channel your inner Bob and Doug McKenzie this month
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Love to hear some Canadian scene reports, as all my info is super dated. I wanted to make a trip to Toronto this Summer but it never happened. I always loved the Quebecois beer scene, and wonder how it evolved. Vancouver scene is still solid I’d imagine, though prices/taxes seemed absurd on beers at the store to me when I was there 20 years back. Halifax beer world was small but vibrant 20 years back as well. Dieu du Ciel was the only interesting one to really make a splash here 15 years ago, and I don’t think they still send anything. Unibroue post Sapporo does its best to stay dead boring and irrelevant, which has been unfortunate for a long time, at least around here. Collective Arts is on the shelves, but seems like it was contract brewed somewhere else…not 100% on that. Does Alexander Keith’s only make Mango Hazy IPAs now?
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3 months too late - took an Ontario trip in August. Border patrol didn’t even blink when I told them I had 99 beers, Except for a few extras I finished them off a couple weeks ago.
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Had this a couple of weeks ago (sorry guessing that goes against the BOTM rules!) in Kaffee Bazaar, Ieper.
Caligula is the beer. Brasserie du Bas Canada is the brewery. Fantastic full bodied DIPA with lusciously ripe exotic tones.
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They do beer in France North ?
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Funny what shows up here. And when. Dunham / Burdock Bardane. Bit of a gusher. Funky more than sour.
We’re not seeing so many Nth American beers here (Australia) at the moment - a combination of breweries less interested in spending to develop foreign markets and higher costs of trade (I suppose). Haven’t seen Unibroue or St Ambroise for more than a decade. Dieu du Ciel, Dunham and Collective Arts are spottily available. On the upside, what’s available tends to suit my tastes pretty well.
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Can’t say I agree with dead boring as a description of Unibroue - they continue to make excellent beers. That said, it also seems like they are doing a lot more non-Belgian styles which are more variable in quality than their core beers. On my last trip to Quebec we tried several new brands from them, most of which were decent but not impressive, and clearly aimed at a more mainstream / accessible audience.
Overall in the last decade or so I think Canada has gone from a situation where BC and Quebec were head and shoulders above the other provinces to now where I think the others have largely caught up. Every province seems to have at least a couple very good breweries. The “best” breweries are largely dependent (IMHO) on how you feel about their hazy IPAs. The breweries that I see getting the most hype online are often the ones I shy away from because their hazies are about half good and half undrinkable for me. (Too much green veg and haze character for me.)
Ironically after a few years were 99% of my beer consumption has been Canadian, the only beer I have had so far this month was Weihenstephaner Hefeweizen! 
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Shame this isn’t December BOTM… Christmas markets over here usually have a Quebec stall selling Canadian beer, ice ciders, maple syrup etc etc… The first ones are starting up from next week so I will see what I can find!
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As promised, right in the nick of time, I found some Canadian beers at a Quebec stall at Arras Christmas market. I know it’s evil corporate macro blah blah but it’s a blummin lovely quad 
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This summer we did cruise from where I live near Boston to Nova Scotia and PEI, and next summer will be in Vancouver for few days. So visited some new provinces but nothing this month.
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note: I failed miserably at this. 
Messorem, which seems like one of the new hype breweries in Quebec, has had a couple of tap takeovers in DC these days, but I didn’t find their hazies to be especially interesting. The guys were nice at Snallygaster though.
I’m not sure if all the provinces have caught up to Quebec. Arguably Ontario, which since I moved there and moved out 10 years ago has gotten better and better. I don’t know about the Maritimes stuff, I just don’t get much of it in DC or when I visit BC or Alberta these days. Two Crows seemed decent from NS, but limited sample size.
BC seems super stagnant. The top 100 list from there stays pretty similar since Four Winds arrived on the scene. Perhaps that just means it’s hard to beat Driftwood and Four Winds, or the new good stuff doesn’t get enough ratings to make top lists. From my own experience, I can definitely say that while tons of breweries have opened in the Okanagan in the past six or seven years since I’ve been going, there have been a lot of average ones, and a lot of bad ones, with one or two decent ones. Really surprising–you’d think with so many you’d get something good just based on numbers. At least Vancouver and Van Island are better.
Alberta has certainly improved leaps and bounds, lots of good new stuff there in the past half decade. And now in Edmonton I see stuff from Sask, which never happened before, so their scene seems to be coming along.
Nunavut has a brewery now, and I have a cousin that may mule me a couple soon. Yukon Breweries is OK, Winterlong is better. NWT and MB I don’t know.
So with the caveat that I no longer live in Canada but just visit often, I’d say nobody has yet caught up to Quebec. Too many top tier breweries there–stuff both for haze heads and for grumpy people like me who prefer Belgian styles, good sours, and other more traditional styles. I have yet to try an Auval beer.
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Going to miss the Messorem tap takover at Churchkey by a few days. I think I’ve had 2-3 Canadian beers total this year. See zero bottles on the shelf.
