Barley Mowat 

We’ve all been there: you have a blog on which you talk about beer, and you feel like featuring the odd interesting and noteworthy brew once a month because, well, you want to. Then “once a month” becomes “once in a whenever” then lots of heady talk happens around doing better and being more consistent. Fast forward a couple of months, and your Beer of the Month dates from December and is pretty much sold out everywhere.

Well, screw that. I’m ditching the Beer of the Month and just full-on embracing my sporadic updates as a purposeful feature. Henceforth the BOTM shall be known as the Barley Mowat Feature Beer. I figure if I remove any reference to a timeframe I’m safe to leave that bastard up there until my site’s finally taken down for non-payment of hosting fees.

Actually, who am I kidding, it’ll be shuttered by court order.

So, to kick off this new feature I thought that I’d do something unexpected. What beer is out there right now that is interesting, good, and deserving of more attention? Hint: it’s not from Driftwood (although Bird of Prey is great).

Nope, this beer is from Steamworks. Steamworks gets a bad rap from the local beererati, and there is some reason for the ill will. Ever since busting out of their Water Street on-premises brewing facility like some sort of brew pub Hulk, the produced product has wavered in quality.

The finger of blame can be squarely aimed at Dead Frog, who was not only responsible for both brewing a sub-standard batch of Steamworks’ award-winning Pilsner under contract, but for also releasing that same batch. Even though Dead Frog has since brought their production quality and consistency back up to craft standards (or perhaps higher), the damage was done. Steamworks’ brand was affected.

Throw on to that fire their focus on the mid-scale market, where the more boring, old-school styles of Pilsner, Pale Ale, and Stout dominate, and you wind up with quite a few people who’ve only had either bad or boring beers from SW. Not encouraging.

The frenetic, busy graphics on the bottles don’t help. Hint: if you could throw “Much Beer. So Hop. Wow.” randomly on your bottle and it wouldn’t look worse, you’re doing it wrong.

Then there was that whole ruckus last year wherein a local nuisance blogger pointed out Steamworks’ myriad trademark battles and you were left with a brewery that puts a bad taste in your mouth before you even took that first sip of (likely questionable quality) beer.

Well, it might be time to revisit the (IMHO) ugliest beer bottles in BC. SW has come to the Imperial Red party started by Lighthouse Siren, and shit just got real. Steamwork’s blogger-infuriatingly unnamed Imperial Red is about 10x better than you’d fear, after finally resigning yourself to trying some because talking about beer in BC is your job. You know, as one does.

In fact, it’s even better than Siren which, despite never quite recovering its ambrosia-like pinnacle evident on first release, is still no slouch by any measure. SW Impy Red is no contender against Parallel 49’s recently released Robo Ruby, but it’ll also likely be around a bit longer as well. That’s because this isn’t being brewed on that tiny copper system on Water Street. Nope, it hails from Steamworks’ gleaming new Burnaby brewery, headed by an equally gleaming new Caolan Vaughan. The Burnaby facility will have no problems keeping the thirsty hoards satiated.

APPEARANCE Deep hazy red/brown. Long lasting, thick head.
NOSE Big tropical hops, with a hint of the caramel sugar bomb body in back.
TASTE Balance, with an appropriately tin-y high-malt finish. Booze definitely present, but accentuates malt.
STATS 8.5% ABV / 75 IBU / Imperial Red Ale
SHOULD I BUY IT? Absolutely. You’re hard pressed to get more beer for your $6.25
CHECK IN

A Bronze medal for a metallic tasting Bronze beer. Writing these is hard. Does anyone even read this?

It’s been a while since I last reviewed a run-of-the-mill beer off the LDB’s shelves. Coincidentally, it looks like Whistler Brewing Company has a new bomber out there: The Chief Chipotle Red Ale. If you need a refresher, I’ve been rather harsh on WBC in the past, but I’ve also given props where props are due.

I’m nothing if not pragmatic, and realize it can be hard for a company focused on low-to-mid-range beer to break away from the mass consumer market and instead focus on the high end beer geek crowd, but WBC definitely put their toes in the water with Lost Lake, a delightfully unfiltered IPA. Lost Lake represented a brief, welcome break from a line-up focused on sweetened beers best consumed from a jagged hole in the side of a can. Seriously, they have nine different beers listed at the LDB, and fully five of those are sweetened offerings that can only charitably be called “entry level products.”

Where does The Chief fit in here? Let’s start with the name. Aside from ominously stepping on the Squamish-based product naming scheme of Howe Sound Brewing, slapping “The Chief” on a spicy pepper infused Red Ale should promise a big, meaty, high-malt beer with lots of mineral complexity. This beer is none of those things.

Granted, it’s not awful, which is much better than I’d feared. However, a “Chipotle Red Ale” named after the largest chunk of granite on the planet can ill-afford to be boring, and that’s exactly where this beer leaves you. Whistler, you can do better than this.

APPEARANCE Clear, light auburn red with thin, quickly dissipating white lead. Very low carb.
NOSE Slight chipotle–not much else.
TASTE Not overwhelming, dry, chipotle bitterness, but rather unpleasant. Virtually no other flavour.
STATS 5.0% ABV / ?? IBU / Chipotle-infused
SHOULD I BUY IT? Yeah, it’s a skip. You might have $5.75 burning a hole in your pocket but you’d be better off eating the money instead.

Coles notes:

The LDB just released their 2013 payment numbers, which includes payouts to anyone they owed money to. Since all breweries in the province must by law technically sell their product to the LDB instead of to customers (even if the LDB never physically touches the money or the beer), these numbers act as a rough approximation of brewery production size.

I sat down and did all the math on this last year based on some inside info from a couple of breweries. Looking back, though, I feel those numbers weren’t quite right. I’ve adjusted my dollars to hectolitre conversion slightly, reflecting the improvement in my knowledge of how beer is sold in BC over the past 12 months. Below, I’ve put the 2013 numbers alongside the revised 2012 numbers, along with a percentage change.

As always, the hectolitre numbers are not directly derived from simple math. For instance, if Joe’s Brewery does $2,125,894 in sales, I divide that by 400 (on average, beer sells for 3.75-4.25 per litre) to get 5,314.735 hL. That’s an absurdly precise number for such a generalization. I take that number, and add into it my knowledge that Joe sells his beer mostly on draft (draft beer is more like $3.25 per litre; packaged varies but can be $6.00 or more). So I round Joe’s number up a bit because he had to sell more beer to make his numbers. Let’s say 5,500.

Seriously, that’s how I did this. It goes without saying that these are not precise numbers. If any brewery reading this wants to give me more accurate numbers for their production from March 2012 to March 2013 I’ll be happy to update.

Some fun tidbits:

• Driftwood has slowed their unbelievable growth, and have only increased 50% since last year instead of doubling as they did every year previously.
• I have no idea why the numbers for Red Truck dropped off a cliff. Maybe they’re focusing on building a brewery instead of brewing beer?
• Yes, those numbers for Prohibition / Big Surf are correct. I checked twice.
• Rock on, Sean Hoyne! Hoyne’s numbers were based off an estimate last year, so that might impact the growth number, but even so making that much beer in a 10hL family run brewery shows major demand for product. Congrats!
• R&B is down more than I’d like. Everyone go have an East Side Bitter.

Disclaimers (repeated from 2012):

• The value that seems to best translate dollars to hectolitres for my control breweries is $400. Obviously this is a very rough guess. Draught-only producers will have their production adjusted higher, while bottle-focused producers will be lower.
• Yes, the final production numbers smell like ass because that’s precisely where I got them from.
• Because of the craziness of shadow brands and contract brewing, it’s hard to split out some of these numbers. OK Spring, in particular, also produces Sleeman locally, and those sales are blended in.
• Some breweries are missing, including: Coal Harbour, Steamworks amoung others. I have no idea why. They are likely running under either a numbered company or a name I don’t recognize.
• I have excluded Labatt’s (Kokanee) simply because it would be impossible to separate out beer produced in-province from imports.
• Likewise, I have skipped Mark Anthony Group (Turning Point/Stanley Park) because most of their money comes from wine (Mission Hill)
• Breweries with no distribution to speak of (mostly brewpubs) have been dropped from the list.