Month: October 2016

Five great beers for a forced obligatory Halloween blog post

Posted on by Ben

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It’s Halloween, which means our houses will soon be filled with candy–either leftover from trick or treaters that never showed or dutifully collected from the neighbourhood by our own kids–and you know what that means: it’s time to capitalize on this annual event with an article that clumsily attempts to link two things as disparate as candy and beer!

Candy, of course, doesn’t pair very well with beer at all with the possible exception of chocolate and some stouts, but even then eating chocolate tends to negate the “chocolate-y” aspects of stouts leaving you to only taste the bitterness and roasted malt characters of the beer.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to force these things together today with some beer and candy pairings because, hey, web traffic. Continue reading “Five great beers for a forced obligatory Halloween blog post” →

Haiku reviews: Half Hours on Earth’s Micro Threat

Posted on by Ben

Haiku reviews is a feature wherein I invoke the brief and impressionistic style of poetry to devote exactly 17 syllables to reviewing a beer.

Half Hours on Earth’s Micro Threat 

Dusk fell on the park.
She offered me a Sweet Tart,
And we said goodbye.

What they have to say: Uh, not much, actually. But it’s a 3.5% tart brett grisette.

Want to send me a beer for the haiku review treatment? Drop me a line.

Five local stouts you should drink, and why you should drink them

Posted on by Ben

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Despite nearly five years writing fairly regular “top [number] beers for [occasion]” posts for blogTO, I’m actually not a huge believer in the idea that you need to change your drinking habits based on the seasons.

Drink juicy IPAs in the winter if you want. Enjoy boozy, barrel-aged beasts in the throes of August. Drink Pumpkin beer never. Whatever.

That being said, I do find that I tend to crave darker beer around the time the leaves start to change and so this seems like as as good a time as any to take a look at what I feel is an oddly-overlooked category here in Ontario, namely stouts. Now I know there are plenty of brewers who make great imperial stouts, and I know that there are brewers who make seasonal, occasional, or one-off stouts, but frankly I’m not sure when we decided that that dark beer was something we only needed from time to time and when we decided stouts needed to have double digit ABV, be bourbon-barrel aged, or include chili-peppers, or vanilla.

And so with that in mind here are five well-made, widely-available, year-round stouts (and one probably-soon-to-be-year-round) that are worth checking out this fall. Or winter. Or whenever. Continue reading “Five local stouts you should drink, and why you should drink them” →

Haiku reviews: Big Rock Brewery’s Citradelic Single Hop IPA

Posted on by Ben

Haiku reviews is a feature wherein I invoke the brief and impressionistic style of poetry to devote exactly 17 syllables to reviewing a beer.
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Big Rock Brewery’s Citradelic Single Hop IPA

If, five years ago,
this beer hit Ontario,
it would have been great.

What they have to say: “A refreshing IPA, Citradelic Single Hop IPA gets its name from the Citra hops used in the brewing process. For Citradelic, repeated heavy dosing and dry hopping brings out the smooth citrus and tropical tones of the Citra hop. These hops are grown in Washington’s Yakima Valley, one of the most fertile and productive hop-growing regions in the world.”

Want to send me a beer for the haiku review treatment? Drop me a line.

The “straight” goods: Toronto Distillery Co.’s First Barrels Whisky

Posted on by Ben

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The first new distillery in Toronto since 1933 has just launched the city’s first 100% organic whisky, and in addition to bringing about “the rebirth of whisky distilling in one of the historically great whisky cities of the world,” its makers are hoping the bottle and its contents might start a conversation about whisky standards in Canada.

Launched in 2013 by Charles Benoit and Jess Razaqpur, the Toronto Distillery Co. was borne of two high school buddies’ shared passion for whisky. Given the requirement for whisky to age, the start-up company located in the Junction (directly next door to Junction Craft Brewing) has, like most new distillers, largely been selling organic gin and “new make” grain spirits, an unaged whisky that you might know by the less refined moniker “moonshine.”

Until now. Continue reading “The “straight” goods: Toronto Distillery Co.’s First Barrels Whisky” →