Wired Cola

CORRECTION: somewhere in this article I claimed that all the beers from the Burrard Street brewery are filtered. In fact, Rickard's White is (like all witbiers) unfiltered, as I was able to see by just looking at a bottle.

UPDATE: Molson sent a lovely follow-up gift to my house, a taster pack of Rickard's. Best! Goodie-bag! Ever! More important for you, Raul the bird has his own post up, and cross-links to, well, everyone who was there. Just read his post and look at his photos, including this one:

Apologies to the late David Foster Wallace.

I'm just back from drinking a wide array of beers, in a brewery, which I toured, and talking to brewers, who were rightly proud of their work. This was all due to the aggressively seductive promotion of the Molson corporation and their charming PR henchpeople.

I could write something aggressively meta about how effective their gentle selling and well-delivered great evening was (hey, you're reading this, all 20 of you), but that's boring. I could write about how to make bloggers ecstatically happy, but if you can't figure out that food+booze+something interesting (and I assure you, touring a high-volume brewery's production line in the company of one of the brewmasters is an experience of such fascination and information density that if you don't enjoy it, you're a damned communist or worse) makes bloggers happy, then you either never need to know that bit of trivia, or you should change your career.

However, I ought to note that giving each participant a beer glass at the end of the evening was charming, but giving each participant a memory stick preloaded with some multimedia files covering the evening including the menu of pairings was so obviously the right thing to do that it wasn't so much a stroke of genius as an indication of how idiotically indifferent so much marketing is, at least to the needs of bloggers. I'm usually pretty down on the self-importance of bloggers, because it's practically the official medium of unwarranted self-importance, but dang, this made me feel cared for and loved.

Oh, since they included it...the evening's menu. Did I mention that the passive-aggressive geniuses behind this event mentioned there was no obligation to write about it on our blogs?

By the way, if you ever get a chance, here's a few things I would recommend you try to experience:

• eat malt grains
• taste beer (any beer) paired with food by an expert chef
• tour a really serious industrial facility at point-blank range
• tour a brewery
• chat with a brewmaster who has a major beer named after him
• chat with the 7th generation heir to the Molson name who is now the company's VP marketing about the beer business
• do all of this in the private bar that sits atop Burrard Street Brewery. Yep, you didn't even know it was there, did you?

Seriously, it was one of those moments when I wish I wasn't such a dumbass, because all I wanted to do was learn more and exploit the opportunity to ask questions of some people who sat in top-tier positions in a world-class corporation. Instead, I brought up the only book on beer I've ever read, asked a guy whose last name was Rickards what kind of beer Rickard's Red is (an ale, of course), and generally had a whale of a time with a bunch of extraordinarily social bloggers, some of whom were under the mistaken impression that they had a serious capacity for alcohol, to which I can only say that I have met small English women who could drink them under the table, come back for another six pints, and would call the experience "a quiet Tuesday night."

I have some incomprehensible on-the-way-home notes, but I assure you their baffling nature has more to do with the Blackberry keyboard than the effect of alcohol on me (not because I can tolerate beer, but because I know to drink modestly, stop early, and eat food).

Nonetheless, here's a coherent rehash of the more interesting parts of my notes:

The brewmasters all seem to be deep believers in fresh beer. On that note, they mention that the key difference between bottles, cans, and draft beer is that draft kegs are not pasteurized (they are filled cold, kept cold during transport and storage, and poured fairly quickly at the pubs), while bottles and cans are. This is a decisive advantage for draft at the pub over bottles and cans, and I now must have a kegger some time. Apparently BC is an anomalously keg-centred province: we drink a lot more draft beer than is usual, but nonetheless most of the beer produced at the brewery (a whole bunch, including several under-license brands like Coors Light, Corona, and Asahi Super Dry) is canned, then bottles, with kegs the smallest share of the market.

They poured "Rickard's Special Gold" for us, described as a "prequel" to Rickard's Red. This was a special 50th anniversary one-off, and while they said "never say never," they have no intention of selling this brew. It was okay, but nothing really amazing in my opinion.

They served Rickard's White (a wheat beer) with an orange as a garnish. When wheat beers are garnished, the usual choice is a lemon, but apparently the orange complements the orange-tinged flavor of this fairly mellow brew better, and I have to say I liked it, and will try it myself sometime.

You may have heard that I like stuff from Unibroue, which is all strong beers on lees pretty much. Mr. Rickards averred that unfiltered beer was basically a mistake, and while I might think the results in some cases speak well of non-filtration (and I'm sure the beeradvocate fans are working up some frothy heads as we speak), the stuff coming out of this plant is all mostly [see correction above] aggressively filtered. There's reasons, to be sure.

If anyone ever tries to diss Molson Canadian in front of you, do a blind test with Canadian, their favored lager, and oh, I dunno, some wild-card (maybe Coors Light or Corona) to see which they pick on taste. Here's the deal: Canadian is a lot more subtle than you might think, and tastes just fine.

You should know my prejudices on the subject, since this evening was a non-blind tasting, and science says that matters: I expected to like Canadian, because I respect it as the tasty survivor of many years of competition for the hearts and palates of Canadian lager-lovers (which in Canada is almost everyone who drinks beer). I expected Corona to be thin and weedy just like I felt the last time I tried it, and it was. I expected to like Rickard's Red and White, because I like darker beer and wheat beer, and I liked 'em both.

As I sober up, I'll probably wonder how a nice catered evening with friends where the beer flowed freely seduced me so easily, and then I'll firmly resolve to go back to drinking nice Belgian triples and their New World clones, but right now I'm still quite appreciative of a hazy good feeling.

In conclusion, do whatever you can to get into the rolodex of a major brewery's marketing honchos. You will not regret it.