FEATURE ARTICLES

• The Biggest Rock of All
  
• Something's Brewing on the Canadian Prairies
  
• CAMRA Warning Issued
  
• Still Great! The GABF at 15 Years
  

• September 1996

The Biggest Rock of All

A short drive away on 40th Street SW, however, a new age has begun. For it is here that the Big Rock Brewery has opened its new facility, a sprawling network of interconnected buildings capable of producing 450,000 hectolitres a year of Traditional Ale, Warthog, Grasshopper Wheat, Buzzards Breath, Magpie Rye Ale and, of course, their well-lauded McNally's Extra Ale. And when the next stage of demand hits, the brewery will be ready for it with expansion capabilities of 700,000 hectolitres of beer per year.

Recently, I came to Calgary at the invitation of Big Rock to witness the grand opening of this new brewery and I was, in a word, impressed. Laid out like a country retreat or, less sympathetically, a militia compound without the barbed wire, the new brewery expands over four acres of land located on the edge of the city. It was designed largely by Big Rock brewmaster Bernd Pieper and one must assume from the layout that Pieper is a man who values stylish efficiency.

From grain silo to brewhouse to fermenters to bottling line and finally to shipping-receiving, Big Rock's new home is a model of linear production, with the entire process laid out upon the land in the fashion of a neatly-designed flow chart. Walking through the series of rooms and buildings, one can't help but be impressed that Pieper elected to shun them "concrete box" approach favoured by so many larger breweries and instead fashion his brewery as something aesthetically pleasing as well as functional.

Even at a reported cost of CN$16.5 million, however, building the new brewery was the easy part for Big Rock; selling more than triple their current production of beer is where the challenge will lie for the future. Although only time will tell whether Pieper, Big Rock founder Ed McNally and the rest of the company are up to that challenge, the company's past eleven-year history of successful market penetration would indicate that the odds in favour are pretty good.

A refreshing look at beer enjoyment in all its forms, complete with a chapter on matching beer to your favourite foods, a guide to drinking beer with the seasons, 29 delicious recipes that take beer into the kitchen and a whimsical look at pairing beer with music and the movies.

Stephen Beaumont - A Taste For Beer

Something's Brewing on the Canadian Prairies

If this seems unlikely, it's because Regina is hardly known for its astonishing number of microbreweries, which is exactly none. In fact, there is not a single craft brewery in the entire province, only the regional Great Western Brewing Company, a former Molson plant in Saskatoon now operating as a worker-owned co-operative, and one each of Molson and Labatt breweries in Regina.

Brewpubs, on the other hand, it has in relative abundance: six, or one for every 30,000 residents. owing mainly to reasons outlined below, brewpubbing has proven to be quite popular in Saskatchewan and new operations continue to open at regular intervals across the province. This in a region where no one has even taken a shot at opening a bottling brewery.

The key to this plethora of prairie brewpubs is the off-license beer trade which for years was the exclusive domain of the hotel trade, with the local inn functioning also as the local beer store. When brewpubs began to open in the early 1990's, however, the government decided to let them in on the act and granted off-sale licenses to several of the early establishments, thus providing a lucrative incentive to potential brewpub owners. From that simple stimulus emerged what is today a flourishing Saskatchewan brewpub trade.

But abundance and quality are two different things, and one does not necessarily lead to the other. Some brewpubs opened simply as a means of garnering an off-sales licence, a fact which has been admitted to me by at least one owner and inferred by several others. In establishments such as these, beer has been brewed almost as an afterthought and, not surprisingly, tastes accordingly.

Fortunately, other brewpub owners like Bev Robertson of Regina's Bushwakker Brewpub and the Lanigan brothers of the Brewsters chain of brewpubs do care about the beers they serve and it shows in the final product. Bev Roberston's son Scott, trained in brewing by both Bev and Brad McQuay of Newlands, maintains a wide array of very fine ales and lagers at the Bushwakker, including organic beers that don't taste organic and a flavourful and compellingly quaffable ESB. While over at the two Regina Brewsters locations, you can count on reliably good, if sometimes uninspired brews, including a nice best bitter and a recently- tasted Espresso Porter with a full body and pleasing character.

What's more, I expect that Regina particularly and Saskatchewan in general are headed for a brewing explosion of sorts. My recent visit to the Harvest Moon Beer Festival in Regina showed me that the long-dormant beer culture of this prairie province is now finally beginning to come out of its shell. If I were a betting man, and I am, I would bet that three or four new brewpubs and at least one micro will appear on the Regina beer scene within the next year or two. And that will take the city to about one brewery per 18,000 residents!

Portland, are you listening?

A brewery-by-brewery and beer-to-beer guide to the Canadian brewing industry, from Labatt and Molson on down to Horseshoe Bay Brewing and the Bushwakker Brewpub.

Stephen Beaumont's
Great Canadian Beer Guide

If you have any comments, questions, hints or tips for Stephen Beaumont's World of Beer, we'd love to hear from you. Although we unfortunately can't promise individual replies to everyone who writes, we will present some comments and answer some questions in a Reader's Forum section in the months to come.

Click Here: worldofbeer@worldofbeer.com.

What do you get when you cross a US basketball player with the Belgian town of Oudenaarde? The answer next month.

The best beer city in North America? It's identity might surprise you!

And Other Assorted Beer Bits

Selected Events for October

Newport, Oregon, USA:
Rock, Rhythm & Brews

A fund-raiser for the Lincoln County Food Share program, the Pacific Northwest's second largest beer festival features over 100 beers from 40 breweries along with performances from such local blues favourites as Curtis Salgado and Duffy Bishop.
October 11-13. Call 541-265-3207.

St. Albans, Hertfordshire, England:
St. Albans Anniversary Beer Festival

Celebrate CAMRA's 25th anniversary in the organization's home town with 150 real ales plus ciders, perries and foreign beers. All of the Champion Beer of Britain winners from 1976-1996 will be present!
October 10-12. Call 011 44 1727 842838

La Trappe Quadrupel

A media tasting presented by this beer's U.S. agent, the Minnesota- based All Saint's Brands, afforded me an opportunity to reacquaint myself with this powerhouse of an ale. Brewed at the Abbey of Koningshoeven in the Netherlands, the Quadrupel is complex without being complicated and, for all its strength, is not at all an intimidating brew. With a light spiciness, particularly apparent in the front, and a melange of fruit in the body leading to a pleasing black currant finish, the Quadrupel is just the thing for sipping on a cool autumn's night.

CAMRA Warning Issued

An alert has been sounded by the United Kingdom beer consumer's group, the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), regarding a threat they perceive as coming from the European Commission in Brussels. At issue is the guest beer law, a piece of British legislation that allows the landlords of tied houses (pubs owned by breweries) to offer one tap of a competing product, as long as that guest beer is a cask conditioned real ale.

According to What's Brewing, the European Commission (EC) has launched a challenge to the guest beer law on the grounds that they claim it constitutes restraint of trade. The EC's position is that because few brewers outside of the UK produce real ales, the Guest Beer Order, as the law is officially known, restricts the ability of European breweries to compete fairly within the United Kingdom.

CAMRA, which was instrumental in getting the Beer Order restricted to include only real ales when it was first introduced, believes that the opening of the guest beer to European brews will significantly reduce choice in the country. In a What's Brewing editorial, the organization maintains that "a thousand German lagers will not suddenly blossom on the bars of the national brewers' pubs" and that "heavily-discounted lager and nitro-keg beers...will rule the roost" should such an event come to pass.

For the government's part, Consumer Affairs Minister John Taylor appears to be on CAMRA's side. In the front page story of the September edition of What's Brewing, Taylor is quoted as saying that "I...do not see that in any circumstances the provision would be extended to include all beers."

On this side of the Atlantic, speaking as a Canadian all too familiar with charges of protectionism coming from powerful neighbours, I am in totally sympathy with the CAMRA cause. To call the Guest Beer Order protectionist is to imply that no brewery outside of the UK is capable of producing a beer that would conform to the law's guidelines, when in truth, as a CAMRA pamphlet points out, the definition of cask conditioned ale contained in the law is liberal enough to include some traditional beers brewed in Europe. And certainly there is nothing preventing Heineken, Beck or Interbrew from brewing their own cask ales for the English market should they wish to gain access to the country in that fashion.

So long live the guest beer, cask conditioned real ale and CAMRA. And here's hoping that the Eurocrats fail in their attempt to screw it all up!

Still Great! The GABF at 15 Years

With so many beers from which to choose, of course, trying to taste even a decent cross- section is an impossibility. But one thing that I have learned from five years of festival-going is that if you keep your ears and eyes open, it becomes a lot easier to gauge the pulse of the fest. And this year's GABF, for all of its size, was no different.

The first thing that became apparent was that there was to be only one "talk of the festival" beer this year: the remarkable Belgian Red Wisconsin Cherry beer from New Glarus Brewing of New Glarus, Wisconsin. A wonderful fruit beer brewed with more than a pound of cherries per 750 ml bottle and aged in oak, the Belgian Red was indeed the one that everyone was talking about, and more than one taster was overheard to say that it was their candidate for "best of show." In fact, I was one of the few people who was NOT talking about the Belgian Red, but only because I had already placed it in my Top Ten of 1995 list for Wine Enthusiast magazine last December.

As I wandered the tasting grounds sampling this, that and the other, the second conclusion I came to was that the overall quality of the craft beer industry was improving. More rare were the beers that you didn't want to finish, and in their place were many more beers of highly drinkable quality. This is a definite sign of good things to come for the industry as a whole.

In terms of national influence upon brewing trends, my third observation was that the heyday of Belgium seems to be slowly drawing to a close and German beer styles now appear to be finding more favour among the nation's brewers. Emphasizing this fashion was the significant numbers of kölsches and alts lining the tasting booths, with the former style in particular rising from virtual obscurity only a couple of years ago.

My fourth and final observation was not so much a revelation as it was a reassurance. Given the conspicuous absence of certain older, well-established breweries from the GABF medal podium over the past year or two, I was beginning to question whether these elder statesmen of the brewing world had become, well, a little complacent of late. I need not have worried; all of the old favourites were there in very fine form and they were, as ever, a pleasure to taste. Ah, delicious reassurance!

In the end, I left this year's Festival feeling quite good about the industry as a whole, despite all this talk I hear about an impending shake-out. From what I could see, hear and taste, there is still a lot of life left in this fifteen-year-old warhorse!

Stephen Beaumont reserves all rights that pertain to the text of his articles, in any form that it appears.