beer tasting

WHITE BARK Wheat Ale—The start of a good party

My Fellow Inebriates,

This morning, in a moment of disloyalty, I tried to stow away in Christine’s fabulous canvas bag. Yes, Christine had arrived the night before bearing wheat ale, red wine, and—treasure of treasures—Glenmorangie 18.

We kicked things off with the wheat ale. WHITE BARK is a traditional Belgian-style ale brewed by BC’s Driftwood Brewery. Intended to be cloudy, WHITE BARK pours a hazy golden hue with a fine off-white foam that settles down quickly. It announces itself to the olfactory centre with a wheat-borne flood of coriander, clove, and citrus notes—in some aspects (perhaps I have gin on the brain) channeling Bombay Sapphire down to the very bottle, which sports a similar vertical row of tasting-note glyphs.

As we inhaled WHITE BARK we noted a strong yeasty backbone, which played out on the palate along with Belgian-style fruitiness and malt. Refreshing at ice-cold temperature, the ale became slightly cloying as it warmed and the flavors cut loose. The carbonation was prickly and pointy, urging WHITE BARK toward mainstream Pop Rocks quaffability even as the intriguing fruit notes insisted that no, it was not in any sense an ordinary beer.

And it wasn’t. But you have to really like wheat beer to appreciate an ale like WHITE BARK. It’s crisp and dry but still belongs unmistakably to the fruity-yeasty-wheaty camp. There’s a lot going on in it—sort of like a party that splits off into several factions, one of which decides to chuck a seven-foot cactus off the roof into the pool while the rest continue their obliviously sedate conversations. Which is to say I liked it, although I might not buy it again immediately.

And that was when I noticed, one of the compartments contained not booze but paper towels. Paper towels!!

Finishing the WHITE BARK bottle left a compartment empty in Christine’s canvas bag. (We didn’t get to the red wine, although some other, magnificent booze was shared.) When I peeled myself off the counter this morning, the first thing I saw was that empty space—just roomy enough for a little bear. So I climbed in.

And then I started to worry. My initial thought had been: Every time Christine comes over, she brings tons of booze! But my worry was this: If Christine has tons of booze, it’s because she saves it, and that means she doesn’t drink it very often. OMG!!!

At that moment my mum found me and helped me out of the bag. She said I had a blog to write, and some cheap crap to drink later—hooch so cheap we can drink it every day.

I’m right where I belong. (But Christine is welcome to come and live with us.)

HOYNE SUMMER HAZE HONEY HEFEWEIZEN—Too mellow for hooliganism

If I were a 100-meter sprinter (LOL), I’d want my name to be Usain Bolt. I mean, bolt, people. What a fantastic handle. And today the dude broke an Olympic record to win the final.

But who knew some guy would throw a beer bottle on the track just before Bolt bolted to victory? Seconds before the starting gun, a man hurled some verbal abuse followed by a beer bottle, prompting his immediate arrest. Bolt was so focused on his 9.63-second sprint that he didn’t even notice the bottle.

American Justin Gatlin did notice the distraction, even though he achieved a personal best of 9.79 seconds. Perhaps the beer bottle helped?

I think beer bottles always help, with everything, particularly when they contain a yummy hefeweizen like HOYNE SUMMER HAZE HONEY HEFEWEIZEN. I doubt this is what hit the track field in London (what sort of macro beer would an Olympics hooligan toss…anyone?). Hailing from Victoria, BC, brewmaster Sean Hoyne can probably rest assured he had no influence, even lepidopterally, on the 100-meter outcome, but he does brew one wicked wheat beer.

And that’s a big statement at LBHQ, where we’ve been disappointed by many a hefeweizen, mostly because they tend toward citrus, banana, or just general weirdness. SUMMER HAZE avoids these pitfalls by balancing the expected wheaty lightness with that delicious honey that we bears go apeshit for. Prefacing this lingering sweetness is a crisp and malty aroma. Nicely balanced, SUMMER HAZE hits the tongue with an enveloping maltiness, dramatically contradicting the sharp expectations I had for it. Mid-palate the honey redoubles satisfyingly and holds into a marvelous finish. Ahhh!!

We can thank Christine (once again) for SUMMER HAZE. Perhaps I flatter myself, but I think she brought it over because bears like honey, and I certainly loved this slightly cloudy, mildly hopped brew. Unlike an IPA, this beer couldn’t possibly make you angry or ornery; it’s too docile and friendly. You wouldn’t, for example, chuck it on an Olympic track just behind the soon-to-be gold medallist who’s about to school everyone on sprinting. And he wouldn’t even notice anyway.

There’s a time and a place for hooliganism, my fellow inebriates: my house, after we move on Wednesday. We’ll take the door off its hinges and you can hurl bottles everywhere. You can wreck the place.

HARVIESTOUN OLA DUBH 12

My Fellow Inebriates,

It’s a million degrees. If ever there was a good time for a lingering soul to depart a furball like Fluffy, this is it. He’s panting with the heat. If it gets much hotter, he might end up dead, and then where will Granny be?

The weekend didn’t feel quite as hot, and I think I know why. The icy refreshment of our Gin Shoot-Out lowered everyone’s temperature, and once we were half-drunk, we stopped worrying about things like Fluffy surviving his first summer in Langley. But after we’d declared GORDON’S the winner of the gin showdown, we decided to take a break from gin and try something from Christine’s canvas bag.

If you recall Christine’s last visit, she brought HARVIESTOUN OLA DUBH 18, a cask-aged ale that had us reeling with bliss. For comparison, this time she brought OLA DUBH 12.

Now you may be wondering, at this point, how we can mooch off Christine so dreadfully. And the answer is, I really have no idea. My parents are socially retarded. But we were all grateful, and poured the OLA DUBH 12 three ways into Reidel stemless glasses, because they happened to be clean.

Like OLA DUBH 18, OLA DUBH 12 is visually striking for its black opacity and creamy beige head. Maturation in Highland Park 12 casks should, we expected, impart almost as much nuance as maturation in Highland Park 18 casks. So it was a bit of a shock to be bowled over by one predominant aroma: molasses. No word of a lie, it was like taking a whiff of a carton of straight molasses. And sure, molasses is nice—the food-eaters at LBHQ tell me it’s great in gingerbread—but it was so dominant in OLA DUBH 12 that it was hard to pick out any other background olfactory chords.

Once we started sipping we could pick up espresso, cocoa, and perhaps some peat. But the strongest note on the tongue was molasses. It was so overwhelming as to be out of whack, if you ask me. As for the mouthfeel, it fell a little short, especially given Harviestoun’s own descriptor, “viscous and gloopy.” Instead it was light- to medium-bodied—certainly too light to stand up to the molasses—and not as creamy as expected.

According to Christine’s sources, the sweet spot for OlA DUBH is 16 years, so that’s next on our list. The 18-year vastly outshone the 12-year, so we’ll see what a Highland Park 16 cask does for this viscous and gloopy beer. We’ll see…

In the meantime I’ll check to make sure Fluffy’s not dead.