Montreal, Quebec

Montreal is the second largest city in Canada and also the second largest city of French speakers. Only Paris has more people who speak French. It is also home to nearly twenty breweries within the city limits and several more just outside.

Some of the best include Dieu du Ciel, Le Chaval Blanc and Le Saint-Bock Brasserie. A few others worth your time are Brutopia, any of the four Les 3 Brasseurs or the Benelux Brewpub. If you can get out of town, Unibroue on the Chambly River has a fun tour.

If you’re hungry or looking for a good beer bar, try Fourquet Fourchette, Vices et Versa or Broue Pub Brouhaha. If you want to bring some beer home with you, your best best bet is Depanneur Peluso.

In some ways, Montreal is two cities. There’s an underground city there with tunnels spanning 20 miles connecting 80 percent of the city’s downtown office space and 35 percent of all commercial space. It also connects 60 residential complexes, meaning you could conceivably never go outside, especially during a harsh winter, for weeks at a time, yet still eat and rink beer at some of the finest places in town. Each day, about half a million people use one of the 120 entrances and exits to the underground.

When the weather is nice, Mount Royal is a great place to go. Created by Frederick Law Olmstead, who is most famous for creating NYC’s Central Park, it offers the most amazing views of the city. Nearby is St. Joseph’s Oratory, the largest church in Canada and boasting the biggest dome of any kind after the one in the Vatican.

For other non-beer things to do, there’s the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Olympics Stadium – the site of the 1976 summer games.

If you can choose when to visit Quebec, June is a good time because that’s when Montreal’s best beer festival is held. The Mondial de la Biere lasts five days and includes many special events in addition to the festival itself.

I’ve been with Unibroue since 2003. When I started, it was still owned by the Dion family, the founder of the brewery. Then the brewery was bought by Sleeman in 2004, exactly a year after I started.

What was the transition like?

That was amazing. We didn’t know at that time what would happen to the brewery. We were all a little bit uncomfortable about it, because Unibroue is a brewery with a history, it is from Quebec, and there was a lot of politics when we merged with Sleeman, which is from Ontario. It worked for the good, because Sleeman came into the brewery and brought automation and technology to increase the brewery capacity.

When we merged with Sleeman, we were at 75,000 hectoliters, and we had a brewery capacity of 180,000 hectoliters. This year, we will brew 180.000 hectoliters: we are at top capacity. We are looking for investment to increase the capacity to 250,000 in 2009. I am actually investing $3 million in the brewing department, so that’s a lot of work to do that—and to be on paternity leave at the same time! My youngest son is three weeks old today.

I am the master brewer. When I first arrived at Unibroue, in 2003, it was in a state of crisis. There was a lack of staff, especially in the filtration area because employees were on sickness leave. When I arrived, it was to filter the beer and to take over the operation in the brewing department in general.

I had to filtrate the beer in the first three weeks, then brew for four extra weeks, and then when everybody came back to work, I had an agreement with the owner to work on Asset, a quality assurance program. It’s better known in the dairy field and the meat field, not very much in brewing. It ensures the quality control of processes, especially in fields that deal with pathogen…

When we merged with Sleeman, we put that aside, so I never had the chance to work on that. That first year when I worked for Unibroue, I had no staff to manage. I worked on several projects in the first two months, such as brewing automation, filtration automation, I also developed a program to run the filtration, which had been completely manual.

This sounds like a very big brewing operation, and yet the Unibroue beers have a hand-crafted character.

Yes, very artisanal, very hand crafted, and that is the challenge, to make the artisanal beer, to refresh and renew so the customer has the same experience every time. If he opens a Trois Pistole or Fin du Monde, make sure it will be the same from batch to batch, from year to year.

To keep the small character, but build the brewery… During the sale to Sleeeman, what did you do to keep your identity?

It wasn’t difficult for us. We were not the first brewery bought by Sleemans; there are actually four in the Sleeeman group across Canada and we were the very last to be bought. So there is another brewery, Shaftebury Brewing Co. in British Columbia, and they have their own home brands and their very specific character. It’s very exciting because Sleeman’s respects what we each do. It was a kind of philosophy by Sleeman.

They know we are the best brewery to do what we do, because we know our product very well. They are most interested in investing in the brewery, how you can do that in a better way,

Before merger, it was very hand-crafted, so the operator needed to know exactly what to do and the margin of error was very thin. Now with the automation, it helps to have better standards in place so we will be very, very constant.

But we kept working on Unibroue, and since then we’ve developed a lot of brands. We’ve the brewery in this little group that has developed the largest number of beer. Every year, we develop three to five new Unibroue beers, all refermented in the bottle, Belgian style

I believe Unibroue was the brewery that brought Belgian brewing tradition to breweries in Quebec.

We are the first brewery in North America to brew and promote that kind of beer. It was a project that André Dion, the founder of the brewery, believed in. He wasn’t sure there was a market in North America for that kind of beer.

Unibroue’s excellent Chambly Noire is the standard bearer, but these beers are everywhere in Quebec right now, and are just starting to break into our consciousness here in the States. While the dark beer may have been just an attempt to fill a hole in the huge range that is Unibroue, such beers do have historical precedent. New Belgium brews a black Belgian ale called 1554, the earliest reference to such a beer they could find in the history books. A text by Lacambre, 1851, lists a number of dark Belgian wheat ales, including Diest, Gulde Bier and Peetermann. Most were colored by a fairly highly colored ambree base malt and a very long boil, often with chalk added, which changes the pH of the wort and allows a lot of color to develop. All of those beers died out by the middle of the 20th century.

Another historical thread is the influence of English and Scottish beers on Belgium in the late 19th century. Import duties at that time were extremely low and, because of their huge scale, British brewers could bring their luxurious beers in cheaper than the Belgians could brew them themselves. As a consequence, great gobs of pale, Scotch and porter were consumed in Belgium. After WWI, the Belgians started brewing similar styles on their own. A “poorter” still survives there: Sterkens, from Moortgat, but as it declares itself to be a Reinheitsgebot recipe, it seems to owe nothing to the earlier wheat-based recipes.

So we’re left without a living link, which just means we’re free to pick and choose from history and reinvent it however we see fit. I’ll be using the best of modern materials and approaches, skipping some of the incomprehensible complexity of the old Belgian brewing procedures. Originally, all the Belgian wheat beer styles called for the use of unmalted wheat, and often other grains such as oats, spelt, buckwheat and in some, even broad beans. Raw wheat contributes a marvelously rich and creamy texture to beer, but it requires the use of a complicated adjunct mashing procedure, in which the raw grains are mixed with a little malt and raised through a number of upward mash steps before being boiled and then returned to the rest of the mash, where it raises the whole mess to saccharification.

For most brewers this is a little much. Excellent results can be obtained by using malted wheat, but in larger proportions (as much as 70 percent in a proper witbier). Since we’re making this thing up, we’ll stick to a more sensible proportion of 40 percent. Instant oats add a layer of smooth creaminess to the recipe—they seem to work well in small amounts without a complex adjunct procedure. A healthy dose of melanoidin (aromatic, dark Munich) malt will give us a little chewy/toasty character, and we’ll be relying on the very smooth and soft flavor of German Rostmalz (Carafa) for the rest of the color and a soft, toasty edge. Don’t forget the rice hulls, as the huskless wheat malt needs a little help with lautering.

This is a lightly hopped beer, one that given the current dire hop supply situation, you might even be able to brew without hocking the family jewels. The hops are there strictly for balance, and in this application almost any variety you have should work, although I like the chocolaty quality of Northern brewers. I have included a dash of coriander, as well as some licorice root and a very small amount of star anise. Other seasonings such as black pepper, cardamom and orange or tangerine peel might work here, as long as they’re subtle. The idea with Belgian beers, is to use the spice to enhance the aromas of the malt, yeast and whatever else is there without it being obvious what the specific spices are.

You should by no means feel compelled to brew this recipe as-is. Witbier admits quite a lot of stretching and pulling in various directions while still retaining its soul. Hop ‘em if you got ‘em; this could handle up to about 40 IBU before getting lopsided. This recipe could be knocked back to about three-quarters of this gravity for a nice dark summer quaffer. Or, you could go the other way and bump it up another percent or two, make the spices a little more prominent, and dub it a Noel Noire, for a gloriously dark Christmas.

More specifically, if there is a single French Canadian to blame, it is Andre Dion, one of the founders of Unibroue. One of Canada’s most impressive breweries turns out some of the most distinctive Belgian-style ales on this side of the Atlantic.

After a buying trip to Belgium, Dion was so smitten by the white beers he found there that he quit his job as president of mega-hardware giant Rona Inc. to enter the beer business. In 1990, Dion and a business partner obtained a 75 percent interest in the struggling Massawippi brewery in Lennoxville, one of Quebec’s oldest breweries. By the end of 1991 they owned Massawippi outright. In 1993, they moved the brewing facilities to Chambly, Quebec.

Unibroue predates such North American Belgian-style stalwarts as Colorado’s New Belgium Brewery by one year, Maine’s Allagash by five years and upper state New York’s Ommegang by seven years. Coincidentally, the first product for both Allagash and Unibroue was a Belgian styled white beer. But that still doesn’t explain why beer lovers in Quebec are ahead of the rest of North America in embracing Belgian style beers.

The French Connection

Like all trends or historic events there is a series of smaller, less noticeable episodes that cumulatively lead to the final result. In this case, a French mindset and a love of all things culinary are key to the Belgian-styled ale explosion in Quebec North America.

The contrary French cast of mind is demonstrated in a tendency to defy convention, even with the most pedestrian of beers. Unlike the rest of North America, where yellow bubbly macro lager is king, in Quebec the ale reigns supreme: the two most popular products in Quebec are Molson Export and Labatt’s 50, both of which are ales.

Some say the Quebecois and the Walloons, or French Belgians, share a like viewpoint. They are both French-speaking ethnic groups. Yet neither feels accepted by the French themselves, and both feel oppressed by the larger populace in their own countries—English Canadians and the Flemish, respectively.

This shared outlook translates into shared beer affinities: Look in any well-stocked beer section or any brewpub in Quebec and you will see a large representation of Walloon beer styles like saisons and hoppy blond ales.

Quebec has long been known as a culinary bright light in Canada and one area where the Quebecois resemble Belgians is in their love of cheese. The two areas each manufacture over 300 different cheeses. When Winston Churchill once proclaimed that, “Any country with two hundred cheeses must be healthy,” Charles De Gaulle countered with “Any country with three hundred cheeses must be ungovernable.” By these standards, Quebecers ought to be very long-lived anarchists, though to date they have only shown occasional, unsuccessful inclinations toward separation from the rest of Canada.

Essence of Quebec

French Canadians are intensely proud of their heritage, and Unibroue has captured this essence like no other Quebec brewery. The company tapped into this sentiment by incorporating Quebec’s early history, myths and legends in the names of their beers and the artwork on their labels. They integrate the early period of New France and the early settlement of Canada, celebrating the inhabitants and voyageurs, or first pioneers, of the new land. They also mirror the Belgian custom of naming beers along the themes of death and religion, with beers such as La Fin du Monde (End of the World), Maudite (The Damned), and Eau Benite (Blessed Water).

Unibroue melds French Canadian passion for beer and food through its involvement in one of the world’s truly great bière et cuisine restaurants, Le Fourquet Fourchette. The name of this establishment means “the mashing fork (a brewery tool) and the culinary fork” and the restaurant’s symbol intertwines the two to illustrate the harmony of beer and food. The restaurant focuses on the foods of New France and native North Americans, with delicacies made from locally grown products, and unbelievable French Canadian dishes of Old World style featuring caribou, fish, lamb, chicken and duck—all cooked in, or paired with, a matching Unibroue beer.

The interior is magnificent and conjures up images of the voyageur and trapper life in New France or old Canada. The staff dress in period Habitants (farmers) wear and the place is dripping with Quebecois atmosphere, right down to the oddly-sized Sherwood Forest chairs and the one-of-a-kind light fixture shaped like a birch bark canoe that hands over the bar.

The stunning terrace provides a magnificent view of the Chambly Basin from the banks of the Richelieu River. For a peek at how pretty the area is, just look at the illustration on a bottle of Blanche de Chambly.

Le Fourquet Fourchette also has an interesting store in the front of the restaurant that stocks Unibroue beers and products made from their beers, including jams, vinegars and mustards. There are also produits de terroir, or locally-sourced and produced cheeses, sausages, jerkies, smoked meats and other delicious treats.

We remember the bad old days—before the revolution—when beer variety was non-existent, when bars and stores offered us the choice between Mainstream Lager A and Mainstream Lager B (and C and D, in more adventurous places).

Then came the thrill of discovery as the beer selection opened up, thanks to enterprising brewers and unconventional importers. Beer didn’t have to mean standard lager; there were rich European brewing traditions that offered us scores of alternative flavors.

Nor did beer have to be produced by huge, factory-like installations. It could be made by scrappy entrepreneurs, brewing on their own with cobbled-together equipment, distributing by pick-up truck and promoting their brews one convert at a time.

It was, indeed, a revolution: an upheaval that overturned the conventional way of thinking in the beer world. And beer writers loved the imagery of rebellion and revolt.

But (Fidel aside) revolutions come to an end. A new view of reality replaces the old. What we think of as “the American Beer Revolution” probably concluded in the nineties.

For beer aficionados, the new reality means sixty or seventy distinct styles of beer in American markets. But outside specialist circles, the new reality actually means that instead of ten mainstream lagers on the shelves, it’s probably nine mainstream lagers and one pale ale.

Despite playing a minor role, pale ales, amber ales and specialty lagers are now members of the beer industry establishment. For a small but significant group of beer drinkers, these are the beers they reach for when they “feel like a beer.”

These beers don’t raise eyebrows at the corner bar, they have a place in the convenience store cooler, and their drinkers aren’t making political statements. The beers are delicious and commercially successful.

Why brew anything else?

Even that extended voyage, however, does not begin to illustrate the gulf that exists between Toronto, the city I call home, and Montréal, where I was born and raised. Visit the two metropolises and their philosophical differences become immediately and starkly apparent: Montréalers populate their cafés throughout the day, where Torontonians appear certain the economy would grind to a halt were they to stop for a midday glass of beer or wine or a cup of coffee; when weather permits, the sidewalks of St-Laurent and St-Denis nightly teem with sharp-dressed citizens strolling or window shopping or just standing and chatting, while Toronto’s Queen and King Streets are primarily boulevards mandated to get a person from point A to point B, with no lingering; and where food and drink are concerned, well, let’s just say that Montréalers are significantly more hedonistic than are their neighbors to the west.

This last point, of course, applies as much to beer as it does to fine wine, haute cuisine or poutine. (Distinctly Québécois, poutine is an over-the-top indulgence of a dish, combining fries, gravy and cheese curds.) Although the city came later to craft brewing than did Toronto, Vancouver or even the modestly-sized Nova Scotian capital of Halifax, once they finally did get started, the city’s brewers have largely led the way for Canadians. As a result, although the fact is widely unrecognized, Canada’s second largest city rates with Denver, Portland, San Francisco and Philadelphia as one of the continent’s finest beer destinations.

Examples of Montréal’s leadership in beer are legion, but begin with the city’s first brewpub, Le Cheval Blanc (809 rue Ontario est, tel. 514-522-0211).

The Experimental Approach

When Jerôme Denys took over his family’s central Montréal tavern in 1981, representing the third generation to oversee the long, narrow room, his first priority was to bring the venerable establishment into the modern age. To compete in the eighties, he figured, the old fashioned, time-worn Cheval Blanc would require a couple of key renovations, such as the addition of a women’s washroom! The idea to brew in the basement didn’t come until half a decade later.

When Denys finally did begin selling his own beer in 1987, Montréalers welcomed the development with great enthusiasm, making the brewpub, according to Denys, an overnight success. And in its early days, Le Cheval Blanc was indeed a brewpub in the purest sense of the word, selling only the house-brewed beer and one commercial brand, all on draught—no bottled beer, no food, no wine, no liquor.

From the start, Denys began setting the tone for what would eventually become Montréal’s pervading approach towards craft-brewed beer. Taking the approach that beer, like wine, should vary from season to season and even batch to batch, Denys regularly altered his recipes so that, for example, a bière blonde tasted in July would necessarily taste different from one sampled in November. If occasionally maddening, it was also a practice that fostered experimentation and so crafted an attitude that would severely influence the next generation of brewpubs to come.

At the head of that generation is Dieu du Ciel (29 avenue Laurier ouest, tel. 514-490-9555). Located just east of Mont Royal, the ‘mountain’ for which the city is named, Dieu du Ciel is, at first glance, more neighborhood local than destination brewpub. But step up to the bar and that impression quickly changes, as the bartender guides you through beers like La Charbonnière, a wonderfully rounded and balanced smoked malt ale, and La Route des Épices, an outstanding seasonal ale flavored with black peppercorns. Order a pint of Rigor Mortis Ambrée, the brewer’s abbey-style dubbel, or the very convincing pilsner brewed occasionally by Jean-Francois Gravel, and you begin to wonder if the man can do no wrong.

Venture no further in your Montréal beer travels than Dieu du Ciel and Cheval Blanc and you will have been well-served by the new school and the old. But to do so would also be to deny yourself the province’s bounty of craft brewery beer seldom seen outside of Québec.

I lived most of my misspent youth some 90 miles from Vancouver and Victoria. Canadian beer was an always sought-after treasure, and Canada, an exotic destination mere miles from home. Did all Mounties sing like Nelson Eddie? Was the city of Victoria really shipped piece by piece from England? The answers to those questions remained in the air, but we KNEW that Canadian beer was STRONG.

American beer was 3.2 percent alcohol or, if stronger, was certainly less than 4 percent. We KNEW that. On each bottle of Canadian beer, the label informed us of its alcohol at not more than 5 percent. Of course, alcohol content in American beer, in those days, was measured “by weight,” whereas the Canadians measured theirs “by volume.” The difference is roughly one-fourth. Four percent by weight is 5 percent by volume. Canadian beer was, and is, almost the same strength as American beer, and these days, strong Canadian beer is actually less common than strong American beer.

But I digress.

GCBFMMII

Last year’s Great Canadian Beer Festival MMII, the 10th, was held in November at the Victoria Conference Centre, behind Victoria’s magnificent but elderly (1908) Fairmont Empress Hotel. The festival’s seemingly limited offering of some 130 beers and ciders from 31 breweries, including five US beers from Washington and Alaska, was a real blessing for those of us to whom Canadian beer was a rare opportunity to indulge ourselves while visiting what is surely Canada’s most distinctive and beautiful small city.

I was lucky enough to get a media pass for GCBFMMII, because the event’s 4,000 tickets had sold out (at C$20/US$15) in close to 45 minutes after they went on sale early in October. The 5,000 or so attendees (including exhibitors, staff and media) imbibed some 65,000 taste samples (C$1 each).

I started my beer incursion there with Unibroue of Quebec, whose beers may well be Canada’s best. Their new Le Terrible, an abbey-style dark ale at 10.5 percent, is nicely done. I also tried their Trois Pistoles, a strong dark ale, 9 percent. Unibroue takes its inspiration from the classic brews of Belgium and northwest France. The beers are not imitation Belgians, no, not at all; they are each original and distinctive.

Next I tried Canoe’s Victoria-brewed Beaver Brown Ale, a splendid example of American-style brown. I lingered a while with Brian MacIsaac’s organic-brewed Crannog Ales (from Sorento, BC). Kick in the Pants Ale is dry hopped and cask conditioned. Old Mill Flax Ale represents an interesting concept as a mild ale with flax as a major brewing element. My favorite of theirs was the Back Hand of God Stout, 6.2 percent, with an almost chocolate-coffee element in its makeup.

I sampled the last of Longwood’s Nanaimo (BC) delicious cask-conditioned British-style IPA (6.8 percent). Victoria’s Vancouver Island Brewery offered excellent Hermannator Ice Bock with an elegant, almost prune brandy finish. At 9.5 percent; it was smooth and friendly, fit for a winter’s fireside libation.

There were many more, as well as some fine Washington state beers.

After 10 mostly sold-out festivals, the management (Dave Preston, chair, and John Rowling, president of CAMRA Victoria) concluded that they needed a larger location. They were in luck when they managed to secure the nearby (10-minute walk from downtown Victoria) city-block-sized Royal Athletic Park, home of soccer club Victoria United, on Cook Street between Pembrook and Caledonia. The new location for Great Canadian Beer Festival MMIII forced a change in festival dates, moving back to Saturday and Sunday, 5 and 6 September. They expect to sell some 10,000 tickets, invite 40 to 50 brewers (150 beers?), and utilize some 350 volunteers. More information can be found at the website, www.GCBF.com.