The Beer Musketeers... and happy Euro-finds

A clever cheeky ad for average Euro-fare

Right now on Facebook, there's a long-running four-way conversation between the Four Beer Musketeers - myself, college chums Glenn and Stevil St Evil and relative newbie to the collective Cat, the lone female who should get some special deference if only due to gender... but hey, if you wanna aim that high, start with world peace, having a fire-breathing pet dragon (thank you, Game of Thrones for adding that to my Bucket List... you bastards) and an episode of The Bachelor where just one of the women finally realizes a buff dude in a big mansion making out with 24 different ladies may not be marriage-material. That said, Cat fits right in due to a love of fine craft beer, not to mention an occasional over-the-line turn-of-phrase on her end. Plus every collective needs a den mother. Poor Cat. She got us.

In this long-running dialogue, we discuss world events, the small triumphs of the day, little aches and pains, the cresting and ebbing of the Toronto Maple Leafs, our childrens' escapades... you know, the beauty and joy that is life. That portion of the conversation is a solid 2%. The remaining 98% is about beer. Good beer, bad beer, outstanding beer, somewhere-in-the-middle beer... all beer.

This innocuous French beer sets off huge
alarms within the Four Musketeers HQ...

To that end, if you wanna be a Musketeer, you have to be game for tomfoolery, dissing and general mockery. To wit, if the Musketeers know I am out with, say, my craft-loving co-worker Saga, I am quite safe. Saga and I will always find something unique in a Sea of Mainstream. But if I'm out with co-worker Gordo, who's a little more Joe Lunch-Pail in his beer choices, I'm gonna get drilled. One night in response to a Cat text asking what I was up to, I replied that I was out having post-work brews with Gordo. Instantly, her text came back: "OMG... WHAT are you drinking????" Well, that night as circumstances had it, we were at the Bronte Sports Kitchen on Tuesday Tall-Boy Night and while Gordo was happily quaffing away on his beloved Molson Canadian, I was trying out a Kronenbourg 1664, a French beer I had never had before. That instantly set off the Defcon-5 Intruder Alert alarms at Beer Musketeer headquarters. The next text, within seconds, came from Stevil - yes, a text from Wellington, New Zealand to Oakville, Ontario, Canada within seconds - with the plaintive message: "Kronenbourg? Good gawd, man. Why????"

I like the logic of this thinking. Also the
irony that it is on a Coors Light ad-board

This is why I'll never have to worry about being seated in a chair in the middle of the room, facing an intervention from the other Beer Musketeers. It would be more like an Anti-Intervention. "Don, we actually want you to drink more beer... but at the same time, be a little more specific and careful in your choices." My family might opt for a proper intervention but they're the reason I drink so I don't think that'll fly. (Note to any family member reading this: "No, not you. You're great... the other ones.") So how was that Kronenbourg 1664? Uhhh... it wasn't bad. Tasted like a slightly-better Euro-version of a mainstream North American lager. Liked it but I'm not gonna fly to France to give them any medals for it.

To that end, Saga and I have a theory on the big-name European imports, meaning Heineken, Stella Artois, Grolsch, Beck's - the big Euro-guns. When young Saga was in France a few years back, he had a Kronenbourg on tap. "It was delicious," he noted. "I thought when I got back to Canada, I had my new beer." So eventually, he returned, grabbed some Kronenbourg from the Beer Store. Upon his first sip at home, he looked at it and thought, "WTF is this?" We both believe that they alter their formulas for the beers being exported to North America to make them more palatable to the mainstream beer drinkers. To put this into beer terminology: they 'Budweiser' it. My high school buddy, Roy, currently residing in Nyon, Switzerland would probably agree as he once told me after a trip to the Guinness brewery in Dublin that the cans of Guinness we get here will never compare to the heavenly brown Exilir of the Gods he had right from the brewer's taps at St. James's Gates.

Czech lager Kozel - sayyy, now we're talking euro-tasty!!!

So the trick is to seek out less mainstream Euro-fare not as likely to alter anything, such as Czech lager, Kozel. Had one for the first time a couple weeks back and that's a tasty brew. The strongly-malted scent, slightly bitter taste is tweaked on the palate by what I'm gonna guess are Saaz hops. It says "lager" on the can but coming from Plsen region as it does, it's a pilsner. (RateBeer only gave this 40 but is notoriously hard on lagers and pilsners, obviously not popular choices on the website, so I tend to disregard pretty much all their scores for those two styles.)

Another nice Euro-find was Germany's Kostritzer Schwarzbier, a black lager whose aroma is nutty but bitter and chocolate on the tongue. I love a good dark/black lager and this certainly qualifies. A solid 82 on RateBeer so clearly we agree on dark lagers and schwarzbiers.

I will always have a couple of these in the
fridge at Donny's Bar and Grill these days.

Another beer that had languished in the fridge for a while at Donny's Bar and Grill was Britain's Young's Double Chocolate Stout, a Christmas gift given to me by Sandi From Upstairs. (From Upstairs is not her real last name.) She got me one of these and a Rogue Dead Guy Ale. I got her, uh, something for sure next Christmas. I don't even think the Dead Guy, one of my all-time favourites, made it down the staircase. Sandi didn't know I loved it - she just thought the label was cool. But this Young's Double Chocolate Stout - holy crap, that's a great stout. Brewed with both chocolate malt and actual dark chocolate, it smells of... wait, do I even have to say? I urged Musketeer Cat to try one and she, too, raved. This bad boy is the bomb. At $3.50 for a 500ml bottle, there's always a couple in my fridge door these days. If I feel like a stout, *bam*, there it is. So the trick with Euro-beers? Go past the big names and find the hidden gems.

The 2014 Ontario Brewing Awards were held at Toronto's Gladstone Hotel on April 3 and some of my favourite beers that I've talked about here took home medals, among them Cameron's Rye Pale Ale, Hop City's Barking Squirrel Amber Lager, F&M Stonehammer's Oatmeal Coffee Stout, Mill Street Belgian Wit and Muskoka's Winter Beard Double Chocolate Cranberry Stout.

Don't tell the Beer Musketeers but
I really enjoyed the Laker Red 5.5

One that caught me by surprise was Laker Light taking gold in the Light Beer category. Not because Brick Brewing is a larger brewery - after all, Molson's Rickards Blonde took silver in the Pilsner group and you don't get bigger than Molson. Also, that news that will make Saga very happy because he loves him some Rickard's Blonde... oh yeah. But no, it's actually because Laker Light is a discount beer and that caught me a little off-guard. That said, well done, Brick!! You see, this is why I'm a Beer Geek and not a Beer Snob. I really don't care who makes a good beer... so long as it is a good beer. As well, I'm not on a quest to try certain select beers - I'm on a quest to try ALL beers. Also it wasn't all that long ago, just last June, that I was the dude drinking discount beers. So it would be like those annoying people who quit smoking and then get all holier-than-thou on the still-smoking within the month. Now the fact is I've never had a Laker Light and likely never will. But the reason for that is simply that I have no interest in light beers - anyone's light beer, commercial or craft. (So, okay, not all beers. But most.) That said, I'll happily scout around on anyone's turf. When we got Laker Red 5.5 in single 473-ml cans, I thought I'd give it a go. It's a red ale and I love red ales - except this is classified as an amber lager but hey, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck... It's all apple on the nose, apple on the tongue and at 5.5%, more bang for your buck if you like the discount lines. Discount Beer Drinkers (who in all probability have never read this blog), THIS is your hidden gem. Is it on the same level as the Flying Monkeys/Central City Collaborative Red-on-Red Ale, which is unbelievable? Of course not. But it has its quirky and quite tasty charms. I genuinely like it and have had it many times since. (Among others, of course. Like I said, I cast my net far and wide...)

Courtesy of my friend, Gail, here's a
urinal at Pizza Boy Brewing Brew Pub
in Enola, Pennsylvania. Their credo?
"You only rent the beer and then it
goes back into the keg." Holy crap!
That's the Circle of Beer legend!

Okay, like many, I'm concerned with the "dumbing down" of society, particularly with the advent of social media such as Facebook and Twitter and the proliferation of blogs just like this. To that end, I will contribute to Word Power by incorporating more complex words into my vernacular. Today, at some point, I'll try to work in power words like "proliferation", "incorporating" and "vernacular" into this blog. Okay, so here we... oh... damn. Never mind. Probably a bad idea, anyway...

Shout outs!!! Thanks to my friend Gail for the uber-cool Pizza Boy Brewing keg urinal to the left there. Great find! Thanks to my former Beer Store bro Tommy Salami for sending me the winners of the 2014 Ontario Brewing Awards on my Facebook wall with the simple note: "It looks like I have a shopping list for the LCBO this evening." Like him, there's a handful of winners on that list I still have to try! So here they are! Winners Of The 2014 Ontario Brewing Awards Of course, Beer Musketeers Stevil and Cat for both their unabashed mockery of Kronenbourg 1664 and uncanny ability to steer all conservations back to beer. Very much the same with that oddball Saga guy. And Musketeer Glenn? Man, we can't shut this guy up! He's back from his Florida visit with his lad, Jake, but it sounds like Daytona Beach just may have kicked serious ass in this one we'll innocently call: Daytona Beach Kicked Serious Ass and then another that chronicles the last day of the trip that we'll call: All Good Things Must Come To An End

Next up: an in-depth look at the Sleeman Empire. What Canadian brewery sold boot-leg beer? Maybe even to Al Capone himself? Not sure. We'll know soon. Okay, guys and dolls, that's it, that's all and I am outta here!!! Until next time, I remain...