenge” the plain words of the constitution?

Out into the oven again today. Thanks God I got that deep long and restful sleep.

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Entitled Elites Bashing Entitled Elites

Preston Manning and other members of the conservative entitled elite have certainly done their job well. Remember how not a few years ago, the Tories were the big bad clique that met behind closed doors and made decisions for us all in board rooms from Bay Street to Calgary? Well, it appears that all the time it was actually the Grits that were the real enemy of the people. Just look at this splendid piece of journalistic revisionism:

Sometime during the Trudeau years, the Liberals ceased to be the party of the individual and became the voice of special interests, the face of elitism. The transformation began under Lester Pearson, when the Liberals launched huge new social programs — universal medicare and pensions — that were uncharacteristically collectivist for the party. Their central characteristic was the suspension of personal responsibility. Canadians were to be guaranteed health care and retirement income regardless of whether they had made plans and sacrifices during their healthy working years for the time when they became sick or old. They were have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too programs.

Never mind that conservative elites (and United Church ministers) gave us much of socialism long before the 1960s. Never mind that we are still crippled by the national debt built up mainly under the secret Conservative socialism compact of the Mulroney years. No, don’t trouble your pretty head about that stuff. The conservative entitled elite have their story down and it has to be repeated and applied.

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Sad News With The Passing Of Bernie Rivers

Beer fans in central New York are mourning the passing of Bernie Rivers who ran Galeville Grocery in Liverpool near Syracuse. The shop hails it self as “your complete historical neighborhood grocery store since 1888.” I met Bernie this past January on a beer run into Syracuse and enjoyed a few minutes with this cornerstone of the community as well as the CNY beer scene. I’ve been shopping at Galeville for almost six years so far and have always been struck how dependent we beer fans are on the passion and risk taking of the shop keepers like Bernie who stock the shelves, hoping the locals will support the decisions and selections they make. I’ve rarely been anything less but excited with my finds there.

Tributes can be found at the Facebook pages for his store.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking In Late June

It was a full weekend. I took Friday off to increase my sports spectatorship time. Beat the hell out of watching the anarcho-tots pretend to represent anything (or nothing rather being black garbed nihilists). As far as that bit of action went, it was Police 900 and Anarcho-tots zero. And perhaps Canadian rights zero as well.

Nice to see that Obama learned his lesson and has moved on to a better class of beer when making international bets. After Mr. Harper brilliantly leveraged that thrilling prize of Molson Canadian for himself last winter, the actual exchange of hometown craft beers between the US and UK has got me verklempt.
The English speaking nations had a poor weekend on the pitch. England was rightly thumped by Germany in a game that pointed out that stacking a team with old guys as well as a set of back that like to play forward a lot is no way to take on ruthless Teutonic efficiency. Thank god I made myself a good breakfast as there was no other reason to be up on Sunday morning.
Ghana looked good beating the US, Uruguay’s winning goal was the best of the tournament so far. High hopes today for the Netherlands.
The Sox have continued to creep up in the standings after taking the series in San Fran. Jays TV coverage of the Phillies series was embarassing, the fawning talk of Halladay being like a dullard bragging about his hot ex-girlfriend who dumped him.

Surely there must be more. Like the NBA draft and the Syracuse stars. No time. Gotta go.

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Stuck In My Own Town’s Mid-1800s Beery History

I had intended to get into the 1900s but have gotten stuck in the newspapers out of my town from the nineteenth century. From its first days at the western edge of the British Empire, as this pretty poor image of an early 1800s map shows, Kingston had a Brewery Street. Its still there even if renamed Rideau. We still have some of our Victorian and maybe even Georgian brewing buildings, re-purposed for other things.

Who wouldn’t get interested with ads like the “ALE! ALE! ALE!” Kingston City Brewery ad from page 3 of the Kingston Daily News on 8 October 1863. Interesting to see that the copy editor had not that much imagination give the “Baths! Baths! Baths!” header for the next ad. The City Brewery was on the waterfront and I think is long gone but the shop the beer was being sold at 158 Princess Street may well still be there, it’s just selling mens’ clothes now.

kdn1862 Kingstonians were not only enjoying local brewed beers, however celebrated, in the early 1860s as the ad to the left from the same paper’s 7 October 1862 issue shows. Mr. McRae of Brock Street had plenty of barrels of the empire’s finest Guinness, Barclay Perkins as well as Allsopp beers to be had – along with a range of imported sherries, ports and brandies. The Morton’s “Family Proof” Whisky he offered was locally made. Not sure that it was immune from family members absconding with it or if it had been, conversely, subject to the proof and acceptance by all family members. The Morton distillery and brewery buildings are also still with us and currently under redevelopment as an arts hub. The building which held MacRae’s shop could well be there, too. Another Brock Street store, Cooke’s which opened in 1865, still operates.

The town seems to have had a fairly rich relationship with beer and other alcohol but it was not all fun and games as this 1867 article from The New York Times explains. The watchman Mr. Driscoll of what is likely the same Morton works was murdered the year before during a burglary. His Detroit murderer was sentenced to hang. They’ll each both be still here, too – buried around here somewhere. The town is like that.

Ontario: Dark Ale, Muskoka Cottage Brewery, Bracebridge

Just learned that my camera died. Also just learned what a crappy camera I bought my kid last birthday. No focus. No warm tones. The corner of the cold room looks like the corner of a cold room. Sad.

Today for Ontario craft beer week, I went out to the LCBO and bought a few cans of beers that I hadn’t tried before. Muskoka Dark Ale is one of them. Dark ales were Ontario’s version of ambers in the States – an entry style that first generation craft brewers relied upon. Upper Canada Dark was a pitcher beer for me in the mid-90s pre-kid days in Ottawa Valley taverns. Easy and moreish. But, as Stan noted about ambers, they can suffer from sameness and the blahs. This one, however, is a great take on the idea. It’s like Theakston Peculier light. Molasses on the nose and in the mouth except a bit of Frye’s dry cocoa, too. HP sauce, even. Yogurty yeast but in a good way, more rich than sour. Nice dusty texture like the cocoa was sifted in at the end. Like it a lot. Some respect from the BAers.

Who Made Ontario’s First Lager And Where?

In the 1868-69 edition of Sutherland’s City of Hamilton and County of Wentworth Directory there is listed a little listing that says “Eckhardt, August, brewer, Hamilton Lager Beer Brewery…” This corresponds with Sneath‘s first listing for a lager brewery in 1868 which states:

Edward Eckhardt opens the Hamilton Lager Brewery in Hamilton and it closed three years later.

The name is right as Albert is confirmed as the brewer and Edward the proprietor in another section of the directory. So they must have started lager beer there. No one else is listed even if the Spring Brewery established in 1868, makers of “ale, porter, beer, etc., in great quantities, either in wood or bottle” are working on “an addition is now being made for an ice house.” Except for one thing. In the same directory there are at least six listings under “lager beer saloon” with proprietors with the names Goering, Grell, Kerner, Mansfeld, Schaupp and Winckler. Maybe more. How could all those businesses get up and running selling lager beer in time to get printed in the directory in the same year that the brewery opens? Could it be that the saloons pre-dated this brewery? Oh, for a copy of the 1866-67 edition of Sutherland’s City of Hamilton and County of Wentworth Directory!

I dunno. I do know that the author of this travel piece about Kingston, Ontario published in The New York Times in 1890 states “in all my travels extending through hundreds of miles of Ontario, beginning at this place, [I] have seen the sign ‘lager beer’ displayed only once.” Ontarians were long time pale ale and stout hold outs when their southern mid-Atlantic and mid-western US neighbours were following their immigrant Teutonic ways and breaking out the lager, much to the chagrin of 90 year old Charles H. Haswell in 1899, as is discussed in Maureen Ogle’s book Ambitious Brew.

There was another issue, of course, in that the rush of German immigrants was more of a late 1800s rather than mid-1800s event here. There needed to be cold. And the first refrigeration system in Canada is only turned on, according to Sneath, in 1886 in Montreal. So… we had ice houses… and folks doing what they could… figuring out the large investments required compared to the smaller population centres and… well, when you figure all that out… wouldn’t you really like a nice old fashioned trusty Ontario stock ale?

The King Brewery Pilsner clocks in at a sessionable 4.8%. It pours an actively carbonated burnished gold that supports a rich white froth and foam. On the nose, there is plenty of pale malt and graininess with Saaz hopping. In the mouth a jag of steely mentholated spicy herbal weedy hops but plenty of rich maltiness to back it up, more bread crust and biscuit that malteser. A complex beer with waves of flavours. Plenty of BAer respect.