TRUE BREW
BREWING UP SOME CHRISTMAS CHEER AT BIG RIG
When you put some Christmas in your glass an angel gets its’ wings!
JEFF O’REILLY Having just completed the hands-on “brewing” part
of my third “nearly annual” collaboration with Big Rig’s Brew Master Lon Ladell and the brewery’s first full- time employee/champion brewer/all around good guy Cody Munro, I look back as one would do in a cheesy made-for-TV-holiday-movie at how this festive brew became a tradition and how we saved Christmas once again. To paraphrase Buddy the Elf “The best way to spread Christmas Cheer is to grab yourself a Christmas beer”. It was about four and a half years ago the Big Rig Brewery first opened and I can’t exactly recall when Lon and I first met – but I do know that we became fast friends and shared a lot of laughs. At the 2013 spring launch of their now legendary award winning Scotch Ale I
was tasked with naming the ceremonial cask concoction that contained a full 26er of Singleton single malt whiskey in its 5L wooden shell. I immediately stepped up with “Scotchy Scotch” Scotch Ale (a nod to Ron Burgundy) and much hilarity ensued, and not just because of this incredibly delicious hi-octane nectar, but, because that seems to be what happens when you go to a beer launch and tap a crazy keg of liquid fun! It was that inspired night that I asked Lon if he could brew a Gingerbread Porter ... and maybe make “some kind of crazy” Christmas-y cask of our own, and just like that I was on the docket signed up to do my first commercial brewing collaboration ... another fantastic decision born through good friends, good fortune, and a healthy dose liquid courage. Sitting together during the early recipe creation stages of the process each time we
looked at some basic ground rules. The beer had to be fun. It was going be inspired by Grandma’s very best holiday baking - not only were we striving to recreate the colour of gingerbread we really wanted to nail the taste as well. We wanted the beer to be somewhere between 5.5% and 6% alcohol by volume (so warming and approachable) and above all else NO NUTMEG! The process has not changed very much even in our third batch as we really
wanted each year’s version to be a little different – we were extremely happy with Version 1.0, and learned a lot through a brewing mishap in Version 2.0 that led to a sweeter than anticipated outcome ... and yes ... we still hate nutmeg. This article won’t allow me to get into the specifics of the process of brewing a
batch of beer (although I may talk to Brian about doing a more step-by-step photo essay of brewing a more straight- forward beer in the future as there is so much going on behind the scenes that I don’t think the average person knows about) we’re going to look at the basics of the ingredients we used in getting to the final result. Beer is typically made up of four or five main ingredients – water, hops, yeast, malted barley and adjuncts (other forms of starches or unmalted grains) but we will also be
34 BOUNDER MAGAZINE
contiinued on page 36
www.bounder.ca
Photo By JEFF O’REILLY
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76
