Hello beer lovers! This week we bring you a special article – Eric visited Ontario from BC for a weekend so we were able to have beer tasting sessions in person rather than over Skype. Naturally, we used this occasion to splurge on several special brews to look at in the next few articles. 🙂
In this article, we want to venture outside of Waterloo, and introduce you to the Ontario beer scene, specifically Ontario’s microbreweries. It’s going to be impossible to acquaint you with every microbrewery in one article, but we’ll do our best to scratch the surface and help you to learn about the large variety of beer Ontario has to offer.
The most well known micro-brewer in Ontario is probably Mill St. Brewery, founded in 2002. This brewery was named after their original location at 55 Mill St. in Toronto’s Distillery District, where they still operate a brewpub with seasonal and one-off brews. Since their founding, they’ve grown considerably to the point where most of their beer is now brewed at a large brewery in Scarborough. In our opinion, they’ve grown so much that they’re crossing the line into becoming a macro-brewery.
Another Ontario microbrewery that you should know about is Flying Monkeys Craft Brewery. This brewery is best known for their weirdness, both in their branding and in the beer they brew. They’ve been around since 2004 when they were called the Robert Simpson Craft Brewery. This brewery makes some of the hoppiest beers in Ontario, including Hoptical Illusion Almost Pale Ale, Smashbomb Atomic IPA, Netherworld Cascadian Dark Ale, and the SuperCollider Double IPA that we reviewed below. They’re also known for experimenting with weird combinations of ingredients. For example, we’ve tried their Bubble Scream Ale (bubblegum flavoured) and their 38 Dark Chocolate Birthday Cake.
So far, we’ve talked about two big players in the Ontario micro-brewing scene, so we also wanted to include an example of a smaller and lesser known brewery. The Lake of Bays Brewing Company started selling beer in Spring 2010, making them one of the newest breweries in Ontario. This brewer is located in Kawartha cottage country, and their flagship beer is the Lake of Bays Pale Ale. This brewery is obviously devoted to high quality beer since every time we’ve had their beer, it has tasted very fresh.
The 3 brewers we’ve talked about so far play very different roles in the Ontario craft beer scene. Mill St. is the big guy, and the name most non-beer geeks associate with Ontario craft brewing. Flying Monkeys is an established brewer that is devoted to pushing the envelope and doing things differently, which one may argue is the spirit of craft brewing. Lake of Bays is a very new brewer and consequently very unknown, but they’re already in most of the LCBOs in Ontario. The Ontario Craft Brewers is a collection of 25 micro-brewers from across the province devoted to brewing quality beer. These are the local microbreweries you’ll find the in the LCBO. Our best estimate is that Ontario currently has over 40 microbreweries, some of them only selling their beer at their brewery (Eg. Gold Crown Brewery on King St.). I hope this first half of our article has given you a taste of the varied beer culture we have here in Ontario.
This week, we are reviewing the Flying Monkeys Craft Brewery’s SuperCollider Double IPA. It is available right now at the LCBO, as well as in bottle at Kickoff in the University Plaza. As soon as we took our bottle home from the LCBO we noticed something odd – it’s abv had been stickered over and read 10.5%, not the 12.4% on the original label. It turns out that the beer was diluted after filtration, but the labels stating 12.4% had already been made. According to the president of Flying Monkeys, the next batch of SuperCollider will probably not be diluted.
The SuperCollider bottle is 650mL and it has a wonderful, striking, shiny label with lots of nerdy super collider jokes (needless to say it ended up in our collection of fancy beer bottles). SuperCollider is an extra strong Double IPA and clocks in at a walloping 160 IBUs. We are huge fans of Flying Monkeys and Eric adores IPAs so we had big expectations and this beer delivered. It is an intense dark chestnut colour and we poured it into a tulip glass to let it breathe a bit. It had a strong off-white head and left a lot of beautiful lacing on the glass as we drank it (the more lace the better as it indicates a beer is fresh). Its aroma included citrus and floral hops with a bit of sweet malt. It only had a slight boozy smell, which was surprising as we expected to smell a lot more alcohol from this heavy hitter. It was wonderfully hoppy with citrus and fruit notes along with malts in the middle and a slight alcohol taste at the end. Our verdict? Delicious. Kudos to Flying Monkeys for continuing to push the envelope in the Ontario microbrewery scene.
Interesting fact: While researching for this article we found out that Flying Monkeys brewed the hoppiest beer in the world (2500 IBUs and 13.3% ABV). It’s called Alpha-fornication and was brewed this summer, but unfortunately they only brewed one 15 litre keg and 6 bottles :’(
The moral of this article? Ontario has a growing microbrewery scene that is creative and unique. So fear no beer – Ontario has great brews here!
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