TWO FRESH ONES FROM CANADA

Friend of Hedonist Beer Jive “MP” graciously donated several Canadian ales to our cause during his recent business trip to San Francisco. While we never actually met, this fine representative of his gold-medal winning hockey powerhouse of a country actually dropped off several beers at the front desk of his hotel for me; all I had to do was pick them up and then commit to drinking them. Done and done. There are little craft breweries spread across Canada; my recent visits to Toronto confirm that you can even run a world-class beer bar serving nothing but great Canadian artisanal beer. I recently completed the second part of my commitment to MP and drank the beer he so kindly provided me – here’s a report on two of them.

SCOTCH IRISH CORPORAL’S BITTER BROWN ALE – This Ontario brewer allow you to make no mistake about their heritage, and they reflect it well. This make a classic copper/brown ale (I’ll bet they love how Beer Advocate categorizes it as an “American brown ale”), very close in flavor profile to an ESB, with a light caramel taste and mild but noticeable hopping. The caramel is akin to those light tan-colored ones, not the rich and intense sugar bombs so popular with candy makers these days. This beer is bitter for sure, also a bit nutty and buttery. At 4.3% alcohol, it’s probably the easiest-drinking beer we’ve had in a long, long time. Please note that I enjoyed this in my rarely-used “Dusseldorf stein”, pictured above. It’s a high-quality beer that I’d definitely like to grab on tap at some point in life. 7/10.

GREAT LAKES DEVIL’S PALE ALE – Yeah, I was hoping this one would be devilish, too, what with the big “666” on the can, but – no. It’s a metallic English pale ale, totally thin and bland, all malts and bitterness and almost completely lacking in flavor. It pours dark, so that’s something. Sorry, MP, but I can’t condone this sort of alemaking, even if you guys are better in hockey and all that. 4/10.

More Canadian beer chicanery to come!