Fans of the oak-aged beers produced by Scotland’s Innis & Gunn are numerous in Canada – so numerous, in fact, that the flagship I&G brew is reportedly the best selling bottled UK import beer in the country. This success has not escaped the notice of Dougal Sharp and his team, who have blessed their Canadian customers with an array of unique I&G variations over the past few years, including an annual Canada Day edition brewed especially for us.

Not quite so exclusive, but still somewhat limited, are the three beers pictured above and reviewed below: the latest instalment in I&G’s occasional Highland Cask series (this one aged in casks that previously held an 18 year old whisky from an unnamed distillery); an expression finished in oak that’s been infused with spiced rum; and the 2011 edition of their annual Winter Beer strong ale. Here’s what I thought of ‘em:

Innis & Gunn Highland Cask
Much like Mr. Beaumont, I wasn’t a massive fan of the 2010 version of this brand, as the overwhelming notes of caramel and butterscotch made it tough to get through a bottle without my teeth starting to hurt. This year, though, they got it right: The caramel is there but more subdued, and joined by vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, and hints of dried fig and the faintest wisp of peat smoke. The finish is medium-dry and slightly herbal, with enough warmth to remind that it’s a 7.1% beer.

Innis & Gunn Spiced Rum Finish
I’ve enjoyed quite a few bottles of the regular Rum Cask that’s available year round, but this Spiced Rum variation didn’t really grab me. The typical I&G components of vanilla, toffee and oak are there, and as it warms, some nice golden sugar and tingly spice notes develop in the finish. But while the overall impression is pleasant, I was hoping for a big punch of rum, and ended up finding more of a light tap.

Innis & Gunn Winter Beer 2011
My tasting notes on I&G’s Winter Beer 2010 include mentions of cherry, bourbon, raisins and maple. This year, I’m hard pressed to find any of those elements in evidence – instead, vanilla-like oak and dark toffee come through right from the get-go, leaving room for little else in the aroma. The flavour is a bit more complex – some dark dried fruit here, some Christmas cake spice there – but the toffee and oak are still the prominent characteristics. Quite enjoyable, although it finishes quicker that I’d like, and could also use a bit more heft in the body to cross over from good to great.

All three of these beers are available at select LCBO locations in Ontario, the Highland Cask in single bottles packaged in presentation boxes (LCBO 271585 – $4.95/330 mL bottle ), and the other two in a special gift pack that also includes a bottle of I&G Original and an attractive branded glass (LCBO 254342 – $14.95/3×341 mL bottle ). For availability info elsewhere, check with your local retailer.

As the blurry self-portrait above attests, I’m a participant in this year’s edition of Movember, the annual campaign in which men grow ugly things on their faces in order to raise money for prostate cancer research.

More specifically, I’m one of a number of local beer writers and bloggers who are taking part in Beauvember, in which we’re each growing a moustache & soul patch combo that’s meant to resemble the one famously worn by Stephen Beaumont.

To cap this dark month that our respective significant others have hated, those of us who have been growing the Beau will be gathering at Burger Bar on the evening on Wednesday, November 30th to mock each other, have a few beers, and receive final judgement on our ‘staches from Mr. Beaumont and his lovely wife Maggie. Onlookers are welcome to come out and heckle, as long as you’re also willing to throw in a few bucks to support the cause.

If you can’t make it in person – or if you’re just feeling extra-generous – you can donate online via my page on the Movember website. Please help if you can!

It occurred to me this morning that I’ve been spending so much time contacting other blogs and media outlets about this that I’ve forgotten to post about it on my own damn blog. Which is pretty ridiculous, because if you don’t use your blog for shameless self-promotion, why bother having one in the first place?

Right, here’s the deal: I’m starting a new beer dinner series under my Canadian Beer News alter ego. Fittingly enough, it’s called the Canadian Beer News Dinner Series, and the dinners will feature great breweries and import agencies paired with great chefs and restaurants. My participation is basically curatorial – I’ll be bringing the talent together, and saying a few words, but mostly I’ll just be enjoying the meals.

The spark for the series was a dinner I attended earlier this year that featured food prepared by vegan chef Doug McNish and paired with organic wine. After the dinner – which was one of the most astoundingly good meals I’ve had this year, vegan or not – I started talking with Doug about organic beer, and casually brought up the idea of him doing a dinner with Beau’s All-Natural Brewery since all of their beers are organic.

One thing lead to another, and the dinner will be happening on Tuesday December 6th at The Windsor Arms Hotel (18 St. Thomas St., Toronto), where Doug has been consulting on some vegan menus recently. And I’ve also got two more dinners in the works for early 2012, and hopefully many more to follow.

This inaugural dinner will include a welcome reception with passed hors d’oeuvre followed by a four course meal, with the reception and each course featuring a beer pairing presented by Beau’s co-owner Steve Beauchesne. Tickets are available online, and should be purchased sooner rather than later, as there are a couple of large groups that have expressed interest in attending, so a sell out is a strong possibility.

And for those who may balk at the fact that the meal will be vegan – as I noted in the announcement over on CBN, Doug’s food will “show us that there is much more to vegan food than tofu and sprouts.” I was blown away by some the flavours and textures of the food he served at the dinner earlier this year, and I’ve no doubt that he’ll pull off something equally impressive for this event. And while I can’t speak for the rest of you, I know that my fat ass and expansive waistline could certainly do with a little less meat once in a while.

So, in summary:

Canadian Beer News Dinner #1:
Beau’s Brewing & Chef Doug McNish
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
The Windsor Arms Hotel
18 Saint Thomas Street, Toronto

6:30 PM – Reception with passed hors d’oeuvre & beer pairing
7:15 PM – 4-course Dinner with beer pairings

$95 per person including taxes and gratuities

>>> CLICK HERE TO ORDER TICKETS <<<

Hope to see you there!

Anyone with at least a passing interest in Toronto’s craft beer scene will likely be aware of the almost legendary reputation of Cask Days, the cask beer event that Ralph Morana and his sons and team at barVolo have been hosting each year since 2005. Over the years it’s grown from a single day event with a couple of dozen casks from Ontario breweries, to a week-long celebration featuring various cask-themed evenings leading up to the main multi-session weekend.

Sometime around the third year, as the popularity and crowds started to grow, Ralph began talking about moving the main event to a larger venue. While some expressed concern that doing this would have a negative impact on what was admittedly a pretty fun event, those of us with slightly claustrophobic and mildly misanthropic tendencies loved the idea of having more room to spread out, and potentially more beers to choose from.

This past Sunday, the curmudgeons were proven right, as the Cask Days festival was moved to the regal and spacious Hart House on the University of Toronto campus, and ended up being one of the best beer events Toronto has ever seen.

Over the course of two sessions, 80 casks from 50+ breweries in six Canadian provinces (Ontario, Quebec, BC, Manitoba, Nova Scotia & New Brunswick) and the UK were poured for well over 1000 attendees. Not to mention the 40 or so casks that were tapped at Volo in the preceding week for various pre-festival events. And it all went off without a major hitch.

Since folks like Jordan and Robin and Mike (and probably plenty of others I’m missing) have already given pretty detailed thoughts on the day, I’m not going to ramble on too much about it. But I couldn’t resist contributing at least a bit of content to the post mortem discussion, if only to marvel about how completely fucking mindboggling it is that the Moranas and their team were able to pull this off. Especially in a jurisdiction with as many arcane and impenetrable liquor laws as Ontario.

And kudos also have to go out to the brewers – especially the Ontarians – who have really stepped up their game when it comes to the beers they’re sending to these events. While earlier editions of Cask Days often had a 50:50 split of good-to-great beers vs. failed experiments, very few of the beers I tried on Sunday were in the latter category, and some of them – like Red Racer Citra Pale Ale, Dunham Oak Aged Cranberry Ale, and Great Lakes Fangboner India Brett Ale – were among the best beers I’ve had all year.

I honestly don’t know how they’re going to be able to top it next year, but I’m already very curious – and perhaps a little bit frightened – to see what Cask Days 2012 has in store. In the meantime, I hope all involved are getting some well deserved rest before the planning starts once again.

While I don’t often see it on tap in these parts anymore, Newcastle Brown is still one of the top import brands down in the US. It makes sense that parent company Heineken would want to use that brand recognition to try and grab a bit more of the market, so I wasn’t surprised when I received a PR pitch a few weeks ago regarding the Newcastle Limited Edition series, a set of four seasonal beers – Summer Ale, Werewolf, Winter IPA and Founders’ Ale – that are being brewed in the UK especially for the American market.

In keeping with the season, samples of Werewolf and Winter IPA were provided, and while I tried them and jotted some notes soon after arrival, various factors have kept me away from the ol’ blog for a while. So with apologies for my tardiness, here are a few thoughts on the pair:

Newcastle Werewolf is described in the promotional bumpf as a “formidable beast”, suggesting that something big and bold is being contained by the bottle. Mention of “a bite of bitterness” that’s “long, deep and lingering” raise even more anticipation. Sadly, though, aside from it having the promised “blood red” colour, it’s a pretty straightforward darkish ale. The aroma has toasted malt, a bit of chocolate, and not much else, while the flavour augments those two notes with some dark cherry and perhaps a smidge more hops than typically expected from the style, but not approaching anything I’d describe as “lingering”. It’s a respectable enough brew, but one that ultimately isn’t really worthy of its name.

And speaking of misnomers; Anyone expecting a full-bore craft-style India Pale Ale from Newcastle Winter IPA will be setting themselves up for disappointment, as its is more in line with mainstream UK IPAs like Wells Eagle and Caledonian Deuchars. Using those brews as a comparison point, Winter IPA performs well, throwing off burnt toffee and biscuit on the malt side, and even-handed hop notes that are somewhat tea-like with a backing grassiness. There’s also a slight mineral tang around the edges, and a soft and slightly creamy mouthfeel to hold it all together. Like its lycanthropian cousin, it’s not a showstopper, but it might just twig a few Newcastle Brown drinkers to the fact that there are more beer styles out there that are worth exploring.

I must admit that up until a week or so ago, I wasn’t overly excited for this year’s edition of Toronto Beer Week. Aside from a few gems, the line-up of confirmed events was a bit underwhelming, with many key venues and breweries missing from the list completely.

But then the week leading up to Friday’s kick-off saw a deluge of new listings added, and suddenly number of events that I was planning on checking out grew so quickly that I’ve got myself booked for at least one event every evening from now until next weekend. And while daily updates/recaps are unlikely, I’ll do my best to getting something written up a couple of times during the week, starting with this review of how the opening weekend played out for me.

As with last year’s inaugural TBW, the week was launched with a ceremonial cask tapping on Friday, with this year’s taking place at Amsterdam Brewery. Former politician, current radio host, and craft beer fan John Tory was supposed to do the honours, but a last minute conflict left him unable to attend, so Cass Enright of The Bar Towel, the Golden Tap Awards and other beer-related initiatives took over and hammered the spigot into the cask of Amsterdam Framboise that had been prepared for the occasion. Also on offer were three other Amsterdam one-offs – a double-dry hopped version of their Boneshaker IPA; a barrel-aged edition of Tempest Imperial Stout infused with cocoa nibs; and Goodbye Fuggled Monday Mild, a roasty and delicious dark mild ale brewed exclusively for the launch event.

Several beer samples with little food left me feeling a bit peckish, so along with Mike Warner of A Year of Beer!, I headed up to Burger Bar for a late lunch. TBW hadn’t officially started there yet, but they had a couple of new things on tap, including Conductor’s Ale from the recently launched Junction Craft Brewing. It’s intended to be a flavourful but easy-drinking brew inspired by west coast classics like Sierra Nevada, and I’d mostly agree with that assessment, although I found the initial aroma to be very wort-ish, which was a bit off-putting. Still a nice enough quaff, though, and one I’ll revisit soon.

From there we trekked up to The Monk’s Table for the blogger/brewer Barrel Bragging Rights showdown that I wrote about the other day. There was some nervousness on the part of all involved that the turn-out might be light, but those concerns ended up being ill-founded, as there was a line-up several dozen deep when the doors opened at 5:00 PM, and the place was rammed soon after.

Even better, the nine collaborative beers that ended up being served ranged in quality from pretty good to absolutely fantastic. There were a couple that were so good that I’d love to see them available on a regular basis from their respective breweries. And to top it all off, the beer I worked on with Hogtown Brewers came in second in the voting, just 2 votes behind the spectacular peppercorn saison created by Chris Grimley of Beer With Me TO and Mike Lackey of Great Lakes Brewery. Considering that their beer was my favourite of the bunch, I had no problem coming in as runner-up.

Following the awards announcement, I took a stroll down to The Rebel House for dinner with follow competitor Josh Rubin of the Toronto Star and our pal Alan Daly (who really should update his blog Wish You Were Beer more often). The Muskoka Mad Tom IPA was in good form, and went well with my grilled cheese and kettle chips. There was talk of heading further south to Volo for a nightcap of Dieu du Ciel Péché Mortel from the freshly tapped keg (which blew before closing time, apparently), but the 8+ hours of drinking was starting to catch up to me, so I made it an early night.

My lone TBW outing on Saturday was a return to Monk’s Table for the Sticky Toffee Pudding Showdown that my wife Sheryl Kirby was judging along with Josh and Stephen Beaumont. She’s already given it a great recap over on her own blog, but I’ll just add that as much as I like sticky toffee pudding, I’ll be glad to avoid it for a while after having to taste four of them back-to-back.

There were plenty of other great looking events going on yesterday – like Oktoberfest at Steam Whistle, another Oktoberfest at Wvrst, and general carousing and drunkenness at Bryden’s and The Only – but the remnants of a mild hangover from Friday along with coming down from a sticky toffee induced sugar high left me a bit wiped. So I opted for a quiet evening at home rather than wearing myself out before the week really got going.

I was feeling much better on Sunday, though, and took advantage of the beautiful late summer afternoon to pay a visit this week’s edition of The Brewery Market, a sort of pop-up beer garden that Cass Enright has been running in the courtyard of the Wychwood Barns location of The Stop Community Food Centre on various Sundays throughout the summer. Each instalment features a different Ontario craft brewery pouring a few of their beers – this week it was Grand River – and some folks from The Stop making delicious pizzas in the outdoor wood oven. It was a great time as always, with plenty of craft beer geeks and newbies alike on hand, as well as a few young families.

The highlight for me was the chance to try the Pan-Ontario Collaboration Ale, a brew created back in the spring for Ontario Craft Beer Week that was made by blending beers from Grand River, Great Lakes, Beau’s, Flying Monkeys and Wellington and aging the result in bourbon barrels. I missed out on trying it during OCB Week, so it was great to find that at least one keg had been held back. And the beer itself – a big, bold brew with notes of dark caramel, cocoa, bourbon, vanilla, wood and more – was well worth the wait.

Sunday night, it was another break from TBW due to other plans, but I’ve got plenty lined up for the rest of the week, including a few beer dinners, a couple of mini-festivals, some tap takeovers at Volo, and whatever else I can squeeze in without falling down. Watch for another post or two here as the week goes on, or follow me on Twitter for the real time play-by-play.

Anyone who makes a living or hobby out of being a critic has likely received feedback to a negative review accusing them of not knowing what they’re talking about. It’s equally likely that the feedback will suggest that the critic should try creating their own version of whatever it is that they’re reviewing before passing judgment on others.

Personally, I’ve always looked at this as a bit of a spurious argument. The fact that my musical ability extends to knowing how to play about three notes on a guitar doesn’t mean that the opinions I expressed in my many years as a music writer were invalid. I just knew what I liked and what I didn’t, and had spent enough years obsessing about music to know what I was writing about. (Well, most of the time, at least.)

The same goes for beer. I’ve never had a lot of interest in being a homebrewer – I have neither the patience nor the imagination needed to do a good job of it – but I’ve consumed enough of the stuff, and read enough about both the product and the process, to have a pretty good understanding of how beer is made, and how to differentiate between good ones and bad ones.

Still, even if I don’t consider it to be a necessary precursor for writing about beer, a bit of hands on experience can never hurt. So when Mike Warner of the excellent (but no longer accurately named) blog A Year of Beer let me know that he was planning a event for Toronto Beer Week that would feature beers created by beer bloggers and writers in partnership with pro brewers, I was pleased to be invited to take part. Even moreso when Adam Grant of The Monk’s Table came on board to host the event, and provided a bunch of 10 litre oak barrels for aging the beers, adding another interesting element to the proceedings. Taking place tonight under the name Barrel Bragging Rights, it’s one of the kick-off events for TBW 2011.

After a couple of false starts with brewers that were unable to participate for one reason or another, I found myself paired up with Jay Cooke of Hogtown Brewers, a new contract brewery here in Toronto. So new, in fact, that they haven’t yet released their beer to market, and as of a few weeks ago weren’t even sure where they’d be brewing their commercial batches.

Jay has a good deal of experience under his belt, though, ranging from small brewers like Paddock Wood to his most recent gig at the main Labatt plant in London. And like a few other start-up breweries in the province, he’d been whipping up test batches for Hogtown on the pilot system at the Niagara College Teaching Brewery, which is where we met up a few weeks ago to create our concoction.

Given the lack of hands-on brewing experience that I owned up to above, I was depending on Jay to lead the way through most of the process, and he did a nice job of that. He came armed with a recipe for an American-style IPA that we tweaked based on the malt and hops that were available to us at the brewery. The original malt bill included Marris Otter as the main grain, with smaller amounts of Munich, Crystal and Cara-Pils; and after some sniffing and tasting of various options, I made an addition of a small amount of Peated malt. On the hops side, Millennium and Centennial went in during the boil, with Goldings joining in right at the end.

Aside from that, there’s not much else I can write that would be notably different from any other small scale brewing project. We milled and mashed in and sparged and pitched and so forth, and ended up with 30ish litres of a nice dark amber liquid that was left to ferment. A week or so later, I got a report from Jay that all had gone well, with the end result being a well-hopped but balanced 6.8% IPA with a nice backing note of peat smoke – in other words pretty much exactly what we were aiming for.

The big question now is how it’ll stack up against the other beers that it’s being tapped alongside at Monk’s Table tonight. As the list of participants illustrates it’ll be up against some pretty serious competition, and given my lack of brewing experience combined with Hogtown still being in pre-launch mode, we’re going into this thing as underdogs. But it’s also a blind tasting event, with folks from the general beer drinking public voting on their favourite – so really, who knows what’ll happen?

Whatever the outcome, I’m looking forward to tasting what my colleagues and their partner brewers have come up with. Those in Toronto who’d like to do the same should head over to The Monk’s Table tonight starting at 5:00 PM, where $25 will get you in to sample all the brews, eat some tasty snacky things, and feed the egos of a group of goofballs who probably don’t know nearly as much about beer as we think, but waste our time writing about it anyway.

It was around that time that a friendly Creemore rep passed me a six pack to try, I’ve tipped back a bottle every now and then in the couple of months since, and having now finished the half-dozen, I’ve come to two conclusions: (1) I like it; and (2) I won’t go out of my way to drink it again.

Yeah, I know that these conclusions seem to be contradictory, but here’s the thing: English Bay Pale Ale is, as Stephen aptly puts it, a “highly quaffable ale.” It has a nice dark copper hue; a nutty caramel aroma with faint peppery tinge; and a flavour that could use a bit of a boost in the hops department, but which still fits nicely into the “well balanced UK-style pale ale” niche that appears to be the aim.

That said, it’s also a beer that leaves little in the way of an impression, lasting or otherwise. Even while it’s being consumed, there’s little to grab the drinker’s attention (which probably explains the somewhat generic nature of my tasting notes above), and even less remains on the palate or in the memory once the glass is empty.

In other words: It’s not a bad beer, but it’s also not a memorable one.

For the less dorky among you: a retcon refers to a situation when facts established in an earlier story are changed in such a way that the previous story couldn’t have happened the way it was originally written – in other words, the previously established continuity has been retroactively changed. Sometimes these changes are small, affecting minor attributes of a single character; and sometimes they’re massive, affecting an entire shared fictional universe (as was the case in the classic DC Comics series Crisis on Infinite Earths that the title of this post lazily evokes).

The reason for this nerdtastic tangent is that this blog is about to undergo a bit of retconning, as I’m starting to integrate many of the posts that I wrote for Taste T.O., the food and drink website run by my wife and myself that we recently converted from a daily blog to an events listing site, taking the old content offline in the process. My contributions there included many beer reviews, pub profiles, and other beer and booze related articles that I’d like to keep online, so folding them into this blog seemed to make the most sense. While doing this, I’ll also be editing or removing any posts that referred or linked to the Taste T.O. posts, fusing the material from both sites into a seamless whole! (Insert dramatic George Perez splash page here.)

Since I’ll be backdating these posts to the dates they were originally published on Taste T.O., the whole process should hopefully go unnoticed to most readers. But for those who enjoy digging through archives, there will be lots of “new” stuff to read.

And as for REAL new stuff – I’m hoping to get more on top of that in the next little while as well. I’ve got quite a backlog of notes and photos from the past couple of months, and while not all of it is post-worthy, there are a few things that I’d like to get written up soon, especially since the fall is shaping up to be a pretty busy season for beer happenings.

Opened in 1927 as Hub City Brewing Company, the brewery changed hands a number of times over the years, ending up as a branch of Carling O’Keefe until 1989, when the Molson/O’Keefe merger threatened it with closure. To avert this fate, sixteen employees got together and purchased the brewery and relaunched it in 1990 as Great Western.

In the years since, Great Western has never had an pretenses of being an artisanal craft brewery. Its brands are aimed squarely at the mass market and sold largely in Saskatchewan, where the brewery’s local and independent nature is what keeps them selling. So it was a bit surprising to see the launch back in March of Original 16 Canadian Pale Ale, a self-described “premium beer brand” released and named in honour of the brewery founders.

Having now tried the few cans that the folks at Great Western were kind enough to send me, I’m reminded that in the world of beer marketing, the word “premium” can have a variety of meanings depending on the context. Or more to the point – when a brewery that normally produces mass market pale lagers puts out an ale and describes it as a “premium beer,” it’s probably not going to be a rich, hoppy, full-flavoured brew.

Based on Original 16, it’s more likely to be a clear golden ale with a light and sweet aroma of honey-on-toast and fruit cocktail, a crisp and clean body, and a refreshing flavour profile with notes of honey, lemon, grape skin and cut grass. What makes it “premium” is the fact that it’s an adjunct-free, 100% barley malt brew, and that its initial 7 day fermentation is followed by nearly four weeks of aging, a rarity for mass market beer.

Basically, Great Western knows its customers, and has brewed a beer that will appeal to them – i.e. a simple, clean, golden ale that has strong stylistic similarities to a a simple, clean, golden lager. It might not turn the head or excite the palate of someone whose taste is more inclined toward big and bold craft beers. But for what it is, Original 16 is nice little beer.