{"id":25608,"date":"2024-07-24T12:09:05","date_gmt":"2024-07-24T19:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/?p=25608"},"modified":"2024-07-31T09:12:50","modified_gmt":"2024-07-31T16:12:50","slug":"third-annual-langford-beer-festival-successful-despite-lack-of-variety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2024\/07\/24\/third-annual-langford-beer-festival-successful-despite-lack-of-variety\/","title":{"rendered":"Third annual Langford Beer Festival successful despite lack of variety"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back for its third year, the 2024 Langford Beer Festival stormed the Starlight Stadium on Saturday, July 13, showcasing over 80 craft brews, including some ciders and meads, from 30 BC breweries. Local beer enthusiasts gathered under the sweltering sun to sample some of the best beers BC has to offer, and, as usual, yours truly was there to search out strange and wonderful concoctions to tantalize you, the reader, with.<\/p>\n

The first beer I tried was the Fuzzy Peach Sour (4.5%) from Whistle Buoy Brewing, which tastes exactly like the fuzzy peach five-cent candies I remember devouring as a kid. Interestingly, no added juices or purees were added; instead, the flavour is derived entirely from 1019 hops.<\/p>\n

From Mount Arrowsmith I tried the Weekend Rambler Mango Sour (4.6%), which uses mango puree and Sabro hops to create a flavour that is both sweet and bitter. The mango flavour is very accurate to eating the fruit itself, and certainly not subtle.<\/p>\n

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The Langford Beer Fest went down on July 13 (photo by Lee Marchbanks).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A-Frame Brewing Company served me their Okanagan Lake Cream Ale (4.4%). I was surprised to learn that cream ales do not contain lactose, and were first developed during prohibition era when common farm ingredients were used to brew. In this case, the beer is 25-percent brewed from two-row corn, which gives a distinct taste. It\u2019s also filtered using rice husks, which doesn\u2019t affect the flavour, but is considered more \u201cnatural\u201d than industrial filtration solutions.<\/p>\n

The Island Grown IPA (7%) from Moon Under Water brewpub incorporates lavender and hibiscus flowers during the whirlpool phase, giving delightful herbal and floral notes. I appreciate beer that tastes like more than just beer, and I\u2019ll be hunting for this one.<\/p>\n

Delirium Brewery brought a very unusual beverage: the Lindemans Kriek Cherry Fruited Lambic (3.5%), which really just tastes like freshly squeezed juice with a mild alcohol kick. It\u2019s brewed in Belgium without yeast, in large shallow trays instead of vats, and 30 percent of the fermentation is made with cherries. While it\u2019s an unusual, marvellous beverage, it\u2019s also exceedingly sweet, which may deter some conventional beer drinkers.<\/p>\n

Next I tried the Blackberry Yuzu Cider (6.3%) by Salt Spring Wild Cider. This strong cider is fermented with apples, blackberries, and yuzu juice\u2014a small, strong citrus fruit. To me, it didn\u2019t taste anything like blackberries, or cider. It tastes more like half a glass of old wine you find discarded carelessly on a bookshelf after a weekend bender, which you drink in a hangover haze and instantly regret it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Beacon Brewing served their Blue Steele Pineapple Coconut Sour (5%) with an unusual blue hue produced by adding spirulina, and fermented with coconut, pineapple, and passionfruit. Interesting and unusual but a bit too sour for me.<\/p>\n

From Merridale Craft Cidery I tried the Jalisco Cider (6%). This is a sweet cider offset slightly by the bitterness of lime, but I was hoping for something drier and tarter, which thankfully I found in the Bee\u2019s Knees Green Tea and Lime Leaf Mead (5.5%) served by Humblebee Meadery. The sourness of the lime paired with the distinct herbal flavour of green tea hit the spot that Merridale missed.<\/p>\n

Continuing the fruit and lime theme, Lighthouse Brewing knocked it out of Starlight Stadium with their Raspberry Lime Pilsner (5%), a crisp, bright beer with raspberry and lime puree added during fermentation, which gives a subtle, well-balanced flavour that\u2019s not too sweet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Phillips Brewing served their Dinosour Dreamsicle (4.2%) which uses real orange and vanilla to produce a flavour surprisingly faithful to an orange creamsicle popsicle. With that said, I\u2019d consider it more of a novelty and wouldn\u2019t want to drink more than one at a time.<\/p>\n

Dead Frog Brewery brought their Pepper Lime Lager (5%). This tastes like soap. If your mother used to wash your mouth out with soap and you developed a disturbing taste for it, try it out.<\/p>\n

Lastly, Driftwood Brewery brought their Fuzztone American Brown Ale (5.1%). This malty chestnut ale carried deep dark notes of molasses and burnt caramel, and was a relieving change of pace after the hop-forward barrage of IPAs, fruit sours, and lagers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This actually brings me to my only complaint about this year\u2019s Langford Beer Festival: there was very little variety, with an overabundance of fruit sours (12), IPAs (10), lime (6), and pineapple (7) flavours. There were no porters or stouts, for example, and extremely little in the way of dark and malt ales. At a beer festival, I expect to see a wide variety of beers celebrated, and the very homogenized menu at this festival makes me think the lineup should be curated more carefully next time.<\/p>\n

Despite this, the third annual Langford Beer Festival was a smash hit and a great success, and hopefully has been firmly cemented into a traditional yearly event in the Western Communities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back for its third year, the 2024 Langford Beer Festival stormed the Starlight Stadium on Saturday, July 13, showcasing over 80 craft brews, including some ciders and meads, from 30 BC breweries. Local beer enthusiasts gathered under the sweltering sun to sample some of the best beers BC has to offer, and, as usual, yours […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25610,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,238,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","category-life-sports","category-webexclusive"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25608"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25612,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25608\/revisions\/25612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}