It was a very Marie Christmas...

Let them eat cake!!! We only put four candles on Marie's
birthday cake because of the strict fire code regulations
at my favoured Rib Eye Jack's Ale House in Burlington ...

When we held my co-worker Marie's 40th Birthday Party at Rib Eye Jack's Ale House in Burlington on December 20, I got a text from another co-worker Michele who was on route with her hubby, Ken, and the home-made birthday cake.

The text was fairly simple: "Can you see if the bar has candles?"

Fair enough. I wandered over to the bar and asked Kylie, the establishment's all-knowing beer technician, that very question.

"Candles?" she asked, her brow furrowing as she thought hard. "Candles? Who makes it?"

Resisting the urge to say "people with too much wax on their hands," I smiled and noted, "Birthday candles... for a cake." She laughed loudly and quickly noted that, yes, they had plenty of candles!

But I honestly understand her confusion. In the one month that I have known her, Kylie and I have talked about and bonded over just one thing - craft beer. No world politics, no weather, no sports, no Ebola Virus - just exceptional craft beer.

Ken and the Holograms (although sometimes they use HoloGrahams in
honour of bass player Graham) were our entertainment on birthday night!

But I'm putting the cart ahead of the horse here... causing my Amish brethren around me no small amount of grief. (Seriously, Jebediah, piss off! Go churn some damn butter.) No, let's talk about how this little birthday bash came to be. You see, Marie has the misfortune of being born on December 25. Due to, well, Christianity at large, her birthday gets overshadowed by some kid born a long long time ago in a manger far far away... named Hans Solo. And we decided screw the Millenium Falcon - it was high time Marie got her due and that we all stopped ignoring her birthday the same way we ignore Gord at work.

So we created a little Facebook page called Marie Vs The Baby Jeebus Birthday Bash and well, once it's on Facebook, it's a real thing, right? And we were set once the date was selected, followed by the locale. The fact that Rib Eye Jack's Ale House is my favourite bar, not to mention super-close to my place, played no role whatsoever because I can honestly say Marie loves the place. And even if she didn't love it, I firmly believe she would have learned to love it. Given time. Starting on this particular day. So about 10 of us jammed into the joint and got ready for a little birthday fun.

Marie's son Kyle started with beer, switched to
rum and then whiskey and bourbon as Saturdays
is their "Add A Second Shot For A Buck" Night

For one of us, the night nearly ended early as Marie's son, Kyle, 21, forgot his ID. (Legal drinking age in Ontario is 19 but if you're American, go to Quebec instead, where I think legal age is whatever the bartender feels like that night. Could be 14, could be 17...) "Where did you leave it?" I asked, thinking it was likely in nearby Oakville, should the matter become an issue. "Uh, Brampton," he confessed. Okay, maybe not so nearby. But it never became an issue and I should note Kyle had a lot of fun, holding his own against the bigger drinking kids like me, Beer Musketeer Glenn and his Mom. He started the evening with a Flying Monkeys Hoptical Illusion Not So Pale Ale but insisted on drinking it out of the bottle. I told him to really enjoy it, he had to pour it in a proper glass, to which he defiantly noted, "Why?" Time to enlist the Birthday Girl. "Tell him why, Marie!" Showing that she still remembered all of our Beer Academy training, Marie patiently explained that your sense of smell plays a larger role than your taste-buds in the taste of a fine pint, as well as releasing the carbonation into the glass rather than your stomach (giving you that bloated feeling) and thus, holding the flavour in the glass. "Besides," I added, tapping into the wisdom of Solomon, "it just looks better in a glass! We do it so it must be cool!!!" (Let's assume that he didn't buy that...)

And while we will never make an IPA drinker out of Kyle (he winced just smelling the IPAs and IIPAs that Glenn and I were piling back), this funny, feisty IT student won Comeback Of The Night, when I was bragging about the fact that

I must say that Beer Musketeer Glenn seemed
to enjoy the best Rib Eye Jack's has to offer...

all my beers were in the 9%-10% zone. You see, Kyle started with beer but before long, he was ordering off their whiskey/bourbon menu as Saturdays are "Second Shot For A Buck" Night at Rib Eye Jack's. After I triumphantly declared that my big, badass IIPAs ruled the school, he looked at me and simply noted, "Everything I've been drinking is 40%. What's your point?" Lesson here? Never go one-on-one against IT students.

But adding a vowel and shifting away from Kyle to beer technician Kylie, thanks to another of Glenn's infamous cross-border one-hour beer excursions into the USA (next time take some KY, dude, because they are gonna bend you over the car hood after being red-flagged so often), I was able to do a pay-it-forward Christmas beer with my favourite young beer technician. Glenn had brought me a Stone Brewing (Escondido, California) Ruination IIPA, pretty much my favourite beer in the world (so far) and when Kylie popped by the table, I gifted her with it. Now while that seemed to genuinely surprise and delight her, you will never get a leg up on a beer technician. Within the hour, while our birthday bash carried on, Kylie had gifted me back a Victory Brewing (Downingtown, Pennsylvania) Hop Devil IPA. We can all stop pretending that Christmas is truly about the spirit of giving because you know what? Receiving doesn't exactly suck, either!!! No sir, it does not...

Okay, my Christmas gift, the
Victory Brewing Hop Devil IPA was
all pine on the nose with some nice
caramel and citrus on the tongue! A
well-deserved 99 on RateBeer...

But it was also Marie's birthday so gifts must be given. Glenn made a wise choice gifting her with an illegally-smuggled (seriously, I'm buying stocks in KY Jelly before Glenn's next trip) Sierra Nevada Brewing's (Chico, California) Pale Ale which at 96 must be one of the higher-rated pale ales on RateBeer. While up until now, not available in Ontario, it turns out that a distribution company will be bringing the outstanding beer to our liquor stores sometimes in March, followed by their Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA not long afterwards. You will have to visualize this but because of this news, I am doing my Happy Dance. It's really quite uncoordinated and very white. Also I just fell. And can't get up. Pass me a beer.

Now since Marie and her beau Ernie have frequented my local brewery, Nickel Brook, on numerous occasions, I went there for her gift whereupon brewery owner John got me a bottle of Old Kentucky Bastard Imperial Stout - their Bolshevik Bastard Stout, aged an additional year in a bourbon barrel. Except John scored me one that had been stored in the back and aged yet another year, making it as smooth as Dr. Evil's head. Not only did Marie drink it, she also made barbeque sauce with it, declaring it outstanding as both a beverage and a food group. BBQ sauce is a food group by itself, right? No? Well, it should be. Who do I petition to make this happen? And can they be bought off with BBQ sauce?

My first offering of the evening was a
Bellwoods Brewery Boogie Monster IIPA.
a hop blast in a tall glass. (Glass, Kyle!!!)

While the birthday girl happily pounded down Mill Street Cobblestone Stout, an Anchor Brewing Steam Lager, a Mill Street Vanilla Porter (her favourite of the night) and a Spearhead Brewing Hawaiian Style Pale Ale (as well as a handful of whiskeys - Kyle comes by it honestly), my night was dedicated to the most lethal of brews - the Imperial IPA. I started with a Bellwood Brewery (Toronto) Boogie Monster IIPA. Pouring a deep orange, as you can see to the right, this 8% brew is both pineapple and grapefruit on the nose, all bitter citrus rinds on the tongue. I honesty have not had a bad or even mediocre Bellwoods beer yet. There can only be one plausible explanation for this. There be witches in that brewery! Burn them... burn them with fire!!! Okay, maybe not, just in case they're not witches because, well... murder (even of witches) remains illegal. Salem kind of wrecked that for, y'know, the witch-burning aficionados.

Okay, I have to give some serious props to tiny Barnstormer Brewery and Pizzeria (you read that right) in Barrie. Open for just two years, I had their F-Bomb Blonde Ale on the Toronto Craft Brew Cruise (nice summer beer) but when I saw their Falconer's Flight IIPA on the extensive beer menu, well, it was a date!

Dustin Norlund, the owner of Barnstormer
Brewery and Pizzeria, puts Barrie on the map
when it comes to top-notch craft beer brewing

Using Citra, Simcoe and Sorachi Ace hops, this 8%, 80 IBU (international bitterness units) beer pours dark copper and is all citrus on the nose with pine and mango on the tongue. Hats off to brewery owner Dustin Norland - he is truly changing the craft beer landscape in his tiny corner of Barrie!!!

I took a quick respite from IIPAs with Muskoka Brewing's Winter Jack Barrel-Aged Double Chocolate Cranberry Stout because I felt I wasn't quite vocal enough at this point and stouts are like a big bowl of Loudmouth Soup to me. This 9% ass-kicker was all chocolate and (to my surprise) cherries on the nose with a healthy heap of vanilla, dark chocolate, cranberry and bourbon on the tongue. Outstanding winter beer!!!

Okay, finally, before I get to Innocente Brewery's (Waterloo) Guilty Conscience IIPA, let me talk briefly about hockey. To be specific, the World Junior Championships being played right now in Canada, featuring the best 17 and 18 year old players in the world. Now I guarantee you if, say, Canada and Russia played the hardest game of the series that went into triple overtime before a shoot-out and then stumbled into their dressing rooms to collapse in a collective heap of teenage sweat, those two dressing rooms would still smell better than Guilty Conscience IIPA.

A wine drinker no more? The Lovely
Lee has been won over by Granville
Island Brewing's Lions Winter Ale...

Seriously, this 7.5% seasonal beer stinks. So there's some never-been-washed jock strap on the nose but the taste? Damn, that's a nice double IPA with citrus, grapefruit and caramel on the tongue. Still, I probably would have told Kyle, "Yeah, just drink this one from the bottle, dude!"

Okay, keeping in mind that clouds probably look at us and say, "Yeah, that one is shaped like an idiot", let's wind this down. A quick note first: my pretty companion Lee is a long-time wine drinker but I recently had her sampling the following: Spearhead Hawaiian Style Pale Ale, Collective Arts Rhyme & Reason Pale Ale, Faxe Red Ale, Nickel Brook Headstock IPA and Granville Island's Lions Winter Ale. She liked them all but the Lions Winter Ale? "I'm tasting chocolate and caramel in this!!!! This is really delicious!!!" Going back to her South African white wine, she bemoaned, "This is so bland after all those flavours in all those beers." I may have a convert on my hands here. Further to that, this is the fifth Christmas in a row where I have received no Christmas Cards from anyone in Africa. Seriously, do they know it's Christmas Time at all???

Okay, in a day or two, the lazy-man Best of 2014 is coming and then next weekend, we have Beer Musketeers Cat and Blair's collective birthdays at the B & C's Craft Beer Bonanza at the Real Sports Bar and Grill in Toronto - the only bar I know with a 46-foot high-def TV screen. Also they serve beer so... Okay, guys and dolls, that's it, that's all and I am outta here!!! Until next time, I remain...