According to info culled from the website of Delancy Direct, Martin will be visiting Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon and Regina over the course of a one week visit, hosting events that are both trade only and open to the general public. (Please see Delancy’s website for details.)

I had a chance to sample three of Martin’s beers this past week and awarded each a most respectably scoring. The Vinter tastes to me like schwarzbier tending a bit towards a Baltic porter, with an appealing aroma reminiscent of hot chocolate left to cool and a flavour marked by notes of burnt toast, liquorice and mild dark chocolate. The Imperial Stout is a bit on the light and thin tasting side for the style, although at 9% alcohol hardly a gentle and unassuming beer. It offers a yeast nose underscored by notes of chocolate biscuits and fresh hops, followed by a palate containing roasty flavours of 90% cocoa content chocolate and espresso, with American hop characteristics rising throughout the taste. And finally, although presented as an IPA, I would characterize Grilløl instead as a very good pale ale, with 5% alcohol, a fragrantly nutty-fruity aroma and a well-integrated nutty-citrusy bitterness that rises through the taste to a dryish and bitter finish.

But you needn’t take my word for any of this. Go out to see Martin when he comes to town and taste for yourself!

Wait, what’s that you say? It’s not abuzz? In fact, no one seems to be taking much note at all?

Can’t say I’m that surprised, really. Granville has for years been owned by Andrew Peller Limited (formerly Andres Wines), a major Canadian wine maker with but a little toe in the beer game. Molson is seeing some success with Creemore and would like to see expanded west coast distribution of its brands, even though the jury is well out on how a blatantly Ontario brand will fare outside the province. (Just as there is some question as to how such evidently Vancouver-centric brands will play in Ontario, if Molson decides to bring the Granville line-up east.) So the marriage makes a lot of sense from a structural perspective.

Far more interesting is word from the Canadian Beer News blog yesterday of a collaborative brew being planned at Canmore, Alberta’s Grizzly Paw Brewing. You can get the details over here, but basically, representatives from each of the province’s craft brewers will be getting together to brew a Dark Rye India Pale Ale (whatever that is…) with the batch being split three kegs apiece and all the proceeds going to support each individual brewery’s charity of choice.

This is the kind of initiative it would be great to see more of, and since Canada Malting is playing a prominent role by donating the ingredients, perhaps we will.

Greg was both a hero to homebrewers with his several well-written “how to” books on brewing, including the landmark Brewing Lager Beer, and a leader and familiar figure in the northeast beer scene. Most importantly, though, he was a most affable individual, equally generous with his time, knowledge and sense of humour. He was also to a degree as much a fixture on the north side of the Quebec-Vermont border as he was in his home country.

Greg will be missed by many, and my heart and sympathies go out to his family and close friends.

The Tale of the Tape: Molson Canadian 67 is being heavily marketed as a 67 calorie per bottle brew, with just 3% alcohol by volume. John Sleeman Presents Bock is 6% alcohol, but offers no hint as to its calorie content. Both are new releases, the latter for a limited time.
The Pop: The 67 certainly announced itself more vocally than did the Bock, with a resounding POP! as the cap was pried off, relative to the Bock’s more subdued pop. Once poured, however, the Bock created and maintained a nice collar of off-white foam, while the 67 poured with a head that crackled and died almost instantly.

The Look: Very pale gold for the 67, orangey copper for the Bock.

The Smell: The 67 offers a light, sweetish aroma of fresh hay and faint caramel, along with hints of fresh lemon and barely perceptible florals. The Bock has a more robustly caramelly nose with orange blossom notes, very faint cinnamony spice a and a hint of Blackstrap molasses.

The Taste: 67 tastes like, well, not much of anything, really. Seldom have I sampled a beer with this little to offer in terms of flavour, with the front reminding me more than a bit of lemon-flavoured Perrier and the thin body tasting vaguely of raw grain and fresh lemon. The finish is almost completely AWOL, with a slightly bitter edge accounting for pretty much the whole thing. The Bock, not surprisingly, has more than a bit more in store, with a sweet, chocolate-caramel start leading in to a toffee-ish body holding notes of walnut and toasted grain. The finish has a gentle bitterness to cut the very modest sweetness of the body, and also a welcomed and warming hint of alcohol.

The Judgment: Molson has tried this kind of low alcohol brew before, with Molson Select back in the 1990`s. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now. The Sleeman Bock, on the other hand, has a lot going for it, including good quaffability. It’s not the best bock I’ve ever tasted, but it is something I expect I’ll be revisiting more than a few times before supplies dry up.

The Answer: To yesterday’s question of whether I’d like the Bock twice as much as I do the 67, is yes. Three or four times as much, in fact.

The latter beer is being touted by the folks at Molson Coors as “Canada’s Lowest Calorie Beer,” with a mere 67 calories per bottle and, unique for this country, I think, a statement of Nutrition Facts on the back of every bottle. What I find interesting about these beers, however, is not their weight, but their respective alcohol contents: 3% for the Canadian 67 and precisely twice that amount, or 6%, for the Sleeman Bock.

So the question is, will the Bock hold twice the appeal of the 67? I have my suspicions, but first I’m going to chill down a couple of bottles of each and sample what’s inside. Check back with me in a day or so for the results.

I won’t expound upon what I think about the individual winners, nor will I list them. (They are over here in full.) But I will pass comment on some of the criticism that has been levelled at the Awards here and here and again over here.

The CBAs are a young awards, and as such are suffering the kind of awkward growing pains that occur during normal adolescence and pre-adolescence. It’s to be expected. Still, problems persist, as have been rightly and, at times, rather unsympathetically observed elsewhere. Here’s my take:

1. Problem one is a lack of inclusiveness, caused simply by breweries not entering their beers. Does anyone think Dieu du Ciel would not have brought home at least one medal if they had entered their beers? I thought not. This, however, will resolve itself as the CBAs grow and become more nationally important. (Memo to the CBA organizers: if you want to bring the Quebec brewers on board, look into partnering in some way with Montreal’s Mondial de la Biere.)
2. Next up is the non-awarding of medals, about which I am in agreement with those who point out its absurdity. When a race is to the finish line, the top three finishers are awarded gold, silver and bronze, period. To say that the second place finisher did not run fast enough to warrant the silver, or the second place beer did not garner enough judging points, is ridiculous.
3. Judging methods have also been called to task, and here I both agree and disagree. Judges are human and therefore fallible, but these imperfections can be regulated as much as possible with proper guidance. That Greg Nash is in possession of score sheets suggesting his 37hr Simcoe SMaSH should have been entered in the Double IPA category rather than as an IPA, when no such category existed, is indicative of, at least, misinformed judging and, at worst, lack of leadership.
4. Still, judges can only work with what they have in front of them and the instructions they have been given, plus their palates, of course. So no one is in any position to say that this beer or that one should have received any given medal. On another day in different conditions and with the beers presented in a different order, the result could very well have been quite different.
5. Finally, with respect to the judging, I highly suggest freeing those poor men and women from the dogma of the BJCP standards. Beer is about pleasure, not conformation to a given set of style standards, and while a pale ale should certainly taste like a pale ale in order to win gold, I strongly believe that the ultimate factor in what makes a beer a gold, silver or bronze medal winner should be its balance, complexity and enjoyment, not its colour or perceived IBU count.

Then I cast my eye over the sponsors and spied something curious. Amid the expected chocolate and restaurant sponsors were a mere two alcohols, Skyy Vodka and Amarula Liqueur.

Now, I’ve against either vodka or cream liqueur, but neither is the first I think of when the idea of chocolate is raised. Vodka is a clear and crisp spirit, better suited to fish or cream, I think, than rich and sweet chocolate, while cream liqueur and chocolate must surely be a case of gilding the proverbial lily.

Where is the whiskey, or whisky, for that matter? Where are the great, chocolate-friendly Belgian ales, Scotch ales and barleywines? Hello, cognac?

It looks like there’s still time to get involved in this year’s presentation, so come on, distillers, brewers and importers. Time to step up!

(Is it even possible to “slum it” in Yorkville, Toronto’s swankiest shopping district? My sense is that no, it isn’t, but then again, to my experience, neither is it possible to eat terribly well, especially now that Truffles at the Four Seasons has served its last plate.)

And so begins the deluge of so-and-so ate here and minor-celebrity-you’ve-never-heard-of ate there. About which I personally couldn’t give even the slightest. What I would like to know, though, is who is drinking what, and where. Big ticket bottles of wine at dinner are probably a given, but what craft beers at Volo or beerbistro, cutting-edge cocktails at Barchef, or a pint of fine cask-conditioned bitter at The Granite? Are any of our visiting stars and starlettes imbibing well beyond the sanctified confines of Yorkville?

Serious drinks folk want to know…

For whatever odd reason, I find that responsible people who would never dream of getting behind the wheel after more than a couple of drinks think nothing of hopping on their bikes in the same circumstances. Which I have always thought is completely ludicrous. Because just as you can harm yourself and others when driving while intoxicated, you can do the exact same thing on a bicycle!

I stopped biking after more than a couple of drinks after a friend of mine ran into a car on the way home from the pub one night. (Yes, you read that right he ran into the car, not the other way around.) Fortunately, he was okay, just scrapped and bruised and shaken up, but it hammered home the danger of being drunk on a bike, namely that you have no hulking sheath of metal around you for protection.

It has yet to be determined if Darcy Allan Sheppard’s drinking played a role in his unfortunate death this past Monday night, but even if it did not, the message here is clear, that in any encounter between auto and bicycle, the car will always win. Think about that the next time you’re thinking about biking over for a session at the pub.

Hops used to be grown all along the southern Canadian border, from the Maritimes through to BC, but until recently had pretty much vanished from our agricultural mosaic. Until recently.

As this Globe and Mail story illustrates, hops are on a modest comeback in Canada, having been in very recent years replanted in several regions. In fact, just the other day I received a notice about a small crop of organic hops grown in eastern Ontario that are now coming up for sale. If you’re a homebrewer, you can do a lot worse for yourself than these beauties.

Now to that other flavouring, specifically the oh-so-trendy lime. I was asked by the aforementioned Globe to taste test the two battling brews and the results appear in today’s paper. Let me tell you, folks, this was one tasting that was plain and simply no fun at all.

(I like Fine Point’s comment about using Rose’s instead.)