Island Craft by Stott Jon C.;

Author:Stott, Jon C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: COOKING / Beverages / Alcoholic / Beer
Publisher: TouchWood Editions
Published: 2019-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Harley Smith, a co-owner of Longwood Brewery and one of the veterans of the Vancouver Island craft brewery scene, stands beside a board listing the beers available in the tasting room. Most of these use what he refers to as “community-sourced” ingredients.

He listed the area ingredients and their suppliers. Cedar Valley Hop Yards, which I’d visited a couple of days earlier, supplied, of course, the hops; Carawood Farms of Courtenay, the barley (which was malted by J. White Malting in Nanaimo); Farmship Growers Co-op of Yellow Point (just south of Nanaimo), the beets used in Beetnik Root Stout; McNab’s Corn Maze and Produce Farm in Yellow Point, the pumpkins in Full Patch Pumpkin Ale; and the farm of Jill and John Edwards of Yellow Point, the quince in Quinceotica Harvest Lager. “I visit our suppliers regularly to watch things grow and to establish a relationship with the people who grow them. You know, there’s a sense of pride watching a field of barley or row of hop bines grow.”

Smith described the core beers made at the production brewery as “solid and approachable. We don’t want you to have just one,” he remarked with a chuckle. “But many of our seasonal beers are outside the box. When we make them, we feel we can go down any path.” The five core beers are Stoutnik, Berried Alive Raspberry Ale, The Big One IPA, Steam Punk Dunkelweizen (each of these also brewed at the brewpub by Graham Payne), and Island Time Lager. The brewpub and brewery versions of the first four are very similar.

Island Time Lager (5 percent ABV, 18 IBUs) is the newest of the beers on the core list. The website description calls this German-style pilsner an “Obsessively Local Brew” and goes on to emphasize that all ingredients are from Vancouver Island. The hops are showcased, with the Mount Hood, Magnum, and Perle hops from Cedar Valley Hop Yards contributing herbal, spicy, and fruity notes. “Lagers are the unsung heroes of beer,” Smith stated. “They represent a growing part of the market, but no one really talks about them. They are the real workhorses.” The dark gold-coloured beer is crisp and a little bitter, with the malts in the background giving the lager a slightly mellow roundness. Unsung heroes though lagers may be, Island Time is Longwood Brewery’s top seller.

Two of the brewery’s seasonal beers are definitely outside the box. Quinceotica Harvest Lager (5.5 percent ABV with minimal IBUs, according to the website) uses an ancient but, in North America, almost unknown fruit. Pear- or apple-like in appearance, it is virtually inedible raw, but sweet and citrusy after it’s cooked. When local farmers Jill and John Edwards invited Smith to take as many of their ready-to-harvest quinces as he needed, he readily accepted their offer. The people at Footless Rooster Hobby Farm, who had a juice press, turned the fruits into liquid, which was added to already fermented blonde ale to begin a process of secondary fermentation. The light-bodied result was a tart beverage with citrusy flavours.

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