Monthly Archives: September 2009

New Lighthouse Limited Releases?

I was at GCBF last weekend and I have a substantial amount to write about it, but thought I’d first share this juicy little tidbit.  I was in a long line for the ATM at GCBF (no beer tokens included?) behind one of the sales managers of Victoria’s own Lighthouse Brewing Company.  We got to talking when he wondered aloud at what extortionate banking fees we might be charged for that extra $20 we needed for tokens.  We struck up a conversation and talked about his beer, Lighthouse breaking into the Vancouver market, competitive beers, and the like (it was a really long line).  I quite like Lighthouse beer in general, but my one beef with them is that they don’t do anything special.  I asked him why Lighthouse didn’t do any seasonal releases.  He said it was because Lighthouse was only equipped for canning until recently and that cans had to be ordered in minimum batches of 10000.  He said that with their new bottling line (Race Rocks Amber and Riptide Pale are now available in bottles) that seasonals were now a possibility and that the brewers were clamoring to do something Belgian.  I pushed to know the particular style, but all I got was ‘something Belgian’.

There you have it, the first bit of beer news (or speculation) broken on LoveGoodBeer.com, a potential upcoming limited release from Lighthouse Brewing.  If they were to do a seasonal release, and I hope they are, I think it would be great for Lighthouse.  Nothing generates more buzz than something new or special and I think Lighthouse’s beers are worth hearing about.

Cheers,

Chris

Montreal

I’m back from my trip to Quebec and I feel more Canadian the ever. My wife and I spent the past week drinking local Quebecois beer, gorging ourselves on the delicious Canadian food group known as poutine -they put pretty much anything imaginable in their poutine – eating cheese, pouring maple syrup over just about everything that is eaten before 12:00 noon, and walking over the ground where some of Canada’s most defining moment took place.

The first half of our trip was spent in Montreal, and the remainder of our time in historic Quebec City. As I previously commented, Quebec is an amazing beer destination, and I have quite a bit to post about. This first post will focus on Montreal, the second, which should follow shorty, will focus on Quebec City.

Montreal

The people of Quebec are incredibly proud of locally produced products, which makes for a great beer culture. Most restaurants we visited in Quebec featured a number of local craft beers. Unlike in Vancouver, good beer is available just about anywhere. Although the style of beers available in Montreal is quite diverse, most breweries tend to brew with a yeasty Belgian flair.

While in Montreal we visited a number of brewpubs – Brutopia, Dieu Du Ciel and Les 3 Brasseurs. For anyone planning a trip out Montreal in the near future, avoid Brutopia, they claim to be Montreal’s premium brewpub, but their beer is terrible – the other two pubs served great beer.

After landing in Montreal and a confusing hour spent on public transit on our way to our hotel, we sat down for our first meal in Montreal at Les 3 Brasseurs. This establishment belongs to a chain of brewpubs headquartered in France, and they offer four beers on tap (Wit, Blonde, Amber and Brown) and a maple syrup bottle conditioned Belgian style ale. We started out with a taster of all four ales – all were delicious, but the brown ale was my hands down favorite. To end the evening we tried the bottle conditioned ale, which was great, but nothing overly impressive. I just don’t think that maple syrup and beer work all that well together, many people I’m sure will disagree.

The best brewpub in Montreal, and possibly even Canada, is Dieu Du Ciel. They offer 18 beers on tap and a limited menu of bar snacks. We were only able to try 6 of the 18, but all were impressive. Dieu Du Ciel’s beer is clearly brewed with passion, care and creativity – three critical element necessary to create great beer, and food for that matter. The styles available range from German kolsch to a rich espresso imperial stout. The only beer that I thought they could improve was the India Cream Ale – I just don’t think brewers east of the rockies can match the fantastic hop flavors that west coast brewers have perfected.

Brewery Creek in Vancouver carries a number of Dieu Du Ciel’s beers, I recommend trying all of them at least twice.

Cheers

Erik

Last gasp GCBF ticket options

It is indeed the Great Canadian Beer Festival this weekend.  This will be my first GCBF and I had no idea how popular it was.  I lucked out in getting tickets by just happening to show up at the beer store to grab the last few available.  I had planned to buy tickets a few days later, but the fates tempted me out on the first day of sales.  Anyway, even though tickets are long sold out, there are still a few ways to get to GCBF:

If you miss out, we’ll post about how awesome it was next week so that you can feel really bad about missing it.  Maybe it’ll motivate you to get tickets nice and early next year?  Seriously though, it is going to be an awesome time.  The lineup looks wonderful and our stay at Swans includes a free tasting, and then we’ll have the excellent Canoe brewpub just down the road…

In preparation for GCBF (and to help recover from the Labour Day weekend) I am embarking on an epic four day beer fast.  Wish me luck.

Cheers,

Chris

Gluten Free Sorghum Beer

I tried Bard’s Gold last night, my first sorghum based beer.  Sorghum is a species of grass and its seeds can be harvested as grain to make beer, a frequent practice in Africa.  In fact, most African beers, including their locally brewed Guinness, are sorghum based.  Bard’s claim to fame is that it contains no barley, wheat, or oats and is gluten free, like that’s a good thing.  I know that there are many people who are allergic to gluten (and many people who claim to be allergic but probably aren’t), so this just might be the beer for them.  It should be noted that gluten based grains nourished and helped form human civilization, which is why I find the present day prevalence of gluten allergies a bit ludicrous, but that’s just me…

Sorghum

Sorghum

Anyway, I’m not sure I liked sorghum beer, or at least this sorghum beer.  I found that it tasted a bit like grass.  It was rather light and had a distinctly different taste from similarly light barley based beers.  It wasn’t really bad, but I agree with some of the Beer Advocate reviews.  If I had a non-fake gluten allergy and had to drink sorghum beer for the rest of my life, I might just quit drinking beer, supposing I couldn’t find any better options than Bard’s.  For now, I’m going to stick to the gluteny goodness of the barley, wheat, and oats people have been eating for ten thousand years.

Cheers,

Chris

Calorie Content of Beer?

My initial reaction to the question ‘How many calories are in beer?’ is who gives a crap?  If you really care about losing weight, you should probably not drink beer at all.  But then if you care about being happy, you probably should drink beer and just not care about calories.  However, many of you do seem to care about the calorie content of beer, particularly of Bud Light Lime.  Going through our top search keywords in Google Analytics, meaning keywords Googlers are using to find our site, I found the following ranked rather high up:

  • bud light lime calories
  • bud light lime sucks
  • calories in bud light lime
  • bud light lime ingredients

What does this mean?  It means that a lot of Bud Light Lime drinkers are after it because they think it is diet beer or because they think they can drink twice as many of them without getting fat (or something similarly depressing).  It also means that a good portion of you hate Bud Light Lime as much as I do, which gives me hope.  A few of my friends have told me they are getting sick of me ragging on Bud Light Lime, so this will be my final mention of it.  It really is that bad though; this is why I think so:

  • It tastes bad. It tastes like Sprite gone off.  I’ve heard people say ‘it’s not that bad’, but why not settle for half decent, pretty good, or better yet, actually good?  I don’t understand why someone would want to drink Bud Light Lime when they could have any one of the wonderful beers that I listed in my previous post that garnered so much attention.
  • Real Lime Flavor. This is not the same as real limes, real lime juice, or real lime anything.  Real lime flavor implies something unnatural and, more importantly, unnecessary.  If it is lime you are after, try this: buy a lime, cut it, squeeze it, and then let the juice drip into a beer.

Anyway, the purpose of this post was not to rag on Bud Light Lime one last time, but to talk about the calories in beer.  I’ve heard many mentions of ‘a meal in a glass’ in reference to dark beers before, but the color of beer has nothing to do with calorie content.  I’ve also heard complaints that beer makes you full.  In my opinion, beer should make you full because it is food, but that extra full feeling one gets comes from carbonation or nitrogenation.  The gasses remain in your stomach and make you feel ‘foamy’, as Erik and I call it when we’ve had a few too many.  In reality, the colorie content of beer has most to do with alcohol levels and residual unfermented sugars in the beer.  The alcohol content of a beer will be most indicative of calorie content.  For example, a 10% ABV beer will likely have close to twice as many calories as a 5% ABV beer.  Now for the actual numbers:

  • Bud Light Lime has 116 calories per 12oz
  • Bud Light has 110 calories per 12oz
  • Guinness has 210 calories per 20oz pint
  • Normal 5% beer ~ 150 calories per 12oz
  • Normal 7% beer ~ 220 calories per 12oz
  • Normal 10% beer ~ 300 calories per 12oz

It seems to me, you are generally looking at about 30 calories per percentage alcohol point in a 12 ounce serving of beer.  Is the 30 calorie savings that Bud Light Lime offers over a good beer worth it?  Rest assured that I’ll be choosing quality over quantity until the end of my days.

Cheers,

Chris