It’s late Monday morning and I’m sitting at my desk with six beers poured and ready for tasting. This isn’t the way I normally do things. Under conventional circumstances, I pour the beers I’ll be tasting one at a time, unless I’m doing a side-by-side comparison of a single style, and try to serve each at a temperature appropriate to its style, allowing ales to warm a bit before pouring, keeping most higher alcohol beers in my wine rather than beer refrigerator, and serving lighter lagers more-or-less straight out of the fridge.
So why is it, then, that I’m facing down four lagers and two ales from a total of six different breweries, all simultaneously poured at the same temperature?
Blame the new Discovery Pack from the Ontario Craft Brewers, which should be appearing on the shelves of LCBO stores across Ontario later today. Intended to highlight what’s currently happing in Ontario craft beer, the six-pack features beer from the Walkerville, Wellington, Muskoka, Brick, Mill Street and Great Lakes breweries, and has been the subject of no small amount of discussion over at forums of the Toronto-area beer site, bartowel.com.
My purpose, then, is to taste my way up and down the selection and decide if, as one bartoweller suggested, the pack seems designed to demonstrate that “Ontario craft beer all tastes the same,” or if, as another poster put it, “it’s a pretty good introduction.”
Visually, there’s definitely a variety on offer here, from the dark amber Red Leaf Lager from Great Lakes to the golden straw cast of the Mill Street Original Organic Lager. No stouts or similarly dark-hued beers here, of course, but a relatively good array of colours otherwise.
In terms of flavour, however, the range is significantly narrower. No doubt contrary to the assumptions of a lot of non-craft beer drinkers – to whose attention this pack is most certainly directed – the least flavourful of the six is the Red Leaf, with its thin body and watery, though faintly toasty taste. At the other end is the Wellington Special Pale Ale, or SPA, which, while not exactly presenting a classically bitter, pale ale profile, does display ample hop complexity and, for someone who thinks India Pale Ale means Alexander Keith’s, will unquestionably represent a palatable step towards the character of a true pale ale.
In between the two are the lightly sweet, medium bodied character of the Walkerville Lager, the light peachiness of the Muskoka Cream Ale, the helles-esque taste of the Mill Street Organic and the gently buttery, modestly hoppy profile of the J.R. Brickman Pilsner from Brick, the latter two seemingly slightly less bold in flavour than I recall from when I last sampled them much earlier this year.
My conclusion, then, is based upon the audience to whom I believe this pack to be targeted: the major label drinker interested in trading up and the import lager consumer seeking to expand their beer horizons. To those people, the Discovery Pack offers a non-threatening introduction to the province’s craft breweries, one which will hopefully entice them to investigate further the wares of those breweries. Sure, I believe it would be more successful were it to present a greater range of tastes – not necessarily into the more highly hopped, bitter styles, as was suggested on the Bar Towel, but into fruit beers, spiced ales or sweeter, slightly higher alcohol ales and bocks. (Oh wait, this is Ontario, where such beers are in seriously short supply. Never mind, then.) But as the first of what will hopefully and presumably be a series of such samplers, it does show promise.
For the rest of us, on the other hand, this package represents less “Discovery” than it does monotony, and thus can be safely shunted aside in favor of a six-pack of something with a bit more character.
