Latest Stories from What’s Brewing

Brian K. Smith reports on a very special event: the annual Craft Beer & Wilderness experience—an exclusive five-day craft-beer-based foodie retreat at a fishing lodge on the remote West Coast of Vancouver Island.

If you’re shopping for a BC beer lover this season, then congratulations: your search for the perfect gift is over.

With a little over a month left until Christmas, What's Brewing magazine launches its annual BC Craft Beer Holiday Gift Guide. Probably the only one of its kind anywhere, this 18-page "look book" of curated gift ideas has expanded with many unique new picks since last year.

Funkiness, sourness, fusel alcohols, phenolics, and fruity esters may be highly appropriate in some beer styles, but when I find them spoiling styles not advertised as hybrids, I am not at all happy.

We've had a full year of beer and cider events under our belts. From panicked purchases of festival equipment to interesting encounters with patrons, it’s been a nutty but all-round solid learning experience for us.

As a homebrewer, I used to make saisons in the summer. I don’t have a temperature-controlled fermentation chamber, but saison yeast performs very well under fermentation temperatures as high as 35°C, so it worked for me. How times have changed! Now I can make a good clean ale at similar temperatures using the new miracle yeasts known as kveik.

To the joy of beer drinkers everywhere, two new beer documentaries have recently been released. Both Brewmaster (2018) and Beers of Joy (2019) follow in the footsteps of the first Somm film.

I remember the very first growler I ever bought; it was from Steamworks brew pub. I had seen a sign about growlers, and being a newish arrival in Canada, I asked for more information. "It's a glass jug that you can take beer away in."

Some of Canada’s best breweries reside in that darned, smug Ontario. If only grudgingly, one must admit that one might want to stop in and check some of them out, if one happened to find oneself in or around Universe Central. The Beer Seekers faced just that type of temptation this past summer and caved in readily.