Photo courtesy ian murchison on Flickr
Lately, I’ve been following the tweets and Facebook updates from the folks out at Beau’s with mild trepidation. You see, on Wednesday, the award-winning eastern Ontario brewery announced the release of its limited edition “Bogfather” beer. They’ve only committed to releasing 1,000 bottles of the latest edition in their Wild Oats series, and when I checked in this morning, they were down to 800. By my calculations, that only gives me a week or so to get out to Vankleek Hill before it’s all gone! How potentially tragic.
While you might be tempted to quip that, with the Bogfather, Beau’s has made you a lager you can’t refuse, please don’t – not only is that joke way too obvious for the high degree of humour we try to cultivate here at Apartment613, but it’s also technically inaccurate. The Bogfather is an ale, specifically a gruit: a style popular in ye olde tymes before hops became the go-to flavouring agent for beer.
Here’s what Beau’s has to say about the “full-out assault” they have planned for your delicate palate:
Intense flavours and aromatics of raisin, hazelnut, herbal bitters, burnt toast, pisang goreng, cola and bubblegum are achieved through the alchemy of a double-mash of dark malts, Belgian trappist ale yeasts, and bogmyrtle hand-picked in the Eastern Ontario wilderness.
Not going to lie: I’d never even heard of pisang goreng until this week. Thanks to Google, it turns out it’s a banana fritter-type snack popular in Indonesia and Malaysia. Who knew beer drinking was so educational? Also, I totally want to go searching for bogmyrtle in the wilderness with the guys from Beau’s, so Steve Beauchesne, if you’re reading this, let’s talk!
Luckily, for those of you who can’t make it out to the V-Hill (seriously, that town needs a cool nickname, and I’m not saying my suggestion is it), Beau’s has also hinted on their Facebook page that a limited number of casks will be made available for consumption here in the capital. They’ve also tweeted about a potential collaboration with local coffee mavens Bridgehead on something called WinterBrewed. Stay tuned.
