BARLEY MOWAT: On “Cask Ales” And Why We Should Celebrate The Hell Out Of Them

by Chuck Hallett | You’ve probably heard the term “Cask Ale” before. Maybe you’ve seen it on a poster or perhaps you’ve noticed my rants on Twitter about how casks are awesome and everything else sucks (relative to casks, that is). But what are cask ales, exactly, and why should you care?

Cask Ales are beers that are served from the same tiny vessel in which the beer was conditioned (matured). Big whoop, right? What difference does it make if you’re drinking the beer from the cask or from the bottle you bought at the store? Beer is beer, no?

Well, that’s the trick. Beer isn’t always beer. In fact, in the early 1970′s, English pub-goers became so offended at the lack of cask ales in England that they created a new name for casked ales and a new movement to demand more of it: The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). Fast forward to today and we now have three branches of the same movement, all demanding Real Ale in BC.

What’s all the fuss about? The trick is the second you take beer off of the yeast or, even worse, filter the yeast out completely, it changes. Yeast contributes more than just carbonation, alcohol and awesomeness to beer — it makes up a significant portion of the flavour as well. Leave the yeast in and you have a different ale: a Real Ale.

Additionally, most beer is like milk, in that it’s better as fresh as possible. Since the beer inside a cask is still technically being brewed, having a pint from the nozzle is about as fresh as you can get. It’s akin to stalking a cow down in the field, and taking a pull straight from the udder. Mmm…that’s actually kind of creepy.

The other thing that makes casks interesting is that they give brewers the ability to screw around with their beers. Want to add some orange into your citrusy IPA to see what happens? Well, good luck convincing the brewery owners to do a major release of a recipe you came up with while pulling deep on a bong on your back deck. A 35 litre cask, though, is small enough to screw around with. If you screw up, and the cask explodes — spraying pineapple chunks all over the brewery — no one’s too pissed off at you (side note: this is totally a thing that actually happened).

That’s the true appeal of casks for me: they’re unique. The beer you’re having from a cask is different from any other beer you’ve ever had before. Maybe it’s hoppier. Maybe it has some fruit in it (or tea), or maybe it’s been brewed using completely novel ingredients because…hey, why not? Brewing beer is all about experimentation, and casks are the purest expression of the discipline.

Homework: Go drink some casks! Casks used to be a rarity in Vancouver, but now you can find a pub around town with a cask on virtually every night of the week. Additionally, there are cask festivals every now and then around town, including this very weekend (update: now sold out). On every night, the Alibi Room has three casks, and The Irish Heather has one. Cask nights abound, so go ahead and make a week of it…

Monday: St Augustine’s
Tuesday: The Railway Club
Wednesday: No takers…yet
Thursday: Yaletown Brewing Company, Sunset Grill
Friday: London Pub, Big Ridge Brewing
Saturday: Central City Brewpub
Sunday: The Whip

Since the casks change constantly, there’s often not a whole lot of warning about what beer will be on display any given day. You can watch the Vancouver chapter of CAMRA’s Twitter account (@CAMRA_YVR) for updates on casks and more general beer news, or just search for the hashtag #CaskAlert.

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Chuck Hallett lives and works in downtown Vancouver. His passionate obsession with craft beer borders on insanity. When not attempting to single-handedly financially support the local brewing industry through personal consumption, he spouts off on his award-winning beer-themed blog: BarleyMowat.com. If you’re in a good beer bar reading this, odds are he’s sitting next to you. Be polite and say hi.

BARLEY MOWAT: A Look Inside East Van’s Highly Anticipated “33 Acres Brewing Co.”

by Chuck Hallett | As is now widely known, 2013 will see a large batch of new breweries opening in Vancouver. Among the first to put beer in my beer hole will be the highly anticipated 33 Acres.

Located in the newly resurgent Brewery Creek District (Main between 2nd and Broadway) at 15 West 8th Avenue, it’s the love-child of film student turned brewery owner Josh Michnik and Brewmaster Dave Varga (formerly of Taylor’s Crossing/Red Truck fame).

33 Acres will very much be “the brewery that Josh built” as he’s had an active hand in virtually every aspect of creating it, from renovations and building upgrades to installing the brewing kit itself. But that’s just Josh’s approach: if you want something done right, best do it yourself. “No short-cuts,” he says, “that goes for not only the beer, but the merch, brand, the furniture, the floors, the walls, everything.”

Josh’s dedication shows in the space he has created. Breweries are often efficient affairs, design driven by practicality first and human use last. This is not the case here. The brewery itself is warm and inviting; reassuringly human in its scale. Tying the whole production floor together is a massive wooden ceiling that Josh spent weeks cleaning and restoring — a chore most breweries would have avoided with a simple bucket of paint.

The goal at 33 Acres is to build something that represents the opposite of the kind of industrial scale manufacturing concern that breweries came to represent during the last century. “I saw 33 Acres as a way to build a place where the neighbourhood could stop by on the way to work, say hi, help load some grain off a truck, have a cup of coffee, and just hang out.” says Josh. “Then on the way home from work, do the same but fill up a growler or stay for a pint.”

Building a space and letting Dave Varga work his magic is a plan that I can get behind. Look for 33 Acres beer to begin showing up in local pubs and restaurants later this Spring. In the meantime, you can follow their progress on Twitter and Instagram. (some images courtesy of 33 Acres)

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Chuck Hallett lives and works in downtown Vancouver. His passionate obsession with craft beer borders on insanity. When not attempting to single-handedly financially support the local brewing industry through personal consumption, he spouts off on his award-winning beer-themed blog: BarleyMowat.com. If you’re in a good beer bar reading this, odds are he’s sitting next to you. Be polite and say hi.

BARLEY MOWAT: Why Craft Beers Are Awesome (And Macro Brewery Beers Suck)

by Chuck Hallett | So what’s all this Craft Beer fuss about? You see the term in bars, and you definitely see it in the liquor store, but what makes some beers craft and others…not?

“Craft Beer” is a fairly new concept, one which grew out of the older term “Micro-brewery.” Micro-breweries staggered onto the scene begin in the mid-80s, and wanted to differentiate themselves from the “beer” produced by the major breweries (think Coors, Busch, Molson, etc). So, they began a program of marketing themselves as the little guy, brewing beer with time honoured traditions and only quality ingredients, versus the big corporate behemoths, only concerned with ever-increasing profits.

And guess what? It worked. It worked so well, in fact, that the micro-breweries grew so large that the term “micro” became a fairly laughable misnomer for them. Therefore a new term was needed, and now we have Craft Beer. Only the USA has an official definition of craft beer (and one that seemingly constantly shifts to avoid including anything brewed by the big guys); Canada has no official designation, but coloquially it means “sorta good.” You can read more about changing Craft Beer designations here.

But why aren’t macros good? Surely, as the old “micros” have proven, one can certainly brew good beer in large volumes? Ah, but therein lies the trick. The older, larger breweries just aren’t brewing good beer. They aren’t even trying to brew good beer. They’re brewing a special brand of insipid lager that they created and popularized through decades of research and advertising. How? Why? Time for a bit of history…

Lighter tasting beers are a fairly recent innovation in brewing. While the trend towards predominantly lager production was in place pretty much as soon as lager was invented, the wheels really didn’t come off the beer flavour cart until US Prohibition (1920). Prohibition is pretty much solely responsible for the invention of “American-style Pale Lager”, a label that’s about as hard to throw out of your mouth as the product is to throw in. Even so, this abomination is anywhere from 75-95% of all beer sold today, depending on the market (we’re ~80%, FYI).

In the dark years of Prohibition bartenders would smuggle barrels of lager in from Canada (or from underground breweries closer to home) and then conscientiously serve a quality product to a clientele that, suffering under the iron fist of repression, needed just a few moments of flavourful relief and respite from their cruel, beer-less lives. Just kidding, they watered that shit down to within an inch of its life and sold it to desperate rummies who would pay anything for their medicine. It’s just the way it goes.

Surprisingly, their patrons actually *preferred* the lighter flavoured, lower alcohol product. Partly this was because the beer was either originally produced in someone’s bathtub between bathings or, even worse, smuggled in from Canada in a long, unrefrigerated version of a reverse underground railroad. Also, it could be presumed that it was easier to deny imbibing illegally if one wasn’t passed out blind drunk at the dinner table.

When the USA got their collective senses back and repealed Prohibition (1933), the pent-up demand was not for quality beers, but rather for the weaker American lagers that everyone had become used to…and so an industry was born. In the next few decades, things went from bad to worse as breweries boomed, grew to industrial scale, and began experimenting with ways to make their product even less flavourful. Flavourless hops and barley were custom bred to help (Coors famously uses their own species of barley) but that only took things so far.

Shortly thereafter, adjuncts such as corn entered the brewing chain, along with non-hop bittering methods. These were praised not only by consumers for providing “clean, refreshing taste” but also by the producers because they’re cheap as fuck compared to actual barley and hops.

Around this industry of generic, insipid drunk-water grew a massive marketing machine. This wasn’t by accident; the only way to differentiate an entire industry of effectively identical products is through branding. And thus the big-budget beer commercial was born, and legions of brand-loyal consumers bought the slick marketing hook, line and stinker. Despite professing being “Bud Men” or a “Coors Fan”, the reality is that the vast majority of macro-drinkers are unable to differentiate between their preferred product and the competition’s. They’ve bought the branding, not the beer.

With a product whose very existence relies on strong branding comes strong competitive advertising and a cut-throat industry hell-bent on destroying or acquiring the competition. This is macro beer, and the big guys behave towards the little guys pretty much like you’d expect: they buy them and shut ‘em down (or seriously water down their product to “increase its marketability”).

Craft Beer, in stark contrast, is focused around making the best beer possible and letting consumers decide what to drink – preferrably a variety of products. Consumers have bought into this model so strongly that the Craft Beer segment continues to grow faster than the breweries can keep up. With enough business to go around for everyone, there’s no pressure to subdue one’s competition. In fact, craft breweries have invented a unique tradition: the collaboration, wherein two breweries jointly share the creation of a beer so they can share techniques, technologoies, and processes.

That spirit of collaboration, quality, and constant improvement is the heart and soul of “Craft Beer”. The great suds are just a bonus.

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Chuck Hallett lives and works in downtown Vancouver. His passionate obsession with craft beer borders on insanity. When not attempting to single-handedly financially support the local brewing industry through personal consumption, he spouts off on his award-winning beer-themed blog: BarleyMowat.com. If you’re in a good beer bar reading this, odds are he’s sitting next to you. Be polite and say hi.

BARLEY MOWAT: On How To Comprehend Your Sister’s Weird Homebrewing Boyfriend

by Chuck Hallett | Barley. Hops. Yeast. Water. You’ve probably heard these words touted around in relation to beer in an advertisement, or maybe you’ve seen them printed on the side of a bottle. But do you really understand how they go together to make our Favourite Beverage? Do you just put them in a blender and hit “pulse”? Is it a bit more complicated than that? In a few minutes from now you’ll know the answers to these questions and more. Welcome back to beer school!

Brewing is both an ancient art and a modern science, and boy is it ever a lot more technical that just putting some barley in a bucket and hoping for the best. There are millenia of history behind making beer. Seemingly most of that time was devoted to inventing new slang for the process: malt, wort, mash, pitch, and many other terms have muscled their way into the process’ parlance, making communication in beer speak a chore for the uninitiated. If you ever find yourself in a discussion with one of the (often bearded) beererati, his occasional incomprehensibility is perfectly normal. It’s kinda like how I feel with art. Or music. Or the weather. (Pretty much anything but beer, really.)

Luckily, the basic concepts behind brewing beer are not that hard to grasp. The following list of terms won’t teach you how to actually make beer, but it will – at the very least – familiarize you with the core concepts in beer-making, allowing you hereafter to nod knowingly the next time your sister’s weird homebrewing boyfriend corners you at a party. Read ‘em up and don’t forget your delicious homework!

Malting. First, barley is not just reaped with a giant scythe then fermented, as cool as that would be. Before the magic can happen, barley must be malted, or allowed to germinate. Germination tricks the barley into thinking it’s been planted and it’s go-time for growing. The result is that the barley seeds generate the enzymes required to convert starch into sugar to support that growth, but this is just a tease: before any real growth occurs the germination is rather rudely halted with dry heat.

Milling. Next, all that malted barley (or malt for short) is ground up in a mill in a process rather creatively called Milling. The result here is a pile of ground up grain called grist. I’m not really sure what else you’d expect.

Mashing. The grist is added to a bunch of hot water in a process called “mashing in.” The hot water is called “Liquor” but, disappointingly, this is just a label. Mashing occurs in a “mash tun” which is vaguely Gallic for “big pot in which one make beer.” The reason the water is hot is that the heat activates the enzymes in the malt to complete the starch-to-sugar conversion. There are several different enzymes and several different ideal temperatures involved, but you get the drift. The result is a grain/water/sugar slurry called mash that can be filtered to create “wort,” the immediate precursor to beer.

Boil. Because we’re all slobs, and also because wort is effectively just a giant barrel of perfect bacteria food that, if left around, would grow enough nasty shit to kill everyone in a three mile radius, the next step is to sanitize things. The easiest way to sanitize a liquid is to boil the ever loving fuck out of it, so we proceed to do just that.

Hopping. During the boil hops are added at different points to balance out all that sugar with bitterness, flavours and awesomeness. Very generally, the earlier the hops are added, the more flavour they provide, while later means more aroma. Hops, being natural preservatives, have the additional benefit of scrubbing unwanted proteins out of the wort.

Chill. Next we bring the steril wort down to a safe temperature for yeast. This is done quickly through a heat exchanger for a few reasons, but a major consideration is that it just takes freaking forever for 15,000 litres of wort to cool down by itself and we don’t have all day, dammit.

Pitch. Once cool, a bucket of yeast is dumped, or “pitched,” into the mixture. Most people don’t suspect it, but yeast contributes most of the flavour to any given beer. Change the yeast, change the beer. With the yeast added, the wort slowly begins turning into beer (wort + booze = beer), and an angel gets its wings. From here the wort is left to ferment for a period of time, which depends on what kind of beer is being made.

Conditioning. Eventually most of the yeast is done, and it settles to the bottom of the fermenter. This inactive yeast is removed, and the beer is left to settle for a while (days or weeks). This lets flavours in the beer blend and mellow, and gives time for undesireable by-products of brewing to off-gas. If you’re drinking a flavoured beer, like a pumpkin ale, odds are the pumpkin was added during this stage.

Bottling/Kegging. Pretty much what you’d expect. The beer might be additionally filtered prior to bottling or kegging to increase clarity, but frankly that’s a horrible thing to do to beer. Sure, it looks good, but it steals much of the yeast’s flavour from the body of the beer, and I’ll take body over looks any day. Yes, this whole article was written specifically to support that joke.

And there you go! You now know more about brewing than I did a decade ago, and perhaps even just enough to horrifibly burn yourself in your kitchen. Congratulations! Homework after the jump… Read more

BARLEY MOWAT: On Lagers And Ales And Drinking To All Their Delicious Differences

by Chuck Hallett | The trick with having a bountiful crop of new breweries sprouting up everywhere you look is that you have to have a fairly solid appreciation of beer in order to really get all you can out of them. No matter how many times I reassure you that there’s no shame in being a Lager Lad, eventually you’ll wind up at a party and someone will ask your opinions on, say, Cascadian versus American IPAs. And then you’ll hate me for letting you go uninformed for so long before crying in the corner for a little bit. So, in order to prevent that from ever happening I will be undertaking a crash course on beer here on Scout. This won’t be an advanced, multi-week rant of beer snobbery, but rather a gentle easing into the smooth, hoppy waters that is beer geekery, all in bite-sized chunks. There will be homework, and yes, you can drink your homework. Let’s get started with the basics…

Beer 101: Lager & Ale | If you ask a random non-beer person on the street what the two main styles of beer are, you’ll get a variety of answers: Light & Dark, Macro & Micro, or even Molson & Labatts. The correct answer, though, is Lager and Ale. All beer is definitively one or the other, and both lagers and ales are beers. This last fact is not as widely understood as you might imagine hope, as I have on several occasions heard the question “Is ale considered beer?”

The difference between the two is largely technical. The yeast used to brew lager is usually Saccharomyces pastorianus (pronounced “screw it, it’s the yeast for lager”) vs Saccharomyces cerevisiae for ale (you can learn more about yeast on my own blog here). Feel like a geek yet? We’re just getting started! The term lager itself comes from the practise of cold storing the beer while it matured, originally in European caves, which was called “Lagering.” Lager is, in fact, German for “storage.” However, you can just as validly “lager” an ale, although this is fairly rare (in a fit of creativity, the result was named a “Lagered Ale”).

Each category is further subdivided into styles, of which there are around 80-100 depending on whom you ask, with more being added all the time. Some examples of each are Lager: Pale Lager, Pilsner, and Bock. For Ale: Stout, India Pale Ale, Belgian and Pale Ale.

People will often tell you that lagers are always light in colour and flavour while ales are the opposite. While these generalizations are often true, they don’t hold for all cases. Take, for example, a nice Ice Bock versus a Blonde Ale. The Ice Bock is black as night and boasts massive coffee flavours and high alcohol to boot, while the Blonde Ale is pretty much what you’d expect: light, refreshing, and puts white-out on computer screens (sorry, I couldn’t resist).

The origins of the “Lagers are light and devoid of flavour or colour” is likely because the type of lager most people are familiar with is the American-Style Pale Lager, more commonly known by its commercial name: “Macro Swill.” Brewed in vats of mind-numbing size to be as inoffensive as possible, these beers are often simply labelled “Beer” because any other term might distract from the branding. General rule: if a beer won’t say what style it is, it’s likely a macro lager (note that there are varieties of Pale Lager that have actual flavour, these are usually takes on the Germanic originals rather than the awful American spin).

But that’s enough fancy book learnin’ for today. It’s time for you to get started on to the drinking portion of this course! You’ll find all your liquid homework after the jump… Read more

DINER: PR Meltdown For Steamworks After Owner Gets Possessive Of “Cascadia” Beer

by Andrew Morrison | Steamworks owner Eli Gershkowitz isn’t making many friends in the local craft beer scene at the moment thanks to a seemingly ill-considered move to try and enforce his 1999 trademark on the word “Cascadia” (in relation to beer) by apparently sending bullying cease and desist letters to breweries making Cascadian-style brews. That’s some awful derpitude right there, and the internets don’t approve. The social media backlash against Gershkowitz and Steamworks has been quick and ferocious. Read about the whole sordid affair over at my new favourite blog, Barley Mowat.

UPDATE: Steamwork’s rushed (and unconvincing) response here. Meh. Barley Mowat’s follow up.