There’s not much we won’t do for you, our faithful readers. We work around the clock when we need to, we file Freedom of Information requests, we sprout early grey hairs doing stressful interviews, and, sometimes, we drink a lot of beer. For you, faithful readers, of course.
Usually we spread out our review of The Great Canadian Beer Fest over two days, but this year we had to do all the drinking in one day. Were we going to let that interfere with our goal of giving you our thoughts on as many beers as humanly possible? Of course not. It just meant it was time to take a deep breath and… drink. Lots. I do what I have to do.
The day started early with the media tour of the grounds, which is when the beer started flowing. First up was Saskatchewan brewery Nokomis Craft Ales with their Haskap Sour. It was the first of many sours I checked out in an attempt to understand the sour trend. Best I can figure is this is for people who don’t like beer but want to figure out a way to like beer, but, still, the Haskap Sour is well done and one of the better sours as its tart, grapey flavour (from the Saskatchewan-grown Haskap berries) gives this one a red wine flavour and aftertaste. I’m still not sold on sours, but this is decent enough for a few sips.
Also from Saskatchewan, 9 Mile Legacy Brewing were at beer fest, pouring their 9 Mile Ale. This is a dry English pale ale that’s very well balanced and low on hoppiness; 9 Mile nailed it with this very drinkable drink.
Victoria’s newest brewery, Whistle Buoy, were up next. They’ve got a name no one is fully confident saying out loud, a cool Market Square location, and a surprisingly hoppy Coastality West Coast Pale Ale that has so much taste going on you almost wouldn’t believe they’ve only been in operation since June 26 of this year. Good things are ahead for Whistle Buoy.
We then moved on to Vancouver’s 33 Brewing Experiment, a cool company with a cool aesthetic. Hazy drinks are popular right now, so I wanted to try their Hazy Pilsner to make sure I got some haze in my beer fest experience this year. You’d think the haziness would battle the Pils’ traditional crispness, but 33 manage to make the two sensations work together nicely for a refreshing and balanced drink that has more bite to it than the average Pils does. Thumbs up.
Then we moved on to Nova Scotia’s Tatamagouche Brewing Company, who had the best beer I tried at the fest this year: the massive 11.2% Toro. A Belgian quad aged in bourbon barrels with an incredible amount of complexity and flavours, this one starts with a bit of light before going dark, warm, and huge. Some mocha and caramel notes mingle perfectly with the oak aftertaste here, the Toro being more sessionable than a beer of this ABV should be, this one absolutely showing why events like the Great Canadian Beer Fest are so great, bringing beers like this one (which is all organic, no less) from across Canada to tantalize our taste buds for a weekend. Extremely well done.
Another organic Nova Scotia brewery, Big Spruce Brewing, was offering up their Cereal Killer Oatmeal Stout, and who am I to say no to that? Picking myself up off the grass after my Toro, I dove into this crisp stout, which packs a perky, carbonated punch and had tons of flavour and a full body. Would definitely drink this one again.
Next up it was back to a British Columbia brewery, with Old Abbey Ales’ Don’t Be Scared. The Don’t Be Scared is an Arnold Palmer-style lager, but, look, I’m half-cocked by this point, I don’t know what that means, I don’t pretend to know what that means, I just drink, and this one goes refreshing, light, and easy. Definitely a smooth hot-summer-day drink, and the lemon juice and orange pekoe tea flavours don’t even bother me too much as it’s so well done.
With this, the media tour was done and Nexus was free to race around the Royal Athletic Park to check out beer from brewers from all across Canada (with over 100 different breweries and cideries from across Canada, it’s The Great Canadian Beer Fest’s widest range of breweries yet).
The amount of BC breweries out there is staggering, so, here, let’s visit another one: Mount Arrowsmith Brewing Company. Their Wildberry Kettle Sour is indeed sour, and more or less cemented my belief that sours aren’t really good if you’re looking for beer, but if you’re looking for, say, a juice box with a teeny bit more kick, sure, have a sour. This one has a good balance between the sourness and the fruitiness, and by “good balance” I mean both are cranked to 10.
There was one beer I knew I had to try this year: Victoria brewers Twa Dogs’ Friday cask, the ominously named CCM-SOS (from the fest guide: “WARNING! This is not for normal human consumption.”). Twa Dogs took their Chili Chocolate Milk Stout and added a ton of extra chilies to it and oh my god is this ever an experience. It starts sweet and has a fairly thin body, with molasses on the nose and a caramel-tinged sweet stout taste. It’s pretty amazing… and then the chilies hit. Talk about an aftertaste; this is just this side of atrocious, and is instead pretty incredible. Although not a beer I could drink a lot of, in small doses this is fantastic, and really exemplifies what events like this are all about. I marvelled at this complex, well-crafted beer with every taste, as it has three distinct stages to every single sip. Great work, Twa Dogs.
I mean, unfortunately, it also kinda torched my palate and maybe made my stomach a bit rumbly, but, totally worth it. So Gladstone Brewing Company’s Belgian Single kinda suffered from being up next; this dry, aromatic pale golden ale didn’t really stand a chance at making an impression on me after being annihilated by the chilies, although I could tell it was well done.
Powell River’s Townsite Brewing was next on my hit list, and their Up the Lake Sour Mash ISA sounded interesting enough, and it was interesting in that it was really not that hoppy. It’s fruity and slightly sour and mildly hoppy, but the one thing that stuck with me the most was just how fruity it is.
Over to locals Swans next; I thought their Scottish Heavy would be huge like a Scotch Ale or Wee Heavy, but it was a surprisingly light experience. At 3.4% ABV, this one goes down like a smooth, light brown ale, with a roasted taste and caramel notes. Although the thin body doesn’t quite match the flavours, I wouldn’t mind spending a bit more time with this one to get to know it more, as I suspect we’d get along just fine.
Swans’ Guilty Pleasure Raspberry Blonde is light on the blonde and huge on the raspberry and good god that’s one carbonated fruit punch juice box. I’ve had a lot of beer by this point and actually thought this was a sour but that’s just the fruit talking. Can we all just agree to keep fruit away from beer once and for all please and thanks?
Strange Fellows Brewing’s Jongleur Belgian Wit is dry and easy drinking, tasty with its spicy notes, its main problem being that I drunk it so late in the night that both my tasting notes and memory are foggy. But here’s something that cuts through the haze: Strange Fellows’ Reynard Oud Bruin. This sour brown ale makes me think maybe, just maybe, sours are a style of beer worth pursuing (ah, no, scratch that, but, still). My notes indicate it has a “crazy smell,” which I recall being a sort of paint-thinner/turpentine situation, and a taste that is quite reminiscent of the fantastic Thor’s Hammer barley wine from Surrey’s Central City Brewers (which also has turpentine on the nose, which, of course, sounds absurd, but it tastes incredible). This one is smoky, carbonated, and, sure, sour, but more like a complex, deep red wine that’s gone funky. There’s a lot going on here, probably because it’s a sour brown ale as opposed to a sour juice box like most sours, and while I’m more likely to go for a barley wine than this, if I ever had a gun to my head and was forced to drink a sour again, this would be the one. Good work, Strange Fellows.
My stomach at this point is not saying “Good work, Greg,” It’s saying “Seriously, dude?” There’s been a lot of big, varying flavours tossed down in there and they’re not really playing together nicely, but all in the name of journalistic excellence I plowed forth, heading over to Les Trois Mousquetaires Microbrasseurs, where I went for their Gose, because that’s the style that seems situated to knock sours off their throne for popularity by this time next year. This beer packs a punch, and is very flavourful. Their description includes coriander and salt; mine just includes staring blankly at my beer fest companion as we try to figure out if we honestly taste salt or if it’s just because any time anyone talks about a gose all they really can say is “there’s salt in it.” No idea, but, yeah, there’s salt in it, and I think I liked it. Their IPA goes down super easy, and is alarmingly not bitter—which I like—and thin-bodied.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Brew Lab looks interesting, so we stagger over to their booth and I grab a KPU Schwarzbier because I honestly have no idea what that is. I like it: it’s a dark, nutty ale that’s not too thick and is very drinkable. It’s easy drinking but with just enough going on to keep it interesting. I’d drink it again, even if by this point in the night I was having a hard time drinking anything.
Beau’s Brewing Co. brought their Lug Tread organic lagered ale from Ontario, so, yeah, I was going to try it because I’m pretty sure I’ve never had a lagered ale before. I got one sip in and my stomach informed me it was time to stop. But I was trying to figure out this lagered ale; my colleague explained to me what exactly that means and I was enthralled; I took more sips but I no longer had the ability to tell if this is good beer or not. Their Full Time IPA goes down the same way, this big IPA (6.7%) making some kind of impact but it was mainly just reminding me that I can’t drink anymore, not tonight. Sorry, Beau’s Brewing. Catch ya next time.
And with that, I stumbled off into the good night, mind racing at the possibilities still waiting, so many beers yet to be drunk, so many flavours yet to be enjoyed. The Great Canadian Beer Fest has a bit of everything, and it will next year as well, when we will return and we will savour the big, bold brews that these craft brewers from all across Canada will bring back to the Royal Athletic Park for another frothy round of sudsy fun, hopefully leaning more dark than sour. Next year could well be the year of the gose, but we’ll be off finding the big bangers, roasted malt for miles, 11% barley wines, and beasts like the Toro and Twa Dogs’ outrageous spicy cask, two beers that won’t soon be forgotten and that all local beer lovers should thank the organizers of the fest for bringing to town on this great weekend.