beer review

INNIS & GUNN WINTER TREACLE PORTER—Charge it to the corporate card

“You wouldn’t even know the difference if you had to wear a hairshirt,” said my mother when she saw the liberties I’d taken in describing her childhood Catholicism. “Your moustache isn’t even scratchy. In fact, I can’t even see it.”

It’s true, the moustache hasn’t gained much traction on this already furry face. I thought, if I just put my mind to it, I’d have this epic Fu Manchu growth going on by late November, but nothing doing. So I’ll have to donate money to the cause instead. Or give my dad a prostate exam.

None of my fellow inebriates will be surprised to learn, however, that my parents keep the LBHQ enterprise on a very lean budget. When I told them I wanted to make charitable donations, purchase seasonal greeting cards, and buy a crate of gin, they told me I’d have to use the “corporate card.”

Turns out the corporate card is a beat-up, unusable piece of plastic, maxed out and ripe for denial. Who knew my parents could be so mean?

It reminds me of the time they almost finished the INNIS & GUNN WINTER TREACLE PORTER. They were almost at the dregs, people, when it dawned on them that the resident reviewer was not there. (I was looking for Glen, polar bear and vodka expert, who’s been missing, along with the camera charger, since we moved to the new LBHQ.) There was only one bottle of this clear, mahogany elixir; they’d split it between them, the gluttons, and their portions were down to fumes—vanilla-caramel-malt fumes with gentle oak and molasses. A Scottish ale I would have given my moustache for, damn it.

When I appeared, they actually looked guilty and let me have the remainders. Forgetting about Glen and the camera charger (and Movember, a worthy charitable cause for those of you with deeper pockets, or any pockets for that matter), I slurped it up.

At 7.9% alcohol, INNIS & GUNN WINTER TREACLE PORTER is perfect for getting ripped on a cold day. A stunning marriage of lightly toasted malt, sticky toffee, well-behaved hops whose fruitiness is a mere hint, crisp carbonation, medium body, and a lingering, peaty finish, this porter is less porter than ale, but what sort of bear would quibble? This shit is divine. For the sake of the tremendous layering of flavors alone, it’s worth grabbing while it’s available—which it won’t be after winter.

Fortunately, the bottle came in a specialty pack that included two other varieties and an INNIS & GUNN beer glass. How could my dad possibly buy just one? A week later he returned to the store and bought another so he and my mum could drink from identical glasses. I can only assume he’ll take a third trip next week on behalf of yours truly…

Or perhaps he’ll tell me to go and buy my beer glass with the corporate card. This isn’t over, Dad.

The Parallel 49 Brewing interview…plus a Mountie, some gin news, and a groundhog in a bowler hat

My Fellow Inebriates,

Let’s face it, when it comes to remembering stuff, neither of my two neurons exactly has its axon on the answer button. So I’ve been very remiss toward one of my favorite fellow beer reviewers and two very kind booze purveyors:

Beerbecue tweeted me to ask about the legalities of LBHQ Canadian Cream.

Naturally I hadn’t thought about getting busted (nor had I honestly thought of sharing the liqueur, internationally or otherwise; it represents about four good days of blotto). But beerbecue instilled the fear of Mounties with this picture.

Mounties are notoriously honorable and this one is probably no exception. Regarding the Canadian Cream biz, it probably wouldn’t accept a hush bribe, and then I’d end up in jail where someone would forge the orifice I don’t yet have.

♦ ♦ ♦

Julia Gale sent me a lovely newsletter mentioning that BROKER’S GIN has been relisted by the BC liquor authority.

This whole thing has been an absolute odyssey, so much gratitude goes to Julia for listening to my whining. Once we get that delicious hooch back at LBHQ we’ll have our much-threatened Gin Shoot-Out Part Deux.

If this groundhog has a Broker’s Gin bowler hat, I imagine mine must be in the mail.

♦ ♦ ♦

Anthony Frustagli of Parallel 49 Brewing was kind enough to do an interview with me.

Since only house-trained bears are allowed at the brewery, we did our Q&A via email. Be warned, this is a real interview! It contains actual answers and information, which are anomalies for this space.

LB: Thanks for agreeing to talk to us about Parallel 49 Brewing. I’m still reeling from how good LOST SOULS CHOCOLATE PUMPKIN PORTER was. I’ve been tasting SCHADENFREUDE this week—quite bold and spicy. As soon as I bought it, I noticed a ton of other pumpkin beers. I was also surprised to note it’s a lager rather than an ale. Where does SCHADENFREUDE sit on the pumpkin-beer spectrum in terms of flavor profile?
AF: It’s the only pumpkin lager that I know of. We designed it that way because as a lager it has a much lighter body than most of the ales out there, so we didn’t have to spice it as aggressively as some of the other pumpkins. At the same time, the bready malts in Oktoberfests provide a perfect backdrop for the spices.
LB: Do you get a lot of feedback on specialty beers such as SCHADENFREUDE? What would it take for this to become a year-round product?
AF: Feedback on the seasonals has been fantastic. In fact, an article in the Globe and Mail today called SCHADENFREUDE “one of the best pumpkin beers in the country.” Having said that, it is staying as a seasonal beer.
LB: What do you see as your market demographic?
AF: Our demographic is people interested in new, exciting, well-crafted beers.  We’ve only had product in market for about five months, so our demographic hasn’t changed much.
LB: Is craft beer suffering the same doldrums [as macro beer], or is it able to weather the vicissitudes of style/popularity?

AF: Craft beer numbers are soaring, showing double digit growth every year for the past decade. I think macro drinkers are moving over to craft beer more than they are switching to wine or spirits…. Differentiating ourselves from macro beer is not hard at all. Macro beer is amazingly homogeneous in terms of both flavour and image. Convincing macro drinkers to give you a shot is the hard part. In terms of production and planning, “craft” shouldn’t immediately imply “small.” There are many amazing craft breweries in the US that are HUGE (relatively speaking). Small-batch breweries are not necessarily craft, and craft breweries aren’t necessarily small. A brewery’s commitment to the quality of their product is what determines if they can be considered a craft brewery or not.
LB: Is brewing more art or more science? Both?
AF: Very much both. Our top two brewers both have degrees in chemical engineering, and are both avid home brewers. Designing great beers is an art; actually making the beers as designed (and on a large scale) is definitely a LOT of science.
LB: There must be a lot of stories about how everyone at Parallel 49 got into brewing. Is everyone at Parallel 49 passionate about beer?
AF: We all are insanely passionate about craft beer. In fact, we all left relatively secure, well-paying jobs because we wanted to work in a field that was a little closer to our hearts.  
LB: How do you decide what sort of beer to produce and market? Do you ever butt heads?
AF: All five of us, along with our brewers and sales reps, have weekly meetings where we sit down and taste each and every beer in production or testing right now, and ask ourselves how we can improve on those. At the same time, we try to answer the question “what would be really awesome to drink right now that I just can’t find anywhere.” That’s how our beers are born.
LB: Which beer is your personal fave? How much does personal taste play a role in deciding which beers to market?
AF: Our motto is “Driven by thirst.” We brew the kinds of beers that we want to drink. Personal taste is pretty much the most important factor in deciding which beers we bring to market. Do I have personal favourite? Depends on the date, weather, my mood, time of day, alignment of the planets, etc. In other words, no… I don’t have a favourite 🙂
LB: Have you ever produced a beer that just didn’t work out?
AF: Several dozen. They never see the light of day outside the brewery though.
LB: What’s your next new beer? Or is it a secret? How soon can we get a taste?
AF: Our next seasonal is UGLY SWEATER MILK STOUT…and we also have a salted caramel Scotch ale, and a cascading dark ale being released in 650ml bottles in mid-November.

LB: Are you getting a lot of traffic in the Parallel 49 tasting room?
AF: Yes, the traffic through the tasting room has exceeded our expectations several fold.
LB: Do you have any advice for tasting-room visitors?
AF: Please bear with us 🙂  Our growler program has exploded beyond our wildest forecasts (we have over 1000 growlers out to market in just over three months) and we only have one growler filling station. We’ve ordered two more, and they will be installed soon.
LB: What do you like best about brewing?
AF: Drinking beer 🙂  And watching people enjoy our beers.
LB: Do you allow bears in the tasting room?
AF: Are they house-trained bears? 🙂

The Parallel 49 brewery and tasting room can be found at:

 1950 Triumph St.

Vancouver, BC, Canada

V5L 1K5

Tel: 604-558-BREW (2739)

WARSTEINER DUNKEL—Not destined for the toilet, even on World Toilet Day

My Fellow Inebriates,

Today is World Toilet Day. Before you assume I’m being facetious (which you might from a cursory glance at the World Toilet Day website), check this out.

Click to sign

Scant generations ago, in what we now term the developed world, people used outdoor sheds to empty their bowels. In these outdoor privies you’d typically find an earthen hole, sometimes with a makeshift lid, ash or other substances to cover offensive deposits and mask the smell, and a stick—one end of which you’d use to wipe, the other of which you’d use to wash your hands, giving rise to the expression “the shit end of the stick.” In winter your ass would freeze to the seat (if there was one). In summer the whole affair would reek to high heaven.

Today’s convenient plumbing and sanitation put us at something of a remove from shit and where it eventuates. Modern washrooms brought not only cleanliness but also discretion, introducing the formerly unknown notion of privacy to bodily functions involving waste. And with privacy came secrecy. With secrecy came repression and outright denial of shit, the fact that shit comes out of us, and the fact that it goes somewhere upon exit. Consider the panic of being at a dinner party where, on a brief visit to your hosts’ swankily appointed facilities, you release a log too large for the porcelain appliance to accommodate, then feel your blood turn cold as your dark progeny hesitates upon flushing, then bounces to the surface, only now surrounded by soupy chunder—how mortifying, right? Frantically you look for a plunger, only to realize your hosts are far too suave to leave such a foul thing visible or even accessible to guests. OMG!

Over a billion people in the world defecate openly. Get involved so we can change this.

No doubt we’ve all been in this desperate situation, although my friend Scarybear insists he has not. He claims he poos outside as a rule, although I’ve never seen him move from the couch. To be honest, until I learned it was World Toilet Day, I didn’t give a moment’s thought to where my own (surely liquid) waste goes. I unconsciously assumed two things:

  • It happens after I’ve passed out.
  • Since I am, pejoratively speaking, a “stuffie,” what comes out is inoffensive and blends into the carpet and/or the dust bunnies under our furniture.

I’m not here today to solve this mystery, though. I’m mainly here to plug World Toilet Day, a cause you can support by signing the petition, updating your FB status with a sanitation-related message, tweeting about the event, and promoting awareness of the world’s gaps in sanitation— and then I’ll segue crassly from that subject to beers you might pour down the toilet.

As far as I’m concerned, there are none. But my mum threatened to pour out her half-glass of WARSTEINER DUNKEL last night. Not that she actually did it; she is far too frugal. She just drank it and complained about it. My dad liked it better, and I hung around to mop up whatever they didn’t finish (talk about the shit end…).

How did we acquire this dunkel?

My dad’s beer choices are branching out. In fact, my dad has started using this blog as a justification to buy beer. When he gets fed up yakking on the phone with technicians who later pretend not to be there when he calls back, he gets a notion to cruise the liquor store and find us something new. This is exactly why I started the blog.

WARSTEINER DUNKEL pours a solid almost cola brown with a reddish tinge and an off-white head. First aromas include chocolate, coffee, and an off-putting metallic note reminiscent of a Canadian hockey beer—very incongruous wafting from this dark brew. The base is yeasty and pilsnerish and a lightweight 4.9% alcohol—too light to carry deep and boomy flavors such as cocoa espresso, so the impression is of a macro beer that had some coffee beans floating in it overnight—or a chicken-legged dude being bullied into doing front squats at the gym, take your pick.

But the overwhelming top note is metal. Not the good kind that makes you remember all the hair you used to have but rather the kind that makes you wonder what you’re ingesting and whether a general metallic overload is responsible for those memory dropouts.

WARSTEINER DUNKEL is, ultimately, drinkable. Just not highly enjoyable. But not something you’d throw down the toilet. Well…maybe after ten of them, reverse-peristaltically. Aren’t you grateful you have a toilet?

World Toilet Day FACTS

  • Sanitation is a human right, yet 2.5 billion people do not have a clean toilet.
  • Around the world, 1.1 billion people have no other option than open defecation.
  • Safe toilet facilities keep girls in school. Dignity and hygiene matter, particularly at the onset of puberty. Taboos surrounding menstrual hygiene preclude discussion of girls’ needs in many countries, leading to high numbers of school dropouts. Particularly in repressive regimes, the silence around feminine hygiene perpetuates the already dominant notion that women are not welcome in public.
  • Sanitation is a good economic investment. In fact, sanitation returns $5 for every dollar spent. Health and productivity increase; tourism benefits; production of sanitation equipment produces jobs; education rates improve—along with dignity and safety for everyone.

Get involved

Click, my fellow inebriates, click!