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Hello readers! We hope that your midterms are finished, and in an effort to help make you forget the more traumatic midterms, this week’s article is about where to find the best beer in the K-W area! We will also be reviewing Rosée d’Hibiscus by Montreal’s Dieu du Ciel.
Our first stop is pretty close to home – it’s the POETS pub in CPH Foyer. It is a proud engineering tradition to have our own bar (other faculties have been denied the chance to have their own pub), and every Alumni Day sees tons of grads back in POETS enjoying a brew. POETS only has bottle service and carries several beers – most notably POETS Warrior Lager, which is brewed specially for us by Gold Crown over at the Huether Hotel. It is a tradition recently brought back to POETS and was originally introduced to POETS in the mid-nineties. POETS has bottle service on Thursdays and Fridays from noon until 4 pm.
To continue our beer tour, we will go over to the University Plaza. There are many bars in this area, but they are mostly red herrings and are designed to part you from your money using inferior, overpriced beers. However, the capital of fine beer in Waterloo is located in the plaza in a small, somewhat dimly lit bar named Kickoff. From the outside, it looks like a sports bar, but as soon as you step through the soccer ball-emblazoned door, you begin to see the insane number of beer taps and a huge fridge full of exotic beers. Kickoff carries a large variety of both microbrew and imported beer. Only once in a while can you find something on the Beer Store’s Top Ten on tap – common features on the tap lineup include Dead Elephant (reviewed last issue), Hacker-Pschorr Weisse, beers brewed by Flying Monkeys, Blackthorn Cider, beers from Big Rock, Cobblestone Stout, Hoegaarden and Fruli (strawberry wheat beer). You will never find the same exotic lineup two weeks in a row – all of Kickoff’s 14 taps switch constantly (Dead Elephant usually only lasts a few days). Be sure to talk to the best bartender in the land – he has worked there over ten years and always has an excellent story to share! Next in the plaza is Molly Bloom’s, a “traditional” Irish Pub. They have Guinness, Carlsberg and Strongbow on tap (among others). They pour a great Black and Tan (reviewed in the first issue) and Black Velvet. The food is tasty, too! Mongolian Grill is one of the only bars around with Sleeman’s Original on tap, and Front Row is the only bar we have seen outside of BC that carries the tasty Okanogan Springs Pale Ale.
On the way to Uptown Waterloo, there are a few bars, but nothing really good until you stop at McMullan’s and Huether. McMullan’s has the most taps in one bar in town – they regularly carry a ton of Big Rock beers, along with every single beer of the “Big Ten” (not to our taste, but sure to please most people), a number of well-known imported beers (Heineken, Stella Artois and Kilkenny to name a few), and a good selection of bottles. The pizza is excellent, and the atmosphere is pretty sweet (go for the armchairs by the bar). Our next stop, The Huether, is owned and operated by the Addly family and is the proud supplier of the delicious POETS Warrior Lager. The Huether brews beer on-site and then serves it at one of the three bars located within the building. The Huether is a proud tradition in Waterloo (Rebecca’s dad was a regular there back when he went to UW!), and we encourage you to try their many unique beers (and some of the best food around).
We wanted to throw in a quick plug for West 50 Pourhouse & Grille in Mississauga. They have over 100 different beers on tap, most of which are imported. This includes our all-time favourite, O’Hara’s Irish Stout, which costs around $14 a pint (but totally worth it)! It’s close to Square One, so check it out if you’re in town. Toronto has its own beer scene, and we could fill another article describing it. So get out there and discover how diverse the world of beer can be!
This week, we chose a beer to demonstrate how diverse the world of beer really can be. It comes from one of our favourite breweries, Dieu du Ciel. The beer is called Rosée d’Hibiscus and is a wheat beer brewed with the hibiscus flower. Before we get into the beer itself, we wanted to talk a bit more about the brewery. They started as a small brewpub in Montreal with the goal of producing the best beer possible at any cost. They dreamed up crazy ideas and have created many unique masterpieces over the 13 years they’ve been in operation. The LCBO started carrying their beers in Ontario almost a year ago, so if you haven’t tried one of their beers, make sure you do. You won’t regret it!
Now that you know a bit about the brewery, we can review the beer. Rosée d’Hibiscus is an extraordinarily different beer since it is brewed using the hibiscus flower. You can see the picture attached to this article to get an idea of what the bottle looks like and the type of glass used to pour the beer. Appearance: The first thing you notice when you begin the pour the beer into a tulip glass is its dark pink hue – a very unique characteristic among beers. It also has the cloudy appearance of a wheat beer, but has a noticeably short head retention, which is uncharacteristic of a wheat beer. Smell: The beer smells of spice and citrus, with a strong floral aroma (from the hibiscus flower). Taste: This beer has a very unique taste (as all beers from Dieu du Ciel do) that can be hard to place. Up front, the taste is sour and tart, but as the beer warms in the mouth, it transfers into the smoother taste of hibiscus while retaining some of its sour character in the aftertaste. Another way to describe beer is mouthfeel, which includes describing carbonation and the feeling of density (or body). Mouthfeel: This is a light bodied beer, but has a high level of carbonation that accents the sour character. Overall: This is a great beer from a great brewery, but we aren’t too keen on how sour it is. The colour and aroma of the beer attracted us, but we still only drink this beer once in a while. Dieu du Ciel makes some amazing ales and stouts, and we can’t resist buying them whenever they’re in stock at the King St. LCBO.
Thanks for reading, we hope that this article will inspire you to get out there, try something new and get outside that comfort zone. Feel free to stop us in the halls and chat about beer, and, as always, FEAR NO BEER!
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