I forgot to post my beery tour around Halifax. It’s been quite a change, I don’t recognize any breweries so every trip to the liquor store is a crap shoot (and an expensive one - a tin of beer is $5, so 4 cans would be about 13 quid. Sometimes more. Getting a poor one ruins your evening).
Initial thoughts - there’s a lot less of a craft scene here. All restaurants and bars will have a solid selection from the 4 or 5 more “established” craft breweries, maybe one or two options from the smaller guys. It all feels a fair few years behind Toronto or the UK, you can still find those absurd 9% poorly brewed astringent IPAs that were fucking everywhere in 2012 and I’ve seen at least one brewery using warrior and magnum hops as aroma/late additions, to the point of including it prominently on the can. That says to me the brewery doesn’t really know what it is doing, but neither does Joe Public because that wouldn’t fly with metro Toronto beer nerds.
I’ve found that an IPA is a very good indicator of a brewery’s overall output - if they can get this right, the rest of their stuff is likely worth trying. So far, I’ve been impressed with Roof Hound, Breton Brewing, Big Spruce, Nine Locks and whatever North Brewing have rebranded to (Compass or something?)
The smaller breweries I’ve walked to and visited with Ferris Jr have been good so far, including Unfiltered with their wanky URL and Good Robot who I’d rate higher if they weren’t selling an utter abomination in cans called “terpene ale” which looks and tastes like washing up leavings. Rest of their stuff is very good though. Two Crows have some solid stuff, but also one which was the worst beer I’ve had since moving here. I considered tipping in down the sink it was so bad. It had big 2011 “we don’t know what we’re doing but we read about hops in a brewing book from the 1970s” energy.
I straight up do not get the ubiquity or Boxing Rock, Garrison, or Propellor breweries. Bang average at best, but been operating from the beginning of the craft beer boom so I guess they’ve wormed their way in.
It looks like I’m going to have to start importing my own beer across provincial lines which is an expensive pain in the arse, and also dust off my brewing gear. The stupid level of tax on alcohol means there is a very healthy home brewing community here which is awesome, and I suspect I’d be able to match the level of commercial beer available without too much hassle. Such is life.
Sorry, no one has to read that boring esoteric wall of text. Apologies.
