Post by Matt, the Beer Baron, introducing you to fantastic craft beer from Canada and around the world.
While every week is craft beer week in our
house, this week (June 13-21) makes it official thanks to Ontario Craft Beer Week. Leading up to this
week, I’d been patiently waiting obsessively checking the LCBO app
to see if Wellington Brewery’s Chocolate Milk Stout had made it to my local
store – but to no avail.
As it turned out, the perfect storm of
Ontario Craft Beer Week, stunning weekend weather, my longing for Chocolate
Milk Stout and Wellington’s announcement that they would also have two special
IPAs available at their brewery store meant one thing:
Weekend road trip to Wellington Brewery!
Wellington has a nice little tasting room
but since I was road tripping, I just loaded up at their retail store
and headed for home to enjoy my bounty.
My love of stout is well
documented
but I had yard work and barbequing to do, so it made sense to start off my Ontario
Craft Beer Week with an IPA. In this case, it was an IPA I’d discovered last
summer and really enjoyed: Wellington Shangri-La IPA.
According to Wellington, the recipe changed
slightly from last year’s batch to the new release, resulting in a little bit
less tropical fruitiness and a little bit more of the hop-forward bitterness associated
with big, bold American-style
IPAs. I got a nice dose of citrus and a light flowery note on the nose
followed by a nice mix of grapefruit and pine with a lingering hoppy
bitterness. My Ontario Craft Beer Week was certainly off to a good start!
While Shangri-La was a good example of a
style of beer that has become fairly ubiquitous over the last few years, the Bewitched
Belgian IPA is a more unique take on an IPA thanks to the use of Belgian
farmhouse-style yeast. The very first sniff was spicy and inviting, reminding
me more of Trappist ales
than an IPA, which was a nice change of pace after the
Shangri-La. Bewitched strikes a nice balance between the citrus-hop of an IPA
and the warm spices and peppery tones of Belgian ales – and at 7%, it was a
nice way to wrap up a Sunday evening.
Last but certainly not least is the
Chocolate Milk Stout, which is exactly what you’d imagine, both in scent, taste
and texture, as well as ingredients. Like most stouts, Wellington’s Chocolate
Milk Stout gets its dark complexity from roasted malts but then adds fair trade
cocoa powder and lactose – a fine milk sugar – to the party to create an even
fuller body and luxuriously smooth mouth feel. It’s certainly no lightweight at
7.2% but it is also surprisingly quaffable thanks to its creaminess and
carbonation and the fact that it is not quite as syrupy or high alcohol as many
of the best Russian Imperial Stouts. If you like dark chocolate, you owe it to
yourself to track one down and celebrate Ontario Craft Beer Week.
GOOD NEWS! Wellington released a small
batch of Chocolate Milk Stout and it is finally starting to hit the shelves at LCBO
stores around Ontario. You can look for inventory in your city on the LCBO app
or through
their website. Good luck and happy Ontario Craft Beer Week! (I’m not
affiliated with either Wellington or the LCBO nor will I profit from this
post... I’m just a beer geek who wants to spread the love of good beer around.)
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