Ontario: 666, Devil’s Pale Ale, Great Lakes Brewing, Etobicoke

A very strange thing has been happening lately. I am going out to a store in my own town and buying the same Ontario-made beer week after week. I wrote about Lake Ontario’s (not Lake Erie’s) Great Lake Brewing’s take on a winter ale a few weeks ago. That beer was a bit frustrating as, while I liked it, I had to buy it in a presentation pack for more than a bit too much. This beer, however, if anything is under-priced at $2.50 a tall can. Better than that, 666 has turned out to be a bit of a puzzle to my mind and in the brewer’s description:

Brewed with 6 select malts and 4 premium hops, it has a rich mahogany colour, reminiscent of early English pale ales. The wonderful hoppy aroma is revealed even before your first sip, followed by a hearty malty body, and culminating with a pronounced bitterness. Prepare yourself for a devilishly good time…

Hmm…six percent…hearty malt body…English hops. Is this a Burton, the elusive Georgian and Victorian bad boy of pale ales before the advent of barley wines? My only possible comparator could be Samuel Smith’s Winter Welcome, itself a likely pretender, reviewed back here and happily sampled every year. The only thing I think might be against that 666 is claim of final hoppiness but I won’t know until I pop the caps.

As you can see, the Winter Welcome 2007-08 is much lighter, the dark amber orange ale sitting under white foam and rim. By comparison, the 666 is darker – chestnut with a fine rich tan rim and foam. On the nose the 666 speaks of roasty nuts with dark raisin, with a nod to oloroso sherry. The Winter Warmer leans more to orange marmalade but there’s plenty of biscuit in there, too. In the mouth, the two have about the same mouthfeel and, if anything, the Sammy Smith offering is more bitter: fresh green salad herb mixing with twig blended throughout the orange-kumquat biscuit malt. A sip of 666 is more about a rougher bitterness framing the darker dried winter fruits.

Martyn Cornell, the Zythophile himself, recently summarized Burton’s style in a few words – “a recognisably Burton Ale profile: red-brown, bitter-sweet, fruity and full-bodied, with a roast malt aroma.” It’s certainly hard to exclude this Canadian-Satanic joint enterprise of a beer from the categorization even if it were to turn out to be unintentional. It certainly is a lush brew, fruit-ridden with hop and a true roastiness within the grainy malt. Loverly. But is it Burton? Who knows? It fills a similar place in the pantheon but I would likely have to mail Martyn a sample. For now this side by side will have to do.

Friday Bullets? It’s The First Friday Bullets Of 2008!!

Iowa rocks. It’s a whole new reason to blog. Even though blogging is now like collecting 45s, most people having voted and having voted for the dreary contentlessness of Twitter and Facebook and stuff like that, by standing up in church halls and on basketball courts, the people of Iowa say no, they have listened to Oprah and Chuck Norris and shaken things up by introducing a little reality. To that end, a poem:

What you vote, what you vote today?
For Huckabee and Obammy.
A bad, bad day; who threw the money away?
Clinton and Mitt Romney-ee-ee.

Who writes lyrics on Iowa in the style of an Irish folk tune? Nobody, baby. Nobody.

  • Update: There is a European Vodka Alliance which champions Europe’s diverse vodka traditions. Who knew? Do they have summer jobs?
  • I am now excited for Michigan. By holding its primary on January 15th, it now stands weeks ahead of all other large states and after only the two traditional testing grounds of Iowa and New Hampshire. The Votemaster has his opinion up now and, because it’s unlinky, I will tell you he says it is still a race amongst Giuliani, Romney, and McCain for the GOP and Obama-Clinton for the Dems. Tiger, when not panicking theoretically, prefers following Real Clear Politics but that has none of the statistics theory chatter.
  • In other news, a little recollection of Canada’s role in crushing fascism showed up this week:

    He didn’t think much of it at the time, but as he drove home he considered the bag and its contents and assumed the flag might be the Union Jack. On further reflection, however, he recalled seeing black on the flag, a colour not found on the Union Jack. When he arrived home, he unfolded the flag and discovered it was not what he was expecting. In addition to the giant Nazi symbol that unfolded before him, the flag was signed by Canadian soldiers from the 2nd Anti-Tank Regiment that fought in Normandy in the Second World War. It lists various battles and the soldiers killed in action. A Lethbridge soldier also signed his name, although it is hard to read. Mr. Coburn realized he had found more than just a flag. “The hair stood up on the back of my neck.”

  • Once a pal of mine, with an evangelical bent, proved again for me that God had a great sense of humour by giving him both a telephone number and license plate with “666” in them. Apparently a whole town has had the same problem:

    A town in the US state of Louisiana is to be allowed to change its telephone prefix so that residents can avoid a number many associate with the Devil. Christians in Reeves have been unhappy since the early 1960s about being given the prefix, 666 – traditionally known as the Biblical “number of the beast”. For the next three months, households will be able to change the first three digits of their phone numbers to 749.

    What is “668”? The number of the neighbour of the beast – rimshot!

Busy week. Not really. But I need a weekend all the same. The Session tonight as well.

The Year Of The Infideleolympiad Is Here!

How fun! There’s more than just the Smoglympiad going on:

The Olympic Games’ ability to attract controversy is enjoying a new twist after China’s equivalent of Des Lynam was humiliated at a television ceremony by his wife storming onstage and accusing him of conducting an affair…As Zhang dithered, clearly uncertain as to whether to intervene or not, she began a simple appeal to the country’s sense of honour. “Today is a special day for The Olympics Channel, and it’s a special day for Zhang Bin, and it’s a special day for me too,” she said. In a particularly brave move, she quoted a French politician critical of the Games who said that if China’s “values” didn’t improve, they would have been for nothing. “That French foreign diplomat also said: until China is able to start exporting its values, it won’t be able to become a great power,” she said. “Yet Zhang Bin can’t even face up to his own hurt wife. I think China, to succeed as a great power… Don’t any of you have any conscience?! Let go of me! We’re very far from being a great country.”

I am reminded of my favorite guy and hope that this lady’s cheatastic husband is sufficiently important that she does not get a disappearing for her efforts.

Your Neanderthal Update

Was they we?

Modern humans may well have evolved from hardy Neanderthals who suffered through a dramatic cold spell that descended on Europe about 40,000 years ago, according to a new study that throws another coal into the already heated scientific debate about our origins. The report, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, disagrees with the widely held belief that humans’ early ancestors came in waves out of Africa to overwhelm the separate and distinct Neanderthal populations of Europe.

We heatedly discussed the prospect of the working out of Neanderthal DNA back in Nov. 2006. This new study relates to the number of narrow-skulled voles found near Neanderthal sites. I am all a giggle over this news but the question remains – what will this do to the putative humour of the GEICO ads? Is it not now much the same as saying “So easy a Hittite could do it”?

The Best of 2007: My Year Interacting With Stuff

Stuff becomes me: I like it and I assimilate it. Every year I think that the stuff I was introduced to was the best stuff and then more stuff comes along and I realize that that is pretty damn good, too. Here is the best stuff of 2007:

  • Pear Juice: pear juice from South Africa in particular. Sounds like a real big whoop but pears are that stealth food that pervades our lives without having all the pushiness of apples or the fear engendering pits of plums, peaches or apricots. Wilde 100% pure pear juice from South Africa is also politically correct and fairly cheap. I never thought that the blackcurrent juices of Poland could be unseated as the juice of the future but there you have it. Life constantly surprises.
  • Sean Kingston: first noticed due to the vaguely menacing joke single “Beautiful Girls”, this Jamaican teen pulls off calypso Zep while saying “girl” just like Bob or maybe Shaggy or maybe Peter. “Shorty” has been added to the vocabulary. “Take You There” plays on winter-get-away package jingles with “Trench Town”.
  • My bench and canoe: really this “best of” is just a celebration of US shopping but the 400 bucks the canoe and bench cost collectively stunned even me, an avid border crosser.
  • BBQ: once again proving that techniques from 57,483 BC still rule, scotched and smoked meats lead the way. Best new ‘que? Smoking extra pork shoulder roasts which are then sliced thin and frozen for mid-winter sangwhichies. Next year? Dropping the wood shavings for solid apple wood blocks.

Not the fanciest stuff nor the most rare to be sure but, really, doesn’t stuff need to be available, reasonable and useful?

The Final Bullets of 2007

You realize, don’t you, that the decade that was brought in with Y2K and all the other millennial whoo-haa is now 80% gone. It doesn’t even have a name and it’s already a senior citizen. Time is flying. Heck, my holiday week off is almost gone. So we better do some prognostications for 2008 before another moment slips away. These are mine:

Sports: Morton will stay up despite being the most points by ties leaders again. Santanawill pitch in the AL East. I may watch an NHL playoff game. I will attend a Watertown Wizards game on a sunny afternoon in late June and consider it a very fine thing.

Canadian politics: There will be an election in 2008 and it won’t be pretty. By any measurement the Harper government has been a dud filed with blamery. What other PM at war could say he is uncertain whether Canadians at large understand the importance of remaining involved in the fight and not realize it is an indictment of his own leadership. The program to bring in accountability has been abandoned, the plan for Bali was to sit at the wet bar while others made a deal and the revival of and reliance on the team from Mulroney era as elder statesmen has been a botch. The opposition may have a GER plan (giving enough rope) but it is unclear if they know how to tie the basic knot required to do the job. In the end, we will have a less stable minority and it won’t matter who wins as the Tories have proven they will implement anyone else’s policies in order to avoid conflict or at least making a decision…and everyone else believes in the same thing anyway.

The World: this could be a nasty one. A year of American election during wartime as well as a Russian one and, perhaps, a Pakistani one. I am going to go out on a limb (ie be wrong) and say that Hillary will not be US president but she may be Vice-President. I will also say that the Republican candidate will be a man and, dare I suggest, a man who has been filmed with a shotgun and wearing hunter’s orange. In the end, it will not matter who wins as the US economy will be weakened further by the botch of a deregulated mortgage system and a consumer credit bubble economy. This will mean there is little or know choice to change course dramatically. China and Russia’s power will increase. A really bad thing will happen and a country somewhere may even be invaded. Magnetic pole reversal will or will not occur but movies (including TV movies of the week) about it happening will be made and we will all be left thinking fondly of the days of movies about meteors and killer waves that wipe out the east coast of the USA. People will reread and adopt both the Flushing Remonstrance and the Declaration of Arbroath to the current situation.

Society, Style and Art: I will continue to have none of the above. The recession will devolve much of the lifestyle columns into discussions about how to cocoon and make jam. Wine will be replaced by beer; tea will take the place of coffee; steak will become sausage; Lego over logo. Privacy will continue to be abandoned in favour of the will of the widget. The internet will become less important than it is even now though someone will make another killer app with mass adoption that will do absolutely nothing for anyone.

Me: through more foster parenting, we will have at least more extra kids in the house than I have fingers on one hand, just like we did in 2007. I will hit 20,000 sit-ups sometime in the summer as I have already hit 8,000 since September. I will have a book deal but it may be for a very short book and the deal may not be that attractive. The garden will expand with ornamental bushes being hacked down and forgotten forever in favour of another herb or one more radish. I will hit my 4,000th post and my fifth year here but attention will more and more be paid to the beer blog, given that it gives. I will finally acquire that trombone mouthpiece. Payments will continue to be made.

Is that all I can expect for 2008, uncertainty or more of the same? I have to be careful, you know. Maybe we can go with something or things unexpected will occur that will have the effect of improving or reducing the quality of our lives to one degree or another. I may go see a band play that I haven’t seem before. I definitely will BBQ a new and unexpectedly tasty mammal. Yes, that I can promise you will happen. There you go. El Predicto speaks.

Stouts: John By Imperial Stout, Scotch Irish Brewing, Ontario

jbis1This is a great new stout from the Scotch Irish Brewing branch of Heritage, the eastern Ontario makers of a very good IPA and a solid, if only seasonal, porter. There is much talk about this one over at the Bar Towel, the province’s beer fan forum, with a little discussion of whether a 6.7% beer can be called an Imperial stout.

Does it matter? Not really. The labels and gradations of beer are as fluid as what is in the glass and what is in this glass is a full bore stout with plenty of the hallmarks of the style. The brew is deep and dark with a narrow brown edge showing when held up against the light. The tan head fades to a thin rim. In the mouth there is a mass of Dutch salty licorice over dark chocolate with some toast and prune treacle, if such a thing exists, underneath. It is all infused with the minty hop that opens up in the finish.

I think this is an excellent example how big need not mean skull-splittingly strong and that Imperial stout can mean grand and not just alcohol ridden. Seven BAers give firm support.