Beer School Teacher Patrick McMurray

Beer School Teacher Patrick McMurray

Every year we run our famous Beer School and always want to make it an unforgettable experience for our  beer lovers. This year is no different and we will be unveiling more great news as we get closer to the event.

Edmonton’s International Beer Fest and Liquor Depot are very happy to announce Patrick McMurray as one of  our Beer School teacher at this years festival. We are looking forward to having Patrick McMurray teach us about  oysters, oyster shucking and beer pairing.

 Patrick McMurray

photo (1)Patrick is a World Champion Oyster Shucker, and author of a book on oysters, entitled “Consider the Oyster –  A Shucker’s Field Guide.”  He is the proud owner of Starfish Oyster Bed & Grill restaurant  in downtown  Toronto. Patrick has been bringing oysters and fresh fish to the city  for the past 7 years for all to enjoy.

You can check out more at: Shucker Paddy

Stay tuned to find out when and how to sign up for this incredible experience!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top 10 Beers to taste at any Beer Festival

Top 10 Beers to taste at any Beer Festival

The thought of one person walking around the grounds of beer festivals for a couple of days and objectively telling you what the “top” or “best” beers are is blatantly absurd. There are hundreds of beers to sample through, and the fact that everyone’s tastes are distinct makes it even more difficult to come up with a list of beers.

And yet, among the greatest joys of attending a beer festival is being able to sample different things and reflect on your discoveries and preferences afterward. With that in mind, you should certainly try the following craft beers during the next festival and see if they make it to your favorites list.

1. 3 Minutes to midnight

An Imperial Stout beer with 10% alcohol content by Bellwoods Brewery, this beer is aged with tart cherries for three months to give it rich and complex notes of tart fruit, roast malt, and bitter chocolate.

2. Fermium House Ales

Brewed by Bar Volo, this Black Imperial IPA with 7.5% alcohol content has a wonderful mix of mango, pine, and orange, as well as roasted malt and chocolate/

3. Red Tape Stout

Brewed by Indie Alehouse with 10% alcohol, this is a delicious, creamy stout with black color.

4. Witchshark

Another Imperial IPA but brewed by Bellwoods, this double IPA has 9% alcohol and combines an aggressively bitter and hoppy taste with juicy and fruity tones. It is deceptively smooth and consistently among the top beers in Canada.

5. Zombie Apocalypse

Another top brew by Indie Alehouse with 10% alcohol content, this is the kind of strong drink with a chocolatey, roasty, boozy feel.

6. Fangboner

A Brett IPA brew by Great Lakes that combines hops with Brettanomyces yeast to produce an appallingly brilliant bitter/funky hybrid that begs to be guzzled down.

7. Amsterdam  Bar Hop Brett Bier de Garde

This all-brett IPA by Amsterdam is brewed with a different hop every time, though it maintains its dry bitterness with complex pineapple, mango flavors and notes of herbaceous grape. It has 6% alcohol content.

8. Coffee Porter

Brewed by mill Street, this is a nice, award-winning porter with 5.5% alcohol content. It is made with Balzac coffee.

9. 504 Pale Ale

Brewed by Liberty village, this is a refreshing and vaguely subtle IPA with 4.8% alcohol content that is meant to calm you after riding the dense route for which it is named.

10. Nutcracker Porter

Brewed by black Oak, this dark porter has 5.8% alcohol and notes of coffee, figs, cinnamon, and spice rounding.

This list is not conclusive, and with breweries introducing new drinks to the market, feel free to try out new entrants at the beer festival. They might just make it to the list next time.

 

Photo Credit: BlackOakBeer

Top 5 Reasons to Attend Edmonton’s Beer Festival 2015

Top 5 Reasons to Attend Edmonton’s Beer Festival 2015

Have you ever had the opportunity to visit a beer festival? There is something very unique about it that makes it an enjoyable experience. Even if you are not a beer lover you should try a festival out, as it will change your opinion of them. There are endless amounts of reasons to go, today we will explore a few of the more popular and more convincing arguments of why you should just drop everything and go.

The first reason you should go to a beer festival is to learn how to taste beer like an expert. Beer festivals often offer you the opportunity to participate in classes that teach you the proper tasting methods. Not only that they will provide the beer that will be tasted. This means that you will teach your palate the proper art of beer tasting! What can be better than that?

These festivals offer a wide variety of culinary booths or areas. These will teach you what foods to combine with certain beers and how to cook using certain types of beers. This will give you the opportunity to try and enjoy new foods as well as picking up a few recipes for that next party. Some of these festivals, especially those in the south, offer the best chili that you will ever try.

These gatherings are also one giant party. These festivals give you the opportunity to go out with friends or family to enjoy a new experience. Many people also make new friends at the festivals as well. There is ample opportunity to find people that have your same tastes or crave the same experiences. It also gives you something fun and new to do with the friends you already have.

Beer! What more could you ask for? These festivals are packed with beer. The prices are at acceptable levels. How many other festival do you know, that make it all about the beer. These festivals pride themselves in presenting their visitors with the best beers available as well as the tools to enjoy them.

More beer! Festivals include a great variety of breweries. These offer breweries from all across the country a chance to present their beers to the public. Many microbreweries go unnoticed or untried, as they are not experienced. These festivals will give you the opportunity to seek new varieties and possibly to find your new favorite beer.

It is important to get out and try new things. Beer festivals give people the opportunity to try not only new beers but also a new experience. A festival will be a fun environment where you can go and experiment new and undiscovered beers. This is only true if they are over the legal drinking age. This is a new opportunity to enjoy your pints and it should be tried at least once. However, be sure that once you have gone, you will most likely look for the next one in town.

 

Get Your Tickets for Beer Fest 2015, March 06-07

Spicy Beer is Good

Spicy Beer is Good

Even though I’ve never chased a sip of creamy beer with a a few squirts of cock sauce, I know Sriracha is going to make it better. Hot sauce makes everything better. Just to make sure, though, I poured myself a glass of Rogue Sriracha Hot Stout Beer.

Not that beer needs improving, mind you, it is a Fine and Good thing on its own. But I’m one of those uncultured eaters who puts hot sauce on everything (OATMEAL?!?!) so that my tongue can’t register flavor unless I’ve doused my meal in some caustic red stuff that measures death on the Scoville Scale.

Made by the free spirited brewers at Oregon’s Rogue Ale house, this brew is basically perfectly designed for me. I’m more of a pale ale guy, so I always find stouts a little flat and syrupy for my taste, and Rogue’s beer succeeds in kicking up the flavor to something a little more interesting.

When I first pulled the bottle out of the fridge it was a little too cold, I could only barely glean the spice in the aftertaste. As the beer warms up a little bit you can taste the bite all the way through.

Though my colleague Adam described the flavor as “like squeezing a Sriracha into a good porter,” I don’t entirely agree. Sriracha is wonderful stuff but the flavor isn’t exactly subtle, and I wouldn’t say the spice or flavoring totally overpowers the the stout. It’s got a nice tingle throughout.

Right now I’m about 3/4 of a way through a 750mL bottle, and I’m not regretting it at all. It’s a slow sipper of a beer-you don’t want to drink this too fast any more than you want to plow through a enchilada stuffed jalapeños and covered in green chili sauce. I’ve got another bottle under my desk, and I don’t know that I would necessarily want to dive in for another round. This is a nice novelty, but not a get drunk beer. Or even a drink multiple beer. This is a drink one beer, pound your chest two times, and move on to something else beer.

Even as I write this I can feel my heartburn kicking in. It hurts. I like it. Confirmed: Spicy beer is good.

 

Source: Hot Sauce Makes Everything Better, even Beer

Beer Fest 2015 Performer: Lyra Brown stars in her own musical fairy tale

Beer Fest 2015 Performer: Lyra Brown stars in her own musical fairy tale

Cinderella waltzes across a pillow. Alice In Wonderland sleeps on a shirt. Princess Anna smiles from a box of tissue.

Singer-songwriter Lyra Brown’s bedroom is adorned with some of her favourite characters from Walt Disney’s animated films, from Snow White to Frozen.

“I grew up with Disney and I think it’s important not to abandon things that inspired you in childhood just because you’re an adult,” says the 23-year-old Edmonton musician. “One of the main reasons I started singing was because of Disney. First, I would memorize Disney books on tape before I could read, and I’d sing the songs from there. Then, I’d watch the films over and over and over and over.”

With her long blond hair, tiny frame and wide blue eyes, Brown could easily be the model for Disney’s next heroine. The album cover of her just-released debut, The Language of Eyes, even features the musician as the star of her own fairy tale – with fiery eyelashes, a flock of moths and a tower with a Rapunzel-like braid flowing out the window.

Brown’s songs are almost as whimsical – 10 lilting piano numbers starring her acrobatic and innocent vocals – yet her lyrics hint at darker, heavier themes. Demons. Scrubbing toilets. First love. Abandonment. Trying (and failing) to learn the language of ‘I’ instead of always putting others ahead of yourself.

“Let your hair down, I want to save you,” she coos on Big Fish Too Soon. “All I want to do is comfort you and abandon myself again,” she swoons on As It Seems. “I used to sit and wait and drop everything if you happened to need me,” she confesses on Cheek & Bruise, which tackles the embarrassment of letting someone take you for granted.

Sounds like the plight of a Disney heroine, right? Brown won’t divulge specific details about her struggles, but admits they directly contributed to The Language of Eyes. “A lot was crumbling around me and you unconsciously believe that it’s your job to hold everybody up.”

“I was really good at being the strong one – and I think those songs are the result of me crumbling as I tried to hold everybody up. It feels very lonely when you have to put on this facade of strength and I think a lot of people can relate to that feeling. So that’s how I want to comfort people.”

Songwriting wasn’t always a comfort to Brown. She wrote her first tune when she was three – The Washing Machine Song – but didn’t seriously start working on lyrics until she was 13. “Very embarrassing. I only showed my cousin,” she laughs. “Songwriting was such a secret act, I didn’t want to tell anybody, but then I kind of came out of shell and started writing on guitar and piano when I was about 14.”

A year later, Brown played her first gig – at (the now defunct) B Scene Studios off Whyte Avenue. She also forged an online friendship with one of her musical heroes, Emily Haines of Metric, around the same time.

“I gave her a two-song EP I had recorded at B Scene Studios and we started emailing back and forth. She was very encouraging and showed belief in me right away. That really made an impact on me. We kind of lost touch as time went on, but I never stopped writing. So I think she was the catalyst. I owe a lot to her.”

Over the next few years, between 2009 to 2013, Brown developed a faithful following in Alberta, playing various folk festivals, radio shows and house concerts. But it wasn’t until Rawlco Radio stepped in with a $10,000 grant that Brown was able to record The Language of Eyes with Edmonton musician/producer Jay Sparrow and engineer Brad Smith at Red Panda Recorders. “I sent them 20, 30 songs and they were like: ‘OK, you’re beyond ready to do this’!” she laughs.

She’s ready to share her songs with the rest of the world – The Language of Eyes is now available on iTunes and she’s applying to play festivals across Canada. She’s also ready to face whatever struggles come her way in the future.

“If you use your pain for something creative, it’s never a bad thing. I’m sure I’m going to go through a lot more s—, too. It’s unavoidable – and it’s a blessing in disguise.”

Catch her performance Friday, January 23, 2015 at $7:30pm at The ARTery, 9535 Jasper Ave. Tickets only $15.00 at Yeglive.ca

 

Source: Concert Preview: Lyra Brown Musical Fairytale