I have a hard time with this month's topic for The Session. Not because I have no experience with home brewing but because I assume everyone involved with beer has had a hand in it. It's like I assume everyone who went to college went to high school first.

That being said, I am a bad brewer. I don't care about most anything when I brew except that the ingredients have to be good and every thing has to be insanely sterile. Other than that, I don't give a rat's ass about hitting the expected gravity, IBUs or BLTs. I like a surprise. Well, I like a good surprise. Like that one cask I made that was blessed by the angels and drained in one sitting.

But it's rarely that good. I have one last bottle of anise pale ale from a batch that really sucked. And, for me, that is the real glory about home brewing. It is where I expect the future pro brewers who earn our hard currency to have made their mistakes. It is error's playground. It is where you dump the stuff out because you never should have made it, let alone served it to guests.

Which is why when I find a brewery with lingering infections, with dulling water composition, with a habit of taking the easy path of massive hopping or adding more dark malts to cover up stuff, well, that is the brewery I figure is run by the guy whose pals didn't have the heart to tell him how his home brew sucked. I am not interested in paying for craft brewers' experiments even if they are called "extreme" or the hot new trend from Italy. Work that stuff out on your own time.

So, back to the question, all craft beer should be inspired by home brew in that it should create the bench made for what is appropriate to sell. If your pal wouldn't drink it for free, why do you think I should pay for it?

The six pack carrier says "Product of USA crafted from barley gown in St. Patrick's Co." I got three Legbiter Ales and three St. Patrick's Best Ales. Can't find the email that I got from the representative. There's nothing in the box but styrofoam popcorn. The waybill says they're from New Jersey. But there is a clue on the bottom of the six: "produced and bottled by Strangford Lough Brewing Company, Rochester, NY." I liked them fine. I will say that from the outset but this clip from the operation's home Northern Ireland website got me scratching my head:

....the directors of this Northern Irish brewery, Tony Davies and Bob Little had to create an entirely new method of ensuring the beer arrived fresher and more cost effectively than would have been possible by simply shipping the finished bottled product from Northern Ireland. The outcome was a very exciting new way of exporting the product from Ireland, not in bottles, but in a concentrated form. The concentrate is shipped to High Falls Brewing Company, where the SLBC master brewer, George Thompson is on hand to assist the High Falls Operating Company to finish brew the beer by adding the final ingredients brought from Ireland, fermenting and then bottling the beer before transporting it to the existing network of licensees for distribution.

So... bulk wort with NI water is being shipped, sloshed about a cargo hold, diluted with NY water and then boiled with its hops - one supposes - after which it is finally fermented and bottled in Rochester at back from the brink High Falls brewery. That is one weird business strategy. But I liked the beer. I liked it fine. It had terrioirs. I poured one of the St. Patrick's Best Ales last night and thought how good it was for an beer with an uncertain source. Very nice lacing. It was also more-ish and rich, its body showing well above its weight for a 4.2% beer. A great session ale. I liked it. I am not sure which beer it is as the brewery makes one beer called St. Patrick's Best as well as another called St. Patrick's Ale. But I liked it.

The Master Brewer used to run "George Thompson & Dobbin Ltd – an international design and build micro-brewery business offering turnkey brewing solutions." Yikes! Turnkey solutions always scare the bejaysus out of me. But I liked the beer. Have they actually figured something out? I have no idea. Not even sure if the BAers have rated them.

I love the "jump the shark" idea but only because I was a pre-teen when Happy Days and the Fonze was on TV. It combines my love of taking a adolescent view of things with my habit of taking a adolescent view of things. So it was with interest that I read this from Joe Stange this morning:

It's all a bit... much. It's enough to make a yank want to duck into a cheap dive and quietly suck down shakers of Sierra Nevada. Because frankly I would be content to do so.

My first reaction? If you have lost the overriding desire to duck into a cheap dive and quietly suck down shakers from time to time, well, I think you have lost something or never had it. For example, while I have a wee bit of curiosity about the experience of blind tastings, I seriously doubt its greater defining value. I do like Andy's view that it might be a perfectly acceptable parlour game. Same sometimes even goes for unblinded (sighted?) tasting and, certainly, swanky grog and grub nights, knees uncomfortably lodged beneath linen. Aren't they just variations on the theme of "trend"? The need to justify, to characterize so as to allow oneself the core experience? Are they that much different from the giggle right had at the expense of Stella Black? From the PR spin of the consultant's quack science or the justifying thrill of your hobby now coming to cable TV?

Don't get me wrong. Good beer is good. Very good. But for me there is no better time than mustering gangs of good bottles and interested interesting folk and just pouring - even if only in the company of mere men. Heck, I just love giving away good beer to pals and workmates in order hear their reaction a few days later. The rest is fluff to one degree or another - the sideshow - the consultant's angle and hope of reward.

I don't know if this is the cool new blue cover or the boring old blue cover but it's quite blue. I did knew from the outset that the book was not written by a Canadian as then it would be titled "500 Beer" as the plural and the singular are written the same up here. But it written by Zak, he the freelance beer writer, specialist beer retailer and author of the entertaining beer blog "Are You Tasting the Pith?" Like his blog, it is a great book full of insight and personality - even if it has the blasphemous subtitle "the only beer compendium you'll ever need." I thought the whole idea was that we need magic books about 300, 500, 1000, a billion zillion best beer eh-vah. I only drink "best beer" myself so I want every book there is about all of them.

76% of the book is filled with well organized brief beer reviews organized first by style and then, rather cleverly, according to its peers or at least beers that are in the neighbourhood. So, for example, three Bamburgian rauchbiers are reviewed along with Alaska Smoked Porter and Meantime Wintertime Winter Welcome. This invites the old double fisted, fill the table with bottles and glassware compare and contrast event.¹ The writing is equally satisfying. Solid and earthy. The hops in a Sixpoint Bengal IPA have a crunchy aroma. Duchesse de Bourgogne gives off the whiff of a pickle jar. Lots of good beer pr0n, too.

Get your reading glasses as the small font can age you rapidly. Buy it.

¹For those unaware of such a thing, I describe the far superior social predecessor to the present faddish, expensive "tiny plates of swanky food and tiny glasses of beer" movement.

I had intended to get into the 1900s but have gotten stuck in the newspapers out of my town from the nineteenth century. From its first days at the western edge of the British Empire, as this pretty poor image of an early 1800s map shows, Kingston had a Brewery Street. Its still there even if renamed Rideau. We still have some of our Victorian and maybe even Georgian brewing buildings, re-purposed for other things.

Who wouldn't get interested with ads like the "ALE! ALE! ALE!" Kingston City Brewery ad from page 3 of the Kingston Daily News on 8 October 1863. Interesting to see that the copy editor had not that much imagination give the "Baths! Baths! Baths!" header for the next ad. The City Brewery was on the waterfront and I think is long gone but the shop the beer was being sold at 158 Princess Street may well still be there, it's just selling mens clothes now.

Kingstonians were not only enjoying local brewed beers, however celebrated, in the early 1860s as the ad to the left from the same paper's 7 October 1862 issue shows. Mr. McRae of Brock Street had plenty of barrels of the empire's finest Guinness, Barclay Perkins as well as Allsopp beers to be had - along with a range of imported sherries, ports and brandies. The Morton's "Family Proof" Whisky he offered was locally made. Not sure that it was immune from family members absconding with it or if it had been, conversely, subject to the proof and acceptance by all family members. The Morton distillery and brewery buildings are also still with us and currently under redevelopment as an arts hub. The building which held MacRae's shop could well be there, too. Another Brock Street store, Cooke's which opened in 1865, still operates.

The town seems to have had a fairly rich relationship with beer and other alcohol but it was not all fun and games as this 1867 article from The New York Times explains. The watchman Mr. Driscoll of what is likely the same Morton works was murdered the year before during a burglary. His Detroit murderer was sentenced to hang. They'll each both be still here, too - buried around here somewhere. The town is like that.

...It ain't all that bad. Sometimes - and more often than we think - it is a far less incident provoking experience than the media would have you expect:

Despite the long-standing rivalry between the teams, which meet in a last 16 clash at the Free State Stadium, everyone was basking in the glow of South Africa's feel-good World Cup and had traveler's tales to share. In the Reyneke Park camp site outside Bloemfontein, German and English flags hung from tents and camper vans. "They started drinking beer early but it's a nice atmosphere. All are well behaved, no trouble," site owner Les Reyneke said. The bar had stayed open until five o'clock that morning.

No doubt they played Beethoven's pastoral symphony on a loop over the cheap tree-strung speakers until the dawn came up after the cool African night. Sound idyllic if you ask me.

I remember being at a game in Kilmarnock back in the late 70s or early 80s when the fool ahead of us drank two bottles of Mateus that he had duct taped to his shins to get them through the gate, ran at half into the sideline mob in the cowshed enclosure to hurl old school pennies and darts (darts!) only to be later carted away in the second half by the police when he ran onto the pitch, like a streaker with his clothes on, when he needed to challenge the ref's call mid-field when nothing turned on the call.

Rivalry between the teams? They bombed my Dad's town when he was a kid. Good to see soccer and beer making real friends in an South African camping park.

Just learned that my camera died. Also just learned what a crappy camera I bought my kid last birthday. No focus. No warm tones. The corner of the cold room looks like the corner of a cold room. Sad.

Today for Ontario craft beer week, I went out to the LCBO and bought a few cans of beers that I hadn't tried before. Muskoka Dark Ale is one of them. Dark ales were Ontario's version of ambers in the States - an entry style that first generation craft brewers relied upon. Upper Canada Dark was a pitcher beer for me in the mid-90s pre-kid days in Ottawa Valley taverns. Easy and moreish. But, as Stan noted about ambers, they can suffer from sameness and the blahs. This one, however, is a great take on the idea. It's like Theakston Peculier light. Molasses on the nose and in the mouth except a bit of Frye's dry cocoa, too. HP sauce, even. Yogurty yeast but in a good way, more rich than sour. Nice dusty texture like the cocoa was sifted in at the end. Like it a lot. Some respect from the BAers.

In the 1868-69 edition of Sutherland's City of Hamilton and County of Wentworth Directory there is listed a little listing that says "Eckhardt, August, brewer, Hamilton Lager Beer Brewery..." This corresponds with Sneath's first listing for a lager brewery in 1868 which states:

Edward Eckhardt opens the Hamilton Lager Brewery in Hamilton and it closed three years later.

The name is right as Albert is confirmed as the brewer and Edward the proprietor in another section of the directory. So they must have started lager beer there. No one else is listed even if the Spring Brewery established in 1838, makers of "ale, porter, beer, etc., in great quantities, either in wood or bottle" are working on "an addition is now being made for an ice house." Except for one thing. In the same directory there are at least six listings under "lager beer saloon" with proprietors with the names Goering, Grell, Kerner, Mansfeld, Schaupp and Winckler. Maybe more. How could all those businesses get up and running selling lager beer in time to get printed in the directory in the same year that the brewery opens? Could it be that the saloons pre-dated this brewery? Oh, for a copy of the 1866-67 edition of Sutherland's City of Hamilton and County of Wentworth Directory!

I dunno. I do know that the author of this travel piece about Kingston, Ontario published in The New York Times in 1890 states "in all my travels extending through hundreds of miles of Ontario, beginning at this place, [I] have seen the sign 'lager beer' displayed only once." Ontarians were long time pale ale and stout hold outs when their southern mid-Atlantic and mid-western US neighbours were following their immigrant Teutonic ways and breaking out the lager, much to the chagrin of 90 year old Charles H. Haswell in 1899, as is discussed in Maureen Ogle's book Ambitious Brew.

There was another issue, of course, in that the rush of German immigrants was more of a late 1800s rather than mid-1800s event here. There needed to be cold. And the first refrigeration system in Canada is only turned on, according to Sneath, in 1886 in Montreal. So... we had ice houses... and folks doing what they could... figuring out the large investments required compared to the smaller population centres and... well, when you figure all that out... wouldn't you really like a nice old fashioned trusty Ontario stock ale?

The King Brewery Pilsner clocks in at a sessionable 4.8%. It pours an actively carbonated burnished gold that supports a rich white froth and foam. On the nose, there is plenty of pale malt and graininess with Saaz hopping. In the mouth a jag of steely mentholated spicy herbal weedy hops but plenty of rich maltiness to back it up, more bread crust and biscuit that malteser. A complex beer with waves of flavours. Plenty of BAer respect.

Where was I? The 1830s and 40s? About there. Local breweries popping up as settlers move west, filling up southern Ontario right up to the Lake Huron coast. Familar names start popping up. In 1835, James Morton is operating out of the old Molson brewery on the Kingston waterfront. John Sleeman starts up in 1836. In 1843, Thomas Carling builds a brewery in London, Ontario. And in 1847 John Labatt enters into a partnership with an existing brewer also in London and Quebec brewers Molson have another go, this time further west along the Lake Ontario shore at Port Hope. It lasts until 1868. Facts stolen from Sneath.

A number of the brewers are also distillers, maltsters, flour millers and a bunch of other things. Which leads me to my first utterly unfounded theory of beer in Ontario. It is related to this beer. When I think of Canadian pale ale, this is the taste I associate with it. It's ale-y. A musty quality that tastes like the Legion Hall dance or a curling tournaments in 1956. Or 1907. Or 1877. It's heavy on the grain. Given the small scale farming economy of the first and second generations of most of southern Ontario to the west of Toronto through the mid-1800s, the same entrepreneurs were likely handling all sorts of grains and distilling some, brewing with others. They had to make products that both reflected and appealed to their clients and the environment. The had to go with a shot of whisky - whether it was made with barley or rye. In 1862 here in Kingston, Mr. Creighton of the Frontenac Brewery was selling stock ale and porter with the promise of a winter beer in the fall. Farther to the west in 1872, Labatt is selling only pale ale and stout in its local paper.

The Mill Street Stock Ale pours the colour of a pine plank in a lumber yard and resolves to a thin rim and froth. But it's that smell - like a bag of wet grain. In the mouth there is a round ball of pale malt sweetness and, then, a heck of a lot of drying grain huskiness. The huskiness is joined by a measured but roughish sort of hop in the finish - more weedy than twiggy. I don't know how this compares to an 1862 Frontenac Stock but I can day dream about it. Worth more respect than the BAers give it.