Beer Interlude: Road Trip!

Last weekend, my lovely wife fulfilled a Christmas promise and booked a brewery tour for the Niagara area (actually, the breweries were all in the Niagara on the Lake area instead). Now Niagara on the Lake is particularly noted for being wine country but it turns out that there are a few craft breweries making their presence known. We were accompanied by our good friends Catherine and David. Our driver for the tour was Jim and he made all of the arrangements.

The first stop was as at Oast House (http://oasthousebrewers.ca/). An oast building was originally used to dry hops in England. I've actually had the brewery's Biere de Garde before when I was having a dinner at the Weinkeller (an excellent restaurant in Niagara that I highly recommend). I enjoyed the Biere de Garde but found it a little too hoppy at the end for me to love it completely. We did a tour of the back area to see the kettles, vats, and whatnot. I also learned that hops added at the start of fermenting bring taste to the mix and hops added at the end bring bitterness.

I hadn't really realized what a hop plant looks like. Now I know. It's basically a vine that grows from basically nothing to 30 feet every summer and puts out what looks like small sort-of pine cones. Oast House has a small circle of them growing and they have an number of farmers growing hops for them as well so they should be able to use their own hops starting next year.

We sampled their Saison and their Barn Raiser. Both are bitter in the finish. The Saison, which I enjoyed the most, starts off with a nice lemon taste before the hops take over. I have two bottles which I'm going to let sit around at room temperature for a while to mellow them out a bit. The Barn Raiser was a brown ale that was OK but really too much bitterness for me to fully enjoy.

Next was lunch at the Old Winery restaurant (http://www.theoldwineryrestaurant.com/). Very nice place but a bit off-theme for a brewery tour. It's Italian in theme and I had the wood oven veggie pizza. I accompanied it with a Leffe Brown Ale to bring a bit of balance to the bitterness I had encountered earlier.

Off to Silversmith (http://www.silversmithbrewing.com/). The restaurant part of this brewpub is in a former church. It looks fantastic on the outside and on the inside. Unlike many Canadian bars and pubs, there's no TVs and the background music is barely there. They use chalk to write down what they are serving. Fantastic! We got our reserved seats and awaited our flight of samples. I was so looking forward to them, especially the Damn Buster English ale.

And I was so disappointed. I started with their wheat beer, figuring to start with the lightest in colour and taste. It wasn't overly flavourful but it was overly hopped. I was surprised at how bitter it was. And the samples just kept getting more and more bitter the darker they were. The Damn Buster was basically undrinkable. David said that was like drinking medicine and I have to agree. Silversmith, there's no award for making the bitterest beer! If there is, there shouldn't be!

Off to school next. Niagara College has a culinary department that includes brewing courses. Of course they have samples! I tried their Butler's Rangers brew, which was bitter but drinkable and their First Draft ale, which was lighter in colour and taste but still on the bitter side. I know that David tried a couple. He handed me a glass of Red Eye Sour. Now I've had the Rodenbach Sour and it might be the best beer I've ever had (if it isn't, it's right up there). Red Eye Sour is the polar opposite. It might be the worst I've ever tasted. It basically has the same taste as the ultra-hot sauces usually have but without the heat. Absolutely nasty. I'm hoping the teacher gave whoever "brewed" that stuff an F. Just because you can dump a gallon of cheap and nasty hot sauce in beer doesn't mean that you should.

(As a side note: what's up with all this bitter beer in the Niagara region. A year or so ago, my wife and I went to the Syndicate brewpub in Niagara Falls and I really didn't like their beer all that much because of the lingering bitterness. Maybe Niagara folk are made of sterner stuff than me?)

Our final stop was the Olde Angel Inn in Niagara on the Lake (http://www.angel-inn.com/home.php). This was the perfect place to end the tour. The pub part is very much English in style so I thought I would order a pint of Angel English ale. I'm glad I did. It took half a pint to cleanse my palette from all of the accumulated bitterness. The remaining half went down slowly and smoothly. The perfect pint to end the day.