Reviews

CYPRESS HONEY LAGER—Good swill during unpleasant times

8:00am

Somebody mailed a human foot to the Conservative Party’s Ottawa HQ yesterday, causing police to declare a Hazmat situation while investigators pored over the Canada Post sorting plant where all packages go before final delivery.

Weirdly, a maggoty human torso had just been discovered in a suitcase in Montreal. Who knows where the head and remaining limbs are destined… I sure wouldn’t want to be a mail sorter this week.

Tory MP Brad Trost, a hardcore pro-lifer who apparently thinks Stephen Harper is too conservative and longs to reopen the abortion debate in Canada, first learned about the foot on TV. “It’s just awful,” said Trost, describing it as “someone’s sick idea.”

Newsflash, Brad: A picture or a story about a severed foot is a sick idea. An actual severed foot goes beyond ideation. Dude, when somebody mails you a body part, it’s either:

  • A mistake (Was it in an ice bath? Was it supposed to be reattached to somebody waiting at the hospital?)
  • A joke (Not funny!)
  • A message (What do you think it could mean, my fellow inebriates?)

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12:00pm

Wow! A lot can happen while you’re out swinging on swings, visiting Tim Horton’s, and watching dogs get haircuts at the pet store. The police just intercepted a package containing a severed HAND at the Ottawa Postal Terminal. They’ve connected the hand and foot with the torso in Montreal, plus they have a suspect. In all likelihood the gruesome mailings are a mob-style message related to the Charbonneau Commission investigating organized crime in the construction industry.

Although police have expressed doubt that any more body parts will show up in the mail, if I were an employee of Canada Post or the Harper government I would definitely be bringing a flask to work. Maybe even phoning in drunk.

With a six-pack of GRANVILLE ISLAND CYPRESS HONEY LAGER I could just manage it, although my friends weighing more than a pound might want to consider a full case. Amber-yellow with a quickly receding beige head, this lager promises honey. Instead bakery leftovers and cloying malt waft from the glass. If you detect honey then you have a finer nose than I and/or the power of suggestion is strong with you. If this latter characteristic fits, you might not wish to drink CYPRESS HONEY LAGER while reading about detached body parts crawling with maggots—you wouldn’t want to cement that association.

Honey, when added to a lager, often mitigates the tinny lightness of that brewing style and lends some depth. But one sip of CYPRESS HONEY LAGER confirms what the nose suspected: precious little honey. Sweetness, yes, but of a juvenile, corn-syrup stripe unable to elevate this lager from a thin, watery and even sour taste experience. This would be an excellent keg beer. If, say, you were moving from a house with a mean landlord and wanted to host one last housewrecker party, CYPRESS HONEY LAGER would be a good choice. Its promise of delicious honey is exactly like a parsimonious landlord’s commitment to fix the toilet.

If you don’t have enough friends to warrant a kegger, but you do like pounding beers while watching morbid CBC news stories, this lager would do for that too.

OLD SPECKLED HEN—For select animals

My Fellow Inebriates,

After consuming a product like HELL’S GATE GENUINE PALE ALE, a gustatory reset is in order. While our tastebuds haven’t been entirely traumatized, they are certainly casting about for respite. Thankfully my dad didn’t stock our house full of HELL’S GATE; he had the sense to limit himself to a six-pack and look around for something else just in case.

What he found was OLD SPECKLED HEN, an English nitro-can pale ale endorsed (at least on British TV) by a beer-drinking fox.

I didn’t know foxes enjoyed beer, but I suppose if slugs can enjoy it then it’s not completely absurd. Just this morning Miss V found a nasty-looking slug sliming its way across the sidewalk. She studied it for a while and poked it with a stick, then asked how we could lure slugs into our yard. My mother offered to pour some HELL’S GATE into a dish—if only V would wait until late afternoon so she (my mum) could justifiably finish the remainder. At LBHQ our tastebuds have to be pretty damn offended for us to waste beer.

It’s a good thing we have the HELL’S GATE because we certainly won’t be pouring any OLD SPECKLED HEN for the slugs. Lovely clear amber with a well-behaved light beige head, this ale exudes malty complexity: fragrant honey, toffee, and unplaceable herbs. Despite these sweet notes it’s smooth and well-balanced with a satisfyingly bitter finish.

The only mistake in going from HELL’S GATE to OLD SPECKLED HEN is the expectation of fizz the former sets up. HELL’S GATE demands a Pop Rocks–type distraction to acquit itself, but OLD SPECKLED HEN is nitro-carbonated, which makes for fewer fireworks on the palate and a much more transparent presentation of the goods. What you taste is what you get, and with an ale as sophisticated as this one, extreme carbonation would get in the way. Of course Canadian beer is mostly uber-carbonated, so we tend to expect and even long for some snappiness. It might take you two or even several nitro cans to divorce yourself from fizzy expectations and appreciate OLD SPECKLED HEN’s moderately carbonated charm (i.e., Dad, you should have bought more).

Of course you probably know all this, my fellow inebriates. You know there’s a time and place for punk-ass items like HELL’S GATE, whereas OLD SPECKLED HEN belongs in book-lined drawing rooms, leathery English pubs, and the headquarters of blogging bears.

Thus there won’t be any beer challenge weigh-in from slugs, because they’re getting nothing but HELL’S GATE. Poor gastropods—who knows what V has planned for them. No sense in getting their hopes up with OLD SPECKLED HEN. They’d just think it was some sort of pre-execution last supper.

One word to the wise: nitro-can beer makes you fart powerfully, so ventilate your setting properly, unless, as beerbecue recently suggested, like James Joyce, you’d rather not.

WHYTE & MACKAY SPECIAL—If you have to pay sin tax, pay it on something cheap

My parents are refusing to buy any more booze. It’s too expensive and—if you believe the dire predictions about the upcoming privatization of BC Liquor Stores—it’s going to get more expensive. I don’t know what’s cooking in my parents’ heads right now…they’re planning a change of headquarters…they’re doing budgets—all painfully boring and seemingly designed to torture yours truly.

Why is alcohol so expensive in Canada?

Seriously! A 750mL bottle of JOHNNIE WALKER BLACK LABEL is $49.99 in Canada versus $34.95 in the US. With our dollar just a couple of cents off par, what could explain this massive difference?

The answer is excise tax, imposed in Canada on goods such as tobacco, alcohol, gasoline, and vehicle air conditioners. Also known as sin tax, excise tax operates in theory as a disincentive to use harmful products, even though these products are often labeled inelastic precisely because imposition of tax (or any other variable) has little effect on net consumption.

Huh?

Essentially, the argument goes, people smoke, drink, drive, and cool themselves as per their own ideologies and lifestyle choices. Increasing or decreasing tax on these choices does not markedly change them; studies show that people continue to consume what they consume—they just bitch more about the prices.

But does this mean excise tax serves only as a penalty for “sin”?

Not according to the prevailing wisdom on excise tax—that higher prices deter consumption while (circuitously) offsetting associated health costs.

It’s hard to pin down the correct assumption. Would hardcore smokers smoke four packs a day instead of two if the price were cut? What margin of society would stay constantly drunk if booze were cheap? Given people’s jobs and obligations—not to mention public proscriptions against public smoking and drinking and social pressures to at least approximate a healthy lifestyle—it’s hard to imagine that, at least for the majority of people, tax cuts would launch them toward debauchery. Not everyone is as thoroughly lacking in judgment as your host here.

Arguments in favor generally fall into three categories:

  • Moral. Excise tax gives pause to people who would otherwise show no restraint. But can you derive good, “moral” behavior through monetary means? Is the tax a disincentive or a punishment?
  • Medical. Forty-five thousand Canadians die from smoking each year. Alcohol-related costs are harder to isolate, however. A glass of merlot with dinner is heart-healthy; a box of merlot is not. The healthy “sweet spot” lies somewhere on the continuum between. How can it be defined without Big Brother’s assistance? Surely, if one glass is healthy, that glass should be subsidized, not taxed…
  • Financial. Especially in countries with tax-funded healthcare, smokers and drinkers burden society with their treatment costs and should therefore pay taxes on the products that eventuate in their ailments. Or should they? According to a Dutch study, overall lifetime health expenditure is highest among healthy-living individuals, precisely because they live longer, whereas their smoking and/or obese counterparts check out earlier, relieving the medical system. Wow!

Photo: CBC

But conclusions from a study conducted in the Netherlands don’t necessarily make the leap to Canada. More relaxed attitudes toward alcohol, reduced emphasis on driving, and a greater acceptance of socialized medicine contrast glaringly with Canada’s moralistic attitudes on alcohol. Whereas alcohol is a casual element of European dining that extends to teenagers, in Canada and the US, alcohol gets built up to Holy Grail status, leading teenagers to binge-drink at the first opportunity. All-or-nothing morality guides prohibitions on youthful drinking (dry grad, anyone?), leading to adolescent obsessions with alcohol (“I’m gonna get so wasted”) as opposed to healthful incorporation of alcohol as a life skill. So when doctors write in the Canadian Medical Journal that alcohol costs Canadians $3.3 billion in annual health costs, they’re not joking. But is the solution to tax the shit out of alcohol, or is it to educate people on how to use alcohol safely?

Admittedly it’s too late for me, my fellow inebriates. For now I take refuge in cheap finds such as WHYTE & MACKAY SPECIAL BLENDED SCOTCH WHISKY. At $25 for a 750mL bottle you really can’t do better—at least not in Canada. THE DALMORE SINGLE HIGHLAND MALT is the primary backbone, blended with some well-judged mystery whiskies, and treated with double cask maturation. Generous and malty on the nose, WHYTE & MACKAY is a lovely amber and offers rich malt and sherry on the palate, tapering from sweet to dry and lingering pleasantly. There’s no smoke to speak of and little complexity—but there’s nothing offensive either. This is an excellent rocks Scotch—an easy, undemanding sipper for when you want a wee dram without feeling too extravagant.