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.

SEEN IN VANCOUVER #437: Progress Video From Mt. Pleasant’s “33 Acres Brewing Co.”

In his Barley Mowat column, Scout beer writer Chuck Hallett recently gave us an update and look inside at what was happening with Mt. Pleasant highly anticipated 33 Acres Brewing Company. Now you can pair that intel with a cool, refreshing video that is making our office thirsty:

Two years ago the idea of building a family run microbrewery began to unfold. Enlisting the help of a few friends, slowly the plans began to materialize. A space in Mt. Pleasant was chosen as our home, this is a look at what?s been happening around here since signing on the dotted line.

EVERYTHING SEEN IN VANCOUVER

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.

GOODS: R&B Brewing’s Raven Cream Ale & East Side Bitter Now Available In Six Packs

R&B Brewing Company is located at 54 East 4th Avenue in Vancouver, BC | 604-874-2537 | www.rbbrewing.com

The GOODS from R&B Brewing Co.

Vancouver, BC | B.C. craft beer drinkers can rest easy after the long-awaited release of R&B Brewing Co. beer in six packs. The most popular beers in the R&B Brewing collection are the Raven Cream Ale and the East Side Bitter. These two award-wining brews are the first of many R&B Brewing Co. beers to be packaged in 341ML bottles and sold in six packs.

“Craft beer is no longer a niche market; the movement in B.C., particularly in Vancouver is exploding at the moment,” says R&B Brewing Co. Co-owner, Rick Dellow (the R in R&B). “Barry (the B in R&B) and I have been wanting to make the leap to six packs for a while and we feel the right time is now.”

The decision to package the East Side Bitter and the Raven Cream Ale in six packs came in response to demand from individual consumers and restaurant accounts. Restaurants and bars that don’t offer beer on draught or have a limited amount of draught lines, have been asking for R&B beer in 341mL bottles. Many consumers buy 650mL bottles because the large bottles are conducive to sampling different types of beer, without having to make a big investment. Once R&B drinkers discover that the ESB or Raven is their favourite, they prefer to pick up a six pack. Six packs are easy to share with friends and the 341mL bottles are perfect for individual servings.

R&B Brewing Co. believes hand crafted beer deserves hand crafted packaging. Every detail from the label to the bar code has been hand rendered by St. Bernadine Mission Communications. The new design is reflective of the East Vancouver neighbourhood where the brewery in located. The gritty black and white illustrations of iconic East Vancouver imagery and slang make these six packs stand out on the shelf. Read more

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 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.

DINER: New “Red Truck” Brewery In East Van To Break Ground With A Massive Bang

One of our favourite local breweries – Red Truck – is going to be dropping a Red Truck from a nice height to celebrate the ground breaking for their new brewery. Here’s a snippet from a press release that will start making the rounds at some point in the next 24 hours…

We’re running out of beer. In the beer drinking year of 2004 Red Truck began driving its’ 1946 Dodge Power Wagon through the streets of the lower mainland, delivering the freshest beer available to Vancouverites and their guests.

From Keg 1, Dave ‘da Brewa’ Varga has been painstakingly brewing delicious Red Truck lager and ale as slowly as he can, always maintaining quality over quantity. Fortunately for the Red Truck Beer Company, Dave has been doing a fantastic job. So good in fact, we have to move from our brewery in North Vancouver to new digs on East 1st Avenue – smack dab in the middle of the city in Brewery Creek.

Complete with a 50’s-style Truck Stop, Red Truck Beer Company will be packaging its fresh beer in bottles, cans and kegs from this home.

…and some renderings to wet your whistle…

You can join the Red Truck crew for their “Truck Drop” and ground breaking at 315 East 1st Avenue on Thursday, September 27th from 2:46pm to 5:46pm. Note that the “drop” will take place at 4pm sharp. Details and such can be found here. See you there!

GOODS: “Dockside” Gears Up For Canada Day Celebrations On Granville Island

Dockside Restaurant is located at 1253 Johnston St. in Vancouver BC | 604-685-7070 | docksidebrewing.com

The GOODS from Dockside

Vancouver, BC | Granville Island is Vancouver’s Canada Day headquarters and Dockside Restaurant at the Granville Island Hotel is offering three different ways join of the party: a pancake breakfast, an all-day BBQ on Vancouver’s best patio and the official cake-cutting ceremony at 2pm. All in all, it’s 12 straight hours of Canada Day fun. Granville Island will be abuzz with activities from free live jazz on four different stages, a free Canada Day Parade and even a Children’s Festival with performers and face painting. The day kicks off in earnest with Dockside’s Truly Canadian Pancake Breakfast starting at 7am. The Dockside team will be whipping up hotcakes and Canadian bacon until 10am to help everyone fuel up for their full day of Canada Day activities. Breakfast is $8 per person with partial proceeds going to Canuck Place. Read more

GOODS: Red Truck Releases “Ruby” English Strong Ale In Honour Of The Brewery Mascot

Red Truck Beer Co. is located at 1015 Marine Dr. in North Vancouver | 604-682-4733 | www.redtruckbeer.com

The GOODS from Red Truck Beer Company

Vancouver, BC | If you’ve met Sam Payne, you’ve probably met “Ruby da dog”, the Red Truck Beer mascot. Ruby is a rescue dog that has come a long way in her 4 years with us. “Ruby da beer” is brewer Dave Varga’s tribute to Ruby on her 4th birthday. This beer, like Ruby, is strong, unique and a ton of fun. Red Truck Limited “Ruby” (6.9% alcohol by volume) is an English Strong Ale with French oak. It has some caramel malt sweetness, and the hops are there strictly for balance. It has a distinctive oak character you typically find in wine, whiskey, bourbon, or scotch. It has a deep amber color with a vanilla bourbon aroma. It pairs well with Pate and Terrines, Grilled Shellfish, BBQ sauces, pork and duck as well as many desserts like bread pudding and apple pie. It is currently available at The Alibi Room, Habit, St Augustines, Central Bistro, Calabash Bistro, and Romers Burger Bar in Kitsilano. Details about the brewery after the jump… Read more

GOODS: Red Truck Beer Co. Has Unleashed Its “Tragically Bitter” Ale Around Vancouver

Red Truck Beer Co. is located at 1015 Marine Dr. in North Vancouver | 604-682-4733 | www.redtruckbeer.com

The GOODS from Red Truck Beer Company

Vancouver, BC | The Red Truck Limited Release “Tragically Bitter” (4.6% – 4.7%) is our interpretation of the premium, traditional session bitter ales of England. It sports a pleasing fruit aroma, a light caramel malt flavour, and a distinctive tea and woodsy hop character. This ale is very drinkable and has terrific balance, pairing well with charcuterie, pate, pickled anything, grilled/roasted/fried chicken, pork, and strong flavoured seafoods. Tragically Bitter is available for a limited time at Boneta, The Alibi Room, St Augustines, Calabash, The Point Grill in UBC, Central Bistro and The Academic. Read more

Bitter Tasting Room

Details

16 West Hastings Street | Vancouver, BC V6B 1G8
Telephone: 604.688.9779
Web: BitterTastingRoom.com | Twitter | Facebook

Gallery

The People

Owners: Sean Heather & Scott Hawthorn
GM: Mike Mitchell
Executive Chef: Paul Haldane

About Bitter Tasting Room

At Bitter, we want you to join us on a journey to a time when Vancouver had a bustling beer culture. Before Prohibition shut down the taps, the local breweries were countless. Delicious ales, lagers and bitters poured free. A golden era in history, before the rise of the beer monopoly, when brewers made the beer they wanted to make, not the beer they had to make.

DINER: A Look Inside “Bitter Tasting Room” As Its November Opening Approaches

by Andrew Morrison | As promised, I checked out the progress at Sean Heather and Scott Hawthorn’s Bitter Tasting Room earlier today. The highly anticipated temple to beer at 18 West Hastings (across from Pigeon Park off Carrall) is coming along nicely. I’m particularly besotted by the 3/4 circular bar, which is much larger than I originally thought it would be. It juts out from a towering wall of beer fridges and totally dominates the space, which is lined with benches made of wood reclaimed from buildings in Gastown and Yaletown. Not only will it act as a wood and well for bar service, it will also do double time as the main kitchen. It comes as fully equipped as a ventless kitchen should (mise en place, lowboys, etc), and will likely prove interesting to see in action. The rear of Bitter – the semi-private room – is nearly complete as well, and will eventually sport a drop down projector screen for Canuck games. But the coolest thing by far? On one of the many pieces of paper floating around, I spied a design mock up that showed what appeared to be a blown up photo of Hastings & Carrall street scene from 1910 (or thereabouts) covering the restaurant’s street frontage (see one of the photos below). At first, I didn’t see any of the big motif started on the window, but I peeled a bit of the paper back and lo! There was a small test patch of the huge image already installed. That means, if I’m not totally mistaken, that we’ll be able to sit and drink and look at the street outside through an image of what it looked like 100 years ago. How awesome is that?

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