beer review

FILTHY DIRTY IPA—Because my dad and I have taste

In the downstairs bathtub this morning: two of the meatiest, most massive silverfish ever seen, squaring off with a hefty spider. Suspended above them by an invisible thread: the exoskeleton of one of their mates, presumably tortured to death by the spider.

Damnit, Stephen Harper, keep your pets on a leash.

Damn it, Stephen Harper, keep your pets on a leash.

Of course I wanted to see who would win. But my mother didn’t care. “F**k you guys,” she said, and shot all three down the drain with the showerhead.

That’s the level of enlightenment at LBHQ.

I thought my mother could use a beer but she has an inexplicable resistance to drinking at 7:00 am, and her unwillingness to let me watch the silverfish-spider death match is pretty much indicative of her unwillingness to take any of my good suggestions.

So I had to wait until 5:00 pm to try this new beer in the fridge: Parallel 49 FILTHY DIRTY IPA. And even then I had to fight my dad for a share of it, which felt sort of like being a silverfish versus a big-ass hairy spider. But fight my dad I did, my fellow inebriates, and here’s what FILTHY DIRTY was like:

FILTHY-DIRTY-500x500Ahhh! Let me start with 7.2% alcohol. It had me there, friends, but it was only getting started. FILTHY DIRTY boasts an IBU of 55, the combined effort of Chinook, Centennial, Citra, Simco, and Ahtanium hops—not fighting it out but harmonizing into a piney, grapefruity, bittersweet hopfest with a creamy mouthfeel and a long linger. My dad and I marveled at the various hop contributions; as we savored the IPA we could taste tropical notes and subtle bready malt backnotes. It was totally, totally yummy.

My mum said it tasted like elastic bands and earwax, which is what she says about all IPAs. We called her a philistine and suggested she get into the kitchen and make the family some pizza.

And that, my fellow inebriates, was a lot like picking a fight with a big spider. Don’t even ask who won.

SALTY SCOT—Wee heavy for a wee bear…or not

My Fellow Inebriates,

I totally forgot about Mother’s Day, which perhaps explains why my mother totally forgot to invite me when they opened a bottle of Parallel 49 SALTY SCOT SCOTCH ALE. If you can trust her tasting notes, it was a heavy, wintry ale with lashings of caramel—a malt bomb packing 7.5% ABV under a finger of fizzy, off-white foam. It developed, she said, as it warmed, coffee and brown sugar coming to the fore, adhering nicely to the palate in a boozy, friendly, wintry, not-quite-Mother’s-Day fashion.

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Why did she not invite me? I’m thinking…maybe she doesn’t equate me with the other kids. You know, the little human girls…Yeah.

And another thing…every so often I notice that my mother isn’t a bear. I mean, she can get ugly like a bear, but ultimately her chromosome count’s off. Not a bear.

And if she couldn’t find it in her heart to invite me for some SALTY SCOT, well, would she do what this mama bear’s doing for her little cub on the highway?

I WOULD SETTLE FOR SOME SALTY SCOT!!!

CZECHVAR for St. Paddy’s Day? Why not?

Today I am recommending a run-of-the-mill, somewhat hoppy and refreshing but basically Euroskunk lager.

Why?

Because it’s St. Patrick’s Day, and if you get some godforsaken notion today that you have to dye your beer green, you’d best choose a light beer instead of pouring all your mother’s Nutty Club green food colouring into a Guinness. With CZECHVAR you’ll only need a few drops, and the beer’s so mundane and uninspiring that you won’t feel you’ve wrecked it when that green tint starts grossing you out a few minutes after you’ve done the deed.

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CZECHVAR is actually made by Anheuser-Busch, which explains a lot. A quintessential summer beer, it’s slightly hoppy and very fizzy, and it emanates a faint eau de Heineken.

Is it fitting for St. Patrick’s Day? Probably not, but on a day when one-quarter of all North Americans purport to have Irish blood, we can hardly get our underwear in a knot about drinking Czech beer. Personally, I’m going to pound this mediocre CZECHVAR for breakfast, get into some cheap Canadian rye for lunch, and then break into the mescal with the (green?) worm in it. By the end of it, for all intents and purposes, I’ll be green and possibly hallucinating leprechauns. And that, my fellow inebriates, is what March 17 is all about.