If you were one of the 106.5 million people to watch the Super Bowl (largest American TV audience ever; take that, M*A*S*H series finale), chances are you saw a Bud Light commercial. Anheuser-Busch (or, rather, AB InBev) trotted out about 80 of them in part to assert its dominance on the grand stage of television advertisement but also to ring in the new Bud Light slogan, “Here we go.” My thoughts on AB’s marketing strategies are known, so it’s surprising to me that they’d go with the worst motto in history of beer.

In the spots, some guy finds out Bud Light has entered the equation somehow and exclaims “here we go,” as if a good time is imminent, like the crest of a roller coaster. Frankly, casting alcohol as a party drug the way this does is disgraceful and the implications of alcoholism are blatant. The Times reports “The idea has been to balance rational reasons for buying Bud Light, which were conveyed as product qualities under the umbrella of drinkability, with reasons that would ‘connect on an emotional level,’ (VP for marketing Keith) Levy said.” Here we go, because you can’t help it, you’re addicted. Talk about emotional.

I reproach Anheuser-Busch for highlighting the negative, consuming affects alcohol has on some. Good work, guys. And I invite you to visit my dad’s new blog on recovery and addition therapy if the topic interests you.

We're all very poud parents.

It seems that I have something in common with Eric Asimov, drinks columnist and blogger of The Pour, both at the New York Times. Besides the odd notion of writing about drinking, we each enjoy a good stout. Thing is, though, Asimov likes my stout – or at least the stout I’m paid to make. (article.)

In today’s NYT Asimov took a look at the stout as a category and less as a style. For instance, St-Ambroise Stout is an oatmeal stout, very different from an Irish stout, milk stout, or a Russian Imperial stout. To this end, he gathered up 19 bottles of all varieties of stout and along with a panel of tasters, rated them out in a top-ten sort of list. McAuslan was second best.

Here’s was Asimov had to say:

It’s a good thing Bernie threw in that Canadian beer, because the St. Ambroise oatmeal stout, from McAuslan Brewing in Montreal, was No. 2 on our list of North American stouts. It was bigger and richer than the Black Hawk, with the smoothness and slight sweetness that come from adding oatmeal to the malted barley.

Now, I’ve never heard of Mendocino Brewing, and I think it got some brownie points for being from New York, but I am certainly going to pick up a bottle of Black Hawk stout on my next trip through Saratoga.

It’s nice to get positive feedback from any drinker. An international review from a critic at one of the largest newspapers in the US, however…. I was smiling all day.

In this building is a pair or rubber boots that have rubbed bald spots into my leg hair.

Faithful readers of All Hopped Up will have noticed a sharp decline in posting since April. Actually, that sentence is misleading; a “sharp decline” should read “a great nosedive to zero” and “faithful readers” implies that there are more readers than just you, Simon, and that those readers have a body of writing to be faithful to. So in the spirit of turning over new leaves and beginning afresh, I intend to fill you in on my summer. A summer so beer-filled that it would be a shame to leave it to inference and hearsay.

First, and most primary to my exploits in beer and my distraction from writing, I got a job. Through some treasured connections I managed to score an interview with David Brophy, the head brewer of McAuslan Brewing, Inc. I guess he liked the cut of my jib because he took me on as a brewer. Since May I’ve been in a daze that I would be so lucky as to turn my hobby into a profession.

For those who haven’t heard, McAuslan is the brewer most famously of St-Ambroise Pale Ale and Oatmeal Stout, but we also brew a blonde, a rousse, and an apricot-wheat beer. The joy of this job comes from the distinct sense of agency in creating beer at a moderately sized craft brewery that has substantial presence in not just the city, but the whole country.

I’ve gotten the go-ahead from the higher-ups to provide information on new releases and other scoops – so long as I don’t divulge any proprietary secrets – and you can find that stuff here first.

That’s it for now. Next I’ll talk about my time at Le Mondiale de la Bière, Montreal’s beerfest. It deserves its own post if only for the press pass the nice people gave me after I interviewed its founder, Jeanine Marois.

Note: The following is the last installment of All Hopped Up’s print version, in The McGill Daily. The electronic edition lives on right here. -jw

I’ve enjoyed this gig. I really have. But at times I realized that this column might not be the best way to get my message across. Before you call me a defeatist, hear me out. To reiterate an elemental goal of my column since its inception, a beer- drinking public that is informed of the depth and intricacies of the craft brewing movement might think about what they are drinking enough to try something they don’t know but may enjoy. Perhaps more importantly, an informed beer drinking public only strengthens and unifies a local beer culture, providing a better environment for craft breweries to operate in.

Though there are, and will always be, those for whom beer is a golden, tasteless alcohol, but our status as college students makes us receptive to positive encouragement. We seek out variety in all we ingest – food, drink, fields of study – and right now we drink more beer than we ever will again. Writing a beer column in a university newspaper is like advocating safe sex in a whorehouse. Sure, it looks good on paper, but the idea’s a no-brainer.

Beer journalism is important, but if this is your first time reading or your first time paying attention, it’s also your last. So what’s a student to do? Luckily, there’s an event approaching that will accomplish for the novice beer drinker in one afternoon what a year-and-a-half of beer columns might get you through.

Montreal’s largest and most successful beer festival, the Mondial de la Bière, enjoys its 16th annual installment during the first week of June. The event has garnered substantial respect from beer geeks both foreign and domestic, due in part to the festival’s reputation of deftly showcasing remote international breweries alongside little-known breweries from right here in Quebec.

This formula for success becomes apparent when Jeannine Marois, the president and founder of the Mondial, explains why her festival is devoted to beer: “Because I love it. It’s a great community of small businesses filled with passion and it extends wherever you go. You can travel the world drinking with nice people.”

The Mondial de la Bière was surely a labour of love. It lost money in each of its first seven years. However, if the crowds of recent years are an indication, 2009 will be a fruitful year for Marois, with over 120 breweries submitting about 300 beers.

Montreal is truly the perfect city for an international celebration of handcrafted brews, because, as Marois explains, “We are an open city. People are willing to discover new things which I think is part of our cultural signature.”

This is what makes the beer festival such an effective entrance to the world of craft brewing. Whereas the world of microbrewing, characterized by small business and regionalism, is often derided for its exclusivity, the conglomerate beer festival offers a solution. An inexpensive and accessible venue provides beer geeks and rookies alike a level ground on which to experience craft brewing. You can read about the stuff all you want, but it’s a whole different story when you go out there and have a beer.

For the uninitiated, though, a beer festival can be a little daunting. On June 3, the Mondial de la Bière will kick off five days of festivities at Windsor Station, spilling out into the courtyard directly adjacent to the Bell Centre. The concept is simple: get a tasting glass and a fist full of tickets costing a buck each, then mill around the booths getting a three-or-four-ounce sample for one to five tickets. If that’s not enticing enough, there will be panels of professional brewers discussing the biz, a contest judged by an international jury, and plenty of entertainment (pdf).

Yet, the true value of the Mondial de la Bière is its global spectrum. The inclusion of multiple beers from beyond North America makes the festival a forum for the interaction of many brewing cultures. For the first time, seven Japanese breweries will be featured, including Kinshashi, Harvest Moon, and Brewmaster, which is said to be rare even in Japan.

Marois traveled to Japan to personally hand-pick each microbrewery, but she says it was worth the effort just to give the foreign breweries a venue. “We bring breweries that have never been to Canada and that you won’t see anywhere else. That’s something pretty amazing to do.”

The added effort is not designated solely to beer from great distances. For the seven breweries from Ontario that will be featured this year, provincial importation policies and tariffs added consternation for Marois and her team. “Getting beer from Ontario was as difficult as getting it from France because the SAQ makes it hard and costly,” says Marois. “If I was doing this to make money, I would never do it.”

Luckily for Quebec’s brewers, this has made the Mondial de la Bière primarily a showcase for local beer. Around 70 per cent of the breweries featured this year will be from within the province, and size is not a barrier. Booths have been given to groups like Distribière, a co-op of smaller breweries from as far as the Îles de-la-Madeleine north of Prince Edward Island, which makes it possible to sell their beer in Montreal.

Marois acknowledges that a festival like hers may be essential to Quebec beer. The grouping of the many elements of a large provincial industry unifies a local beer community and, as mentioned before, informs the beer-drinking public of the merits of said community.

Furthermore, Marois will be doing Quebec beer an even greater service when she features local breweries this October in Strasbourg, France during the first Mondial de la Bière in Europe.

As a final counsel to my readers, if you are staying in Montreal for the summer, head to Windsor Station in early June for an excellent start to the city’s many summer festivals. Keep an eye out for me; we’ll grab a beer.

graphic by sasha plotnikova

Errol Morris, the Oscar-winning director of The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line, is also the director of a lengthy campaign of commercials for Miller High Life extolling the virtues of being a man and enjoying a beer. Each spot has a 1950s air of male hegemony and revels in it, thick arms, hairy knuckles, and all. In one commercial, the gruff narrator asks a newlywed housewife standing before a supermarket beer cooler what kind of man she wants her husband to be. She chooses a High Life man, of course. Another asks a shirtless beer belly, “Is your name Sally? Sally, the salad-eater? No, you’re a High Life man and you don’t care who knows it.”

It’s not hard to admit that the prevailing undertones of the beer world are masculine ones. If we are to believe the dated notions that beer is the working class beverage and working class families are supported by a sole (male) breadwinner, then the brews in the fridge must be Dad’s, right? Wrong, says the growing number of women who drink, brew, advocate, and otherwise enjoy beer, and they want you to know it.

In honour of last Sunday, International Women’s Day, I propose a look into the crusade to eradicate gender discrepancies from beer. With goals ranging from the promotion of female presence in the brewing community to the eventual erasure of fratboy beer marketing, there are women upsetting the male-dominated breweries of North America.

Alyson Tomlin was drawn to beer after teaching others how to brew at a brew-on-premises store 11 years ago. But when she decided to pursue her love of beer in a career as a brewer, she was met with negative feedback. “I even had one old guy say, ‘You can’t brew; you’re a girl,’” says Tomlin. “Well, then I had to do it.”

Now, at 31, Tomlin is the operations manager at the R&B Brewing Company in Vancouver and one of the relatively few female brewers in Canada. Even though the staff of R&B is 50 per cent women and 50 per cent men, she still sees herself as “one of the guys.” Entrance into the “old boys club” of professional craft-brewing is difficult, Tomlin says, due in part to the physicality of brewing on small, manual systems. “When I was hired, my boss said, ‘If you can’t physically do it, we’re letting you go.’ I’m sure he doesn’t say that to guys.”

Such constraints hinder the development of a female presence in the brewing profession and reinforce the stereotype that women don’t know beer. For the record, Tomlin believes women make better beer drinkers with better palates, and I agree. Just take a look at the Pink Boots Society, which counts Tomlin among its members.

Started by Teri Fahrendorf in Portland, Oregon, the Pink Boots Society was “formed to inspire, encourage, and empower women to become professionals in the beer industry.” The society has members from all over the world but most successfully advocates for the recognition of female brewers in North America. “It’s a sisterhood,” says Tomlin, “It says we can do this and we worked our asses off to do it.”

At this year’s Craft Brewers Conference in Boston, the Pink Boots Society will participate in seminars on women in craft-brewing and women as a target audience for craft beer. If you want more evidence that the gender wall is breaking in the world of beer, just look locally: Laura Urtnowski co-owns and brews Boréale, Ellen Bounsall co-owns the McAuslan Brewery, and Jeannine Marois founded Montreal’s major beer festival, Le Mondial de la Bière. It may be a small community, but it’s growing fast.

With gender more equalized in the brewing world, perhaps a unified Canadian beer culture might more easily emerge. Tomlin is optimistic. “Maybe that’s the secret part about being a girl that the guys don’t see – the idea that if we work together, it’s going to benefit us all in the long run.”

Gros Mollet: Kudos to the folks in Lac St-Jean for turning to that greatest of Quebec forefathers, the lumberjack. This strong brown ale is named Gros Mollet, which means “fat calf” and since there’s a wonderfully drawn rendition of a giant axeman on the label, I’m inclined to conclude they mean this gros mollet and not this one. Continuing with the outdoorsman trend, the beer has an incredible flavor that suggests an homage to maple syrup rather than blaring it out. The roasted malts add to this by providing a chocolaty creaminess that round out the beer in the mouth. At 7.8% ABV, this beer is a great addition to what I’m recognizing as a specifically québécois style, the “bière forte.” Most breweries will put a hi-test beer in their line-up and simply label it “strong beer,” but Gros Mollet isn’t as abrasive as the others. It’s alcohol is a warming afterthought and not barrier to the beer’s flavor.

Boutefeu: I love these names! Boutefeu translates as “shot-firer” or  “inciter of quarrels.” Although it looks like it could also mean “fireball,” I’d rather go with my favorite synonym “rabble-rouser.” An unfiltered red ale, Boutefeu looks mighty pretty in the glass, its foamy head sticking around minutes longer than Gros Mollet’s. It is equal parts malt and hops in the nose, but at first taste the sweet body of the style blankets over the bitterness. The hops, however, do have a presence; citrusy and sweet, these coat the tongue and comprise a lingering aftertaste. Well done, Lac St-Jean. Two fine beers.

all photos by Camille McOuat

1. All good beer begins in the mind of a good brewer. More often than not, a brewmaster starts brewing on his stove and upgrades his set-up again and again, until one day he has a brewery. For Mercier, homebrewing was a “super cheap way for a 19-year-old to make 12 per cent beer.” But as craft brewing picked up in Montreal, it caught his interest.

Mercier is fascinated by both Belgian brewing traditions and highly-hopped West Coast styles. The tap list at Benelux aims for originality with creative hybrids like the Semuta, a Belgian saison supercharged with hops from the Pacific Northwest.

2. Today Mercier brewed his West Coast India Pale Ale. Rather than employing Belgian influences, Mercier toned down a recipe for a strong Imperial IPA he concocted when Benelux opened in April 2006.

Like homebrewing entirely with grains, the first step is to mash barley malt and extract all the sugary liquid. The second step, the sparge, is contained within this commercial mash tun.

3. Assistant brewer Philippe Tremblay adds a dose of hops to the brew kettle as the unfermented beer, known as wort, boils.

Though Mercier and Tremblay both deny their status as beer geeks, citing professionalism, Mercier’s eyes light up when he talk about hops. “Pacific hops can be broken down into three categories of taste,” he explains. “For instance, you can taste grapefruit flavors in most big American varieties, but Simcoe hops have interesting resiny cedar flavors.”

4. Still, it’s not hard to at least look like a geek in a brewery. After the wort cools, it is pumped into 900-litre fermenters seen here. One major difference between homebrewers and professionals is the attention given to yeast, held here in flasks. Major breweries will have scientists and labs devoted to culturing yeast and keeping it healthy. Their methods and yeast strains are often kept under tight lock and key.

Keep an eye out for Benelux’s 3rd anniversary bash in April, and for inside tips on the best beers of the bunch, e-mail Joe at to allhoppedup@gmail.com.

The brew day started with the toasting of two cups of oatmeal. I first read of this in Randy Mosher’s great book Radical Brewing, who says that when using toasted adjunct grains allow two weeks between toasting and brewing to allow harshly flavored chemicals from the toasting to dissipate. On the other hand, the smell of baking cookies coming from the oven dispelled any worries about this. I follow a general creed that reads, “What’s good for cookies is good for life,” harsh chemicals be damned.

The rest of the recipe also comes from Mosher’s book (the oats being a personal tip-of-the-hat to a local brew I’m quite fond of). I’m confined to extract brewing by small size of Montreal’s apartments and my wallet, but luckily there are plenty of recipes to fit my set-up. Mosher calls for a pound of both black patent and dark crystal malts, which I steeped with the oats at around 65˚C for a half hour.

This is the first time I’ve steeped grains for an extract brew in a separate pot and without a cheesecloth pouch, in order to emulate a proper mash tun. After doughing in at 4:45 p.m., a healthy sparge at about 5:20 p.m. yielded a dark black liquor that was coffee-like, thick and sweet. Very exciting.

Before the boil, I added a kilo of amber liquid malt extract and 1.5 kg of light dried malt extract (DME – which is said to be sweeter). At the beginning of a 60-minute boil, I tossed in 1.5 oz of Fuggles hops in plugs, with another addition of the same size at 15 minutes from the end.

I’ve taken the time I have to consult the robotic brewer that lives in my computer. Beer Alchemy is a tragic little thing. It can tell you what’s wrong with your attenuation or predict the color of your beer in degrees Lovibond, but it has never drunk a drop. I like to run recipes through it so different numbers I get from analysis do not surprise me.

Projections (provided via technology)

Original gravity – 1.059
Final gravity – 1.020
Expected ABV – 5.2%
Expected IBUs – 23.2

At flame out I really wished I had a nice counterflow chiller that makes pitching the yeast less of a gamble. Unfortunately, I could only cross my fingers and fill my carboy with some cold water. That brought the temperature of the wort all the way from 100˚C+ to 27˚C, still too warm for the yeast. Two hours in a chilly mudroom brought it down to pitching temp, but may have allowed mold, wild yeast and other bad guys in the air to find the sugary sweet wort.

Actuality (provided by my hydrometer)

OG – 1.052 (a little low, oh well)
FG – ???
ABV – ???
IBUs – I’ll never know.

Troy graciously supplied me with some reusable yeast from a past stout. I pitched this at around 11 pm. A week or so in primary should do fine, and then some time in secondary with ½ tsp vanilla extract, ¼ tsp allspice, ½ tsp cinnamon, ¼ coriander, 1 whole star anise, .5 g juniper berries and a pinch of black pepper soaked in 6 oz vodka and 2-3 oz bourbon.

UPDATE: Over 18 hours after I pitched the yeast and there’s NO ACTIVITY. I’m a fool for not making a starter. Thinking it might be a fermenting temperature thing, I moved it to a warmer room. It would hurt to have to dump this stuff….

UPDATE 2: Full day after pitching the yeast and still nothing. Tried aeration and temperature shift but I was really worried about all the air space in the 6.5-gallon carboy. I thought the easy thing to do was rack it to a smaller, 20-liter demi-john. After some late-night siphoning, I learned that I didn’t even brew 20 liters of beer; there was about as much air space as before. Gadzooks! I thought, what the hell, why not brew up the difference? About a half-kilo of extract in a liter and a half of water on the stove for a spell and a brand new vial of yeast in the morning and hopefully we’ll make it through this thing.

UPDATE 3: I did a little troubleshooting with Benelux head brewer Benoit Mercier and we decided the yeast I used was bunk. He let me walk out with a jar full of his own yeast and I hoofed it home. To kill anything that grew in it over the last day and a half I boiled all the beer again (which amped up the OG to an awesome 1.062), pitched the new Benelux yeast and ….IT LIVES! Now that it’s fermenting, Drew, you can expect to sample it after a week in primary, 10-14 days in secondary and 10 to condition. About a month.

graphic by Sasha Plotnikova

On February 9 in the small seaside town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a beer will be placed on tap in the Portsmouth Brewery. Its reception will ripple through the sea of beer aficionados across America. Portsmouth Brewery, which only produces about 1,000 barrels of beer annually (for comparison, Boréale’s brewers produce around 60,000), releases this beer so infrequently and in such small quantities that the Internet is buzzing with anticipation of its arrival.

Kate the Great, as the beer is called, wasn’t such a hot topic before December 2007, when the readers of BeerAdvocate Magazine rated it the number one beer in America and the number two beer on Planet Earth. The magazine is the periodical of the popular web site beeradvocate.com, which has over 175,000 members, most of whom are self-labeled beer geeks – lovers, defenders, and sometimes, to a fault, crusaders of craft-brewed beer. Such an accolade for Kate the Great created enough hype to give rise to Kate Day, the name given to the not-to-be-missed celebration of its release.

Kate is an Imperial Russian stout (named after the Russian Empress Catherine II),  an old style which lent the term “Imperial” to the extreme beer movement  and denotes a beer more concentrated in flavour, character, and alcohol.

These extreme styles of beer are often given very limited releases because their market base is composed of exactly the type of craft drinkers who would make such a big hype. The beer-drinking public is not typically drawn to such beers. Yet, on Monday afternoon, a line will form around the block at the Portsmouth Brewery, with people travelling from afar to secure one of about 900 bottles. If the most recent Kate Day this past June is an indication, they’ll sell out within 24-hours.

The anticipation for Kate the Great is bred at online beer-rating web sites like beeradvocate.com and ratebeer.com. Their member forums overflow with predictions on changes in ranking (currently the stout is number five overall online), the distances traveled to make it to Portsmouth, and even arguments as to the motives of beer geeks.

“I am fascinated with the modern beer geek who has to have everything – at any price usually – just because it has been deemed the latest and greatest on the Internet,” writes one member of beeradvocate.com about Kate the Great. The buzz that a high ranking generates appears to be the main draw for many drinkers, who respond to such cynicism with validation – “I want [Kate the Great] because of the hype around it. I haven’t had it yet so I want to try it.”

However, others say that it’s as much about the journey as it is about the reward. As much as these beer geeks believe in drinking locally and supporting regional brewers, the thrill of attaining a bottle they have heard much about is a major draw.

Whether time and money is expended in trading for these limited-release beers – there is an intricate trade network made possible by these web sites – or great lengths are undergone to acquire the beer at its source, beer geeks find the search fulfilling.

Montreal’s own Dieu du Ciel! brewpub once had its own buzz-worthy beer. Another Imperial stout, Péché Mortel, elicited as much clamouring as Kate the Great – that is, before Dieu opened a large-scale bottling brewery and saturated the market. At 16th overall on beeradvocate.com, Péché Mortel still holds its own, but after seeing it in a beer store on the West Coast, I knew that it was no longer in the same league.

It’s hard to say if Kate the Great will follow Péché Mortel’s path. So long as the Portsmouth Brewery maintains its rarity and there are still beer geeks jonesing for that ultimate Imperial stout, the hype will live on.

Where to buy good beer is the question I’m asked the most. It seems that people are interested in drinking quality brew but reluctant to shell out $7 a pint at a bar. But never fear! There are deps that suit your purpose if you’re after something more than a Molson Ex. Well, actually, some aren’t deps – in fact they may scoff at the stereotype that beer needs be sold next to bottles of Porte d’Enfer. Nevertheless, these four establishments are the best purveyors of local, craft-brewed beer in the city. Along with a description, each review has the manager’s pick, my own, and a reason to go more than once.

Fromagerie Atwater
Atwater Market

Okay, it’s a cheese shop, but they’re serious about their beer. With 20 new styles in since Christmas, they’re constantly updating their supply with the freshest, most current offerings from Quebec’s micro breweries. The best part is that you can shop for the best cheese to pair with your beer in the same store. Just ask any of the knowledgeable staff who will gladly tell you what complements what.

Selection: 125 styles total, 95 from Quebec brewers
Manager’s Pick: Au Maitre Brasseur – Noire de Fromagerie Atwater
All Hopped Up’s Pick: Buy a bottle of Maudite from Unibroue and a cheese called Le Fêtard which spent its formative years being washed in the aforementioned stuff
Reason to come back: Lots of beer, lots of cheese, lots of tasty combo possibilities.

Super Marché Rahman
151 Laurier O.

The ultimate beer dep, “Le Paradis de la Bière” has been a purveyor of Quebec microbrews for 18 years. Its massive selection places forties of Black Label next to magnums of nobler stuff, but the shining stars are the five kinds of house beer. Rahman himself formulated the recipes for the Paradisiac beers – traditional styles brewed with Indian spices, all bottled at local breweries.

Selection: around 500 styles, 250-300 of which are from Quebec
Manager’s Pick: Paradisiac Scotch Ale
All Hopped Up’s Pick: Paradisiac Cuivrée – a strong, hoppy beer
Reason to come back: Trying a different beer each time you come in will keep you busy for years.

Épicerie José inc.
470 Duluth E.

The “most like a classic dep” dep. You can stop pick up a loaf of bread or cigarettes on your way home and get lost amid a staggering beer selection, or roped into one of their weekly beer, cider, or wine tastings. Épicerie José gets brownie points for having the best prices of the bunch with lots of deals on 12 packs and 6 packs you can make yourself.

Selection: 350 styles total, about 200 from Quebec brewers
Manager’s Pick: Les Trois Mousquetaires – Signature Series
All Hopped Up’s Pick: Something from the brand new Brasseurs de Montreal
Reason to come back: Tastings. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, from 5-9 p.m.

all photos by Joseph Watts

Les Délires du Terroir
6406 St.-Hubert

This small shop in Rosemont is big on beer, as long as it’s from Quebec. Owner Sylfranc Côté orders beers with age in mind so that two or three years from now that strong beer will be at its best. Côté is also passionate about pairing beer with food. They have a fine working relationship with sausages from Le Queue de Cochon, the artesian butcher next door.

Selection: 195 styles, all from Quebec
Manager’s Pick: La Barbarie – India Pale Ale
All Hopped Up’s Pick: À l’Abri de la Tempête – Corne de Brume an aged scotch ale
Reason to come back: When the Saint Reserve beers from Microbrasserie Charlevoix arrive, you’ll have a chance to taste what Côté considers to be Quebec’s best beer.