FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.


"I think the best beer is always the one that's made closest to where you're drinking it," says Brian Read over a freshly poured pint. "Freshness is a very important component."

As one of the authors of Calgary's Good Pub Guide, Read is certainly qualified to comment. Along with fellow beer lover and collaborator, Jack Penfold, he spent many gratifying nights indulging his love for good beer while researching the book. The result is not only a useful reference guide to Calgary's good pubs, but also a layman's guide to beer appreciation.

Read first learned to love beer while living in the UK when his co-workers convinced him to join the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), a consumer group dedicated to the preservation of the British brewing tradition. After moving to Canada he began brewing his own beer and met Penfold when he founded the Calgary chapter of CAMRA in 1994, Canada's only chapter of CAMRA other than Victoria. The book blossomed a few years later in response to the growing craft beer industry and the need for a cozy environment to enjoy their favorite beverage.

"Locally, particularly, I think Big Rock has played a big part because they were the first brewery to offer an alternative," explains Penfold of Alberta's rapidly expanding craft beer industry. "They've been very successful for a number of reasons, partly because they have good beer and people got used to the idea that beer wasn't all the same, it didn't have to be served ice cold and it was for other things besides getting drunk."

Marketing by Canada's big beer companies, argues Read, has shaped Canadian's beer consumption for years. Old slogans like "cold beer" and "crisp, clean taste" have been the hallmark of Canadian consumption. "Labatts and Molson are the same style of beer and they're made almost identically, so they don't have any distinctive characteristics. Not that they're bad beers or easy beers to make - they are difficult beers to make and the breweries are very good at making a difficult style. But due to mass-production they've only made one type and we've been conditioned by advertising to think that beer should be ice cold, served in a cold glass and highly carbonated.

"We're now realizing that beer is more than an alcoholic drink, it's a drink to savor and to taste," explains Read. "We're realizing that it's as diverse as wine is. I think that is what is really going to contribute to the developing beer culture. There will always be the mass produced beer that you just swill because you're thirsty on a hot day or you want to get drunk. But I also think we're getting more sophisticated and more interested in the wide variety of beer that is available."

It is this growth in sophistication that Read sees as CAMRA's goal in Alberta. Where the UK chapters of CAMRA were formed in response to industrial giants making British beer more homogenous, Calgary's chapter sees its role as developing, rather than protecting, a local beer tradition.

The growth in Alberta's industry is encouraging for Read. He hopes that as the number of local brewers grow then the level of sophistication in drinking beer will also grow, most notably that they will start serving beer at the right temperature - generally the same temperature that it was fermented at.

"The only thing that is going to get bars to serve it at the correct temperature is a massive customer demand," explains Read. "It's much easier to serve beer ice cold: it hides the flaws, if there are any, it prevents foaming - the more you warm the beer up the slower you have to serve it, the more it froths. So if we demand beer instantly, like we do in this country, you really can't have them served at the right temperature. In Germany or Ireland people expect to wait 10 or 15 minutes for their beer to be served, because that's how long it takes to pour one."

And as for Read's favorite local beers, he's diplomatic in choosing. "I like English bitters, but a lot of the bitter made here tends to take the name too literal, because bitter is not a very good name from a marketing point of view for something you want to sell. Bitter in England is not that bitter. Wild Rose recently came out with what was called an ordinary bitter as a special seasonal brew and I like it very much, but it wasn't that popular because people expected it to be bitter. I also like German and Czechoslovakian beers. I think the Pilsner at Mission Bridge is a very good example of a European Pilsner, not the kind of Pilsner we're accustomed to having here. It's got a very robust hop bitterness and aroma, and there is a maltiness there, too. I like that beer.

"I think the Hefeweissen, which is produced by Banff Brewery - which is in Calgary, not Banff - is an excellent and very interesting beer. Hefeweissen means a wheat beer with yeast in it. It's more difficult to get the balance right because the bitterness which normally precipitates with the yeast still in it, this has a very strong banana-like flavor. There are no bananas in it, this is just the esters produced by the yeast. It's a pretty good beer and a refreshing beer."

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