I am currently in San Francisco enjoying the best beer event in th U.S.: SF Beer Week. Below are my tasting notes from Friday’s festivities at City Beer and Toronados, where I was lucky to taste both the 2009 Cable Car (a sour beer made by Lost Abbey just for Toronado’s and unavailable anywhere else) and Pliny the Younger, (an epic 11% double IPAwith amazing flavor and balance). SF beer week is truly the ideal model for beer weeks everywhere.
Midnight sun obliteration vii – clean balanced hoppy stout, more like a black ipa with subtle roasted malt stout characteristics. Good but not my style.
Midnight sun monk’s mistress nitro. Takes a good minute to form its head – very dense.
Nice smoothness dried fruits and Xmas cake. Enjoyable and the alcohol is quite mitigated by the nitro.
Russian river mortification 2010: nice hop mid palate balances the sweetness on this impressive quad. Vg+. still only Belgian yeast lovers need apply.
Pliny the younger – is this a west coast IPA? Indeed but with ridiculous balance and pine centric. The best west coast IPA around? I would say yes.
Lost Abbey Cable Car – insane complexity and lactic character. Sour cherries, Brett but clean and very very balanced. Excellent+.




I am a little late with this brief note on a great holiday beer, but there is still some of it floating around the market and it’s worth picking up to drag out your festivities for a few more days! Anchor is a pioneer in the U.S. microbrew scene, making its first beer (Anchor Steam) in 1896. However, in my opinion it is Anchor’s Christmas Ale that is their true paean to craft brewing. This is a special beer that sees a change in recipe every year and carries with it significant aging potential. They also change their label every year, but consistently keep the hand drawn tree as the basis. This year the tree was based on San Francisco’s famous Monterey Cypress near where the Panhandle meets Golden Gate Park. The 2009 ale is the 35th edition of Anchor’s Christmas Beer.
On my recent trip down to Seattle I picked up a bunch of winter and Christmas beers from some of the very excellent U.S. microbrews available south of the border. Here we have a very interesting hybrid style ale from Great Divide of Denver, Colorado, a great brewing city and state.
A beer from the brewmaster’s collaboration series, this ale was a joint effort between Dirk Naudis of De Proef and Tomme Arthur from Lost Abbey/Port Brewing. Both of these guys are lauded in the craft beer community, and the idea of a collaboration between them on a crazy hybrid Belgian and American wild ale is pretty exciting. I’ve had and written up the second beer in this series made by De Proef and Jason Perkins of Allagash. It was awesome. This confirms the trend.
In an exciting development, I am writing up this beer procured not on a trip to the United States, but rather on a trip two blocks away from my work at a local beer speciality shop. That’s right, a true blue bourbon barrel aged stout has made it across the border and into our stores. I’ve been ranting about the beauty of wood aged beers ever since I lived down in California where such things are not strange oddities but much loved companions. If the recent shipment of this rare beer from North Coast is any indication, we may be able to begin moderate rejoicing here in British Columbia.
Today I stopped by the 100th cask rotation at the Alibi Room here in Vancouver for a special selection of BC microbrewed beers. The place was hopping and filled with both beer geeks and beer industry, including many of the brewers themselves. There were quite a few one off beers being poured, but the one that really stood out to me was this unique “wet hopped” India Pale Ale from BC’s newest brewery Driftwood.

