A can of beer from Barrie. Mmmm. Robert Simpson Brewing is a brewer that does not make it to the east end of Lake Ontario. I picked this one up a few weeks ago at the Queens Quay LCBO in Toronto. The BAers, who have some reservations at 21% nay, call it a cream ale - which to me means a warmer brewing of ale malts with a lager yeast strain. But "cream" does not appear on the can, though that stuff about that 1516 law from Bavaria is on the back - even though that was a law really about keeping scary things like wheat out of beer and not modern additives and adjuncts, a regulatory nod to the local barley farmers and bakers as much as one protecting good beer if we are to believe what we read at page 158 in certain books.

After a big zlurbfft when the can opened, the beer poured a very active pale straw with a white foamy rim. It's a pleasant enough light ale with a corny edge like the founding father of cream ales, Genesee Cream from Rochester. At the outset there is a short blast of pear juice then some twiggy hop, then a bit of malt and then corn. Throughout the last 2/3s of the taste there is a sort of watermelon rind thing as well, a light but roughish hard to describe thing. The finish is drying. If Northumberland Ale is a 1950's Canadian stock ale, maybe this is a 1950s old-style upstate New York cream ale. But I don't know what that might have to do with Confederation. Or Bavaria in 1516.

Still, no bad flavours and plenty of nice clean ones in a light ale, a style sort of lost to the beast that is "lite beer". Consider for your next stinking hot day.