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Monday, October 15, 2007

Beer Appreciation Week #2

After taking last weekend off due to Thanksgiving, we reconviened at George Brown College to take part in the second session of Beer Appreciation instructed by Ron Keefe from the Granite Brewery.

Ale was the focus of the day which suited me well as I am an ale drinker. Ron started the class off by having us sample Sleeman's Cream Ale and judge it using the 50 point judging system. It's not bad taking a part time college course and the first thing you do when arriving is drinking a beer.

After Ron talked about all the different styles of ales available everywhere, he had us watch one of Micheal Jackson's Beer Hunter video's about British ales. This was a treat for me as I have never saw a Beer Hunter video to date. It was very interesting and I learned some new stuff about Cask ales that I have never heard of before.

After the video we got back into the tastings. We started off with a Marston's Pedigree in spirit of Jackson. The funniest tasting we did was comparing an Anchor Liberty ale with a Alexander Keith's IPA. Wow, what a difference. I have had Anchor before and I very much enjoy it and rated it very high. I love the smell of the hops on the nose created by dry hopping. Very nice. After the IPA(s) (you know what I mean), we got into St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout and Guinness. I love the St. Ambroise so I wasn't really interested in tasting the Guinness. And finally we did a blind tasting of Scotch Irish Black Irish Plain Porter and Innis and Gunn Oak Aged. Both very nice.

It was a good class and as mentioned, I learned some more stuff about Cask ale just in time for Volo's Cask Days here in Toronto.

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