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ROGUE DEAD GUY ALE—Welcome in our fridge (although apparently a lot of things are)

My Fellow Inebriates,

If you want a beer in our house, you have to reach past a sample jar of urine in the fridge. It doesn’t need to be there, but a certain four-year-old is so pleased with herself for having produced it that no one dares remove it.

If my parents think this is a good way to keep bears away, they are wrong. To mark the fridge as territory, Miss V would have to let loose her number one on the whole appliance, not place a neatly sealed jar beside the margarine. Just saying, parents.

Who am I kidding? I don’t have any thumbs. I’m beholden to my parents. I get to sample beer when they do. Sigh.

Both kids are still sick, cuddled together under a blanket with yours truly trembling beside, hoping Gravol can thwart a vomit splattering.

On the upside, it did make for an easy bedtime last night, which left us bears and my parents free to catch up on Fringe, accompanied by a beer: ROGUE DEAD GUY ALE. My dad bought a few onesies this week, including Friday’s disastrous FRÜLI, in a bid to get out of our beer comfort zone and into some experimental territory. DEAD GUY ALE promised to be more of a beer than FRÜLI, and it certainly was.

We used the Reidel stemless glasses to get a good look at it. Slightly hazy amber, DEAD GUY ALE displays white foam and good lacing. The aroma is roasty, herbal, and slightly citrus with some yeastiness—very promising. The flavor jibes nicely: brisk and citrus with just enough carbonation; this ale suggests a mineral spring, flowers, possibly trying on dresses. The mouthfeel is reasonably substantial, even a little sticky. Hoppy bitterness punches through each sip, balancing nicely with the malt but perhaps not delivering the deeper caramel tones we generally favor at LBHQ.

There’s quite a lot going on in DEAD GUY ALE—a little too much for my mother, whose bandwidth of beer preferences is not terribly wide. She passed her glass over to my dad, who accepted it happily. For me it was like a game of keepaway—they didn’t pour me my own glass, peeps, so I had to do some ducking and weaving to get a share.

DEAD GUY ALE is interesting stuff. A little IPA, a little Bock—a 6.5% party in a 650mL bottle. Maybe not something we’d get again, but I’d certainly rather see it in the fridge than a urine sample.

KITSILANO MAPLE CREAM ALE—Finders/keepers for the Easter Bunny

My Fellow Inebriates,

Ever lost a camera or memory stick while on vacation? Losing an awesome camera sucks, but losing months of saved pictures is devastating.

If you’re like many people, you leave hundreds of photos on your memory card without copying them over to your computer or printing them. I had to remind my parents of this the other day when my dad decided to take the camera card to work in his pocket. OMG! How would we get all those pictures back of me posing with wine bottles?!

Either this or the prospect of losing everything—from her trip to Ireland to Miss P’s 6th birthday—freaked my mum out and prompted her to copy the pictures over to the hard drive. But why was it so hard to get up the initiative to do it?

Is it because we believe in the kindness of others? Does my mum think that, if she left the Canon on a playground bench, someone would scruple to return it to her?

What would you do if you found a forgotten camera?

Well, first of all, I would look at ALL the pictures on it. Because there might be some funny or racy shots. But, after I finished snooping, I’d contact ifoundyourcamera. Founded by 21-year-old Canadian journalism student Matt Preprost, the site was conceived as a way to bridge losers with finders of cameras and memory devices—no fees to either.

There’s something really affirming about ifoundyourcamera. Using crowd sourcing to help us help other people is a great way of leveraging the web, and the site has pages of success stories to recommend it.

Just recently one of my mum’s friends accidentally left her camera in a restaurant after lunch. (If you have a lot of liquid lunches, the probability of this increases.) She never saw it again. In all likelihood it was stolen, but imagine if the thief had had the semi-decency to extract the camera card and contact ifoundyourcamera. He/she could have kept the camera, disavowed all knowledge of it, but returned the irreplaceable pictures. Then, using insurance money, my mum’s friend would have bought a kickass new camera.

If we’d had a kickass new camera, here’s what I would have done at Easter. I would have set it up on a timer to take pictures at intervals, so we could catch a shot of the Easter Bunny. You see, he took the last beer out of the fridge. It was a KITSILANO MAPLE CREAM ALE from Granville Island Brewery, one of the nicer Lower Mainland breweries and a cool tourist attraction.

When my dad bought this beer he was worried that the maple would be overwhelming. He bought it, I would assume, because he loves me so much; he wanted me to have something novel to review. Granville Island has a great track record with us, though, so that worry diminished before the beer finished pouring.

In the glass KITSILANO MAPLE CREAM ALE is a striking amber with a creamy head. On the nose, maple is apparent without being cloying; vanilla and caramel notes play back-up. On the palate it’s refreshing and balanced—again, not cloying, but satisfyingly sweet (my mum thought perhaps a little too sweet). The mouthfeel is very rich and creamy, yet still quite crisp. Moderately carbonated, this ale goes down very smoothly (and quickly). The sweetness lends it a perceived heaviness that might prevent (other) drinkers from imbibing it all night, and lingers on the tongue for quite a long time.

Overall, KITSILANO MAPLE CREAM ALE is a pleasant member of the Granville Island beer family. I’d still take the PALE ALE over it, but it’s a damn decent beer.

Unfortunately the maple flavor must have appealed to the Easter Bunny’s sweet tooth. I wish I’d been awake with the camera to catch a shot of him leaving us bereft of beer and leaving behind a shitload of non-alcoholic chocolate. But let’s face it, you don’t really want to leave a camera running non-stop: if it happened to catch my parents in some marital affectionate moment I would have to bash the whole apparatus to pieces.

And speaking of Things That Cannot Be Unseen, another of my mother’s acquaintance’s, Bea, once handed her camera to a trustworthy-looking tourist while on vacation in Mexico. She asked the dude to photograph her parasailing. Don’t forget my mother is ancient; this was before digital cameras. Bea did her parasailing bit, then looked anxiously for the tourist. Initially she thought he’d pulled a fast one. But he did emerge from the crowds and hand her the camera. When, back in Vancouver, Bea developed the photos at the drugstore, she found one shot of herself parasailing, and ten of the friendly tourist’s genitalia.

Which isn’t the sort of photo ifoundyourcamera would have published, even if Matt Preprost had been out of diapers and preternaturally web-savvy enough to start the site in preschool. So it was lucky for Bea that her tourist friend was so nice. Not only did she get a parasailing shot; she got some free porn too (which, incidentally, wasn’t how she saw it).

ALEXANDER KEITH’S RED AMBER ALE

My morning child abuse (abuse by children, if you haven’t been following) came with a reminder that today is a special day. I truly wouldn’t have remembered if Miss P hadn’t bounced around all morning about it—today is the day we defer to a soil-dwelling rodent on questions of climate. It’s Groundhog Day, my fellow inebriates, which means the creature will give us an opportunity today to either laugh off global warming or get up in arms about it.

Of course there’s a multiplicity of prognosticating vermin throughout North America. With a six-year lifespan, you can bet Punxsutawney Phil isn’t the original Punxsutawney Phil—unless Chuck Testa did an unusually good job reanimating him. Groundhogs mate like crazy between March and April, producing two to six young at a time, so there’s always a fresh supply for—given the media resources that get dedicated to the annual event—what must be the deadest day ever for actual news.

Cheesy Canadiana and/or Americana always make me feel like a beer, and with Miss P safely off to grade one, I decided to crack an ALEXANDER KEITH’S RED AMBER ALE. The cans had appeared in our fridge following a rare visit from (even rarer) friends of my parents—a “slumming it” product that I would certainly buy to take to someone’s house if I didn’t necessarily care about retaining their respect, or if I thought maybe I could trade up to something better in their fridge.

Everything about the pour suggests mass-produced domestic beer—hockey beer, if you will. The color is aggressively orange, the head loose and half-hearted. In terms of smell this amber ale doesn’t give much away; you have to just take the plunge and taste it.

And much the way my on-again-off-again-mostly-off girlfriend Dolly describes an evening with me, ALEXANDER KEITH’S RED AMBER ALE is pretty much a waste of time. It’s ordinary: tangy but sweet and thin with insufficient malt—the sort of brew that reinforces a general sense of unmet expectations and thereby propels the drinker toward more serious alcohol earlier in the day than planned. I do therefore recommend it for non-daytime imbibers as a method of jumping the mental hurdle into “Why not?” territory.

As I started a second can, I wondered if Dolly would be interested in Groundhog Day simply because of her fur fetish. Plenty of people share her proclivities, and with Valentine’s Day looming, they are probably stirring in their burrows much like Punxsutawney Phil and Wiarton Willie.

Social stigma hinders fur fetishists even more than it does daytime drinkers. According to my sources, “furries” fall into five categories, none of which dovetail too well with mainstream mores.

  • Fursuiters (those who like to dress up)
  • Otherkins (those who believe they are animal in spirit)
  • Furries (those who enjoy roleplay)
  • Furverts (those with fur fetishes plus every subset you can think of)
  • Trans-species (those who physically alter themselves to resemble kindred animals)

It was sweet of Dolly to cross the line into full-on bestiality with me, but I have to realize it’s over, and there are enough other bears in the house to give her whatever it is she needs without subjecting her to the odor of rancid beer. Drinking ALEXANDER KEITH’S RED AMBER ALE is my way of accepting Dolly’s rejection.

We all slum it sometimes, whether it be with Malibu or Alexander Keith’s. Dolly slummed it with me, but I think that was the bottom for her. And I don’t want to say anything mean about her. I really doubt she’d get that interested in a groundhog, even if it could predict the weather (which would be amazing given that the weather channel can’t).

So what happened anyway with North America’s groundhogs? Did they see their shadows?

According to the three most closely watched of these psychic vermin, spring is coming. So get out the hay fever meds, brush up on your climate-related conversation, and (Dad) take the Christmas tree down. Spring is sprung and love is in the air (unless you’re me).