Road Trip - Montréal

Last week we celebrated my 40th birthday in Montreal!  We wanted to go somewhere fun and, surprisingly, have never been to Montreal together, and neither of us has been since we were teenagers. 

Montreal is about a 7 hour drive from home. On the way, we stopped to visit family for a couple of nights in Eastern Ontario, then headed into the city.  

I'll let Matt, the Beer Baron, talk about all the beer he tried in an upcoming post, but one of our first stops was Atwater Market to check out the beer and cider selection at the Fromagerie.  We collected several selections to enjoy in our hotel room.

We chose the Delta Montreal as our hotel and it was great. The Jazz Fest was on while we were there and it was right next door. It was an easy walk to Old Montreal and shopping downtown. 

The Beer Baron - Light & Dark with Dieu du Ciel!

This post comes from Matt, the Beer Baron.  He can be found on Twitter @geekcanuck

To give craft beer fans a bracket of their own to cheer about during March Madness last month, Sun Media – with more than a little help from beer writer and sommelier Crystal Luxmore – created Beer Madness 2015: Canada’s Favourite Beer Content.

You can click the link to see how it all played out, but the Coles Notes version is that the big macro brews like Molson Canadian and Labatt Blue were decimated by craft beers from across the country. That really didn’t come as a surprise, as I didn’t really think a contest aimed at craft beer drinkers would appeal to macro drinkers. Not to generalize (too much), but if they really cared about beer, they’d drink something different.

In the end, Ontario favourites like Muskoka Brewery’s Mad Tom IPA did well and showed that IPAs are still very much en vogue,  but the final matchup came down to a pair of brilliant brews from Quebec: Le Trou Du Diable’s Saison du Tracteur,  a fruity farmhouse ale; and Dieu du Ciel’s Peche Mortel, an imperial coffee stout.

While Saison du Tracteur won and I can certainly understand why, Peche Mortel was my favourite from the outset and I voted as such and was happy to see it make the finals. Peche Mortel isn’t exactly easy to come by here in Ontario, so the Clockwatching Tart wasn’t surprised when I excitedly asked / begged her to pick me up a four-pack after checking the inventory on my trusty LCBO app. Not only did my favourite store at York & Ridout have Peche Mortel in stock, they were wonderful enough to suggest a four-pack of Dieu du Ciel’s equally fantastic Moralite IPA.