Category Archives: food

Working at the same place for almost 20 years generally means you get some nice perks (assuming you work at the sort of place that provides perks, of course), which is why I am lucky enough to have five weeks of paid vacation a year. The problem, though, is that I’m really slack about taking that time off. I rarely travel, and I generally enjoy my job, so taking a big chunk of time off at once usually isn’t a priority for me.

So around this time every year, when I’ve only taken a handful of days off for short trips or appointments, I start to realise that I’d better start booking a few days here and there before I end up having to take the entire month of December off. Which is why I’m off work today (well, that and the fact that my wife, who works from home, it out of town today, so I needed to stay home to take care of our dogs who are a couple of spoiled brats that get a walk every 3-4 hours).

All of which is a long-winded explanation as to why I finally have some time to post something to this oft-neglected blog of mine. In fact, I might manage to get a few posts written today, although I’ll probably schedule them to post sporadically over the next week or two in order to fill what is bound to be another lengthy gap before I get around to writing something here again.

Today’s topic: The stupendous Dogfish Head beer dinner at beerbistro that I attended way back on Wednesday May 28th. As others have noted, this was possibly the best beer dinner Toronto has ever seen, and it was certainly the best I’ve ever attended. Even DFH’s Sam Calagione (pictured above right, along with Tom Peters from Monk’s Cafe in Philly who made a pit stop on his way to Mondiale in Montreal) was completely blown away, and said that it was in his top three DFH dinners ever.

The spectacular meal from beerbistro chef Brian Morin and his stellar kitchen staff featured nine courses, all of them playful takes on classic comfort foods, and each paired with a Dogfish Head beer, plus a bonus beer at the end. If you know anything about DFH, you’ll know that most of their beers are 6% and up, with some as high as 20%+, so it probably goes without saying that Thursday morning was a little blurry. But man, was it worth it.

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As usual, others have beat me to it, but I figure since I was a host and co-presenter of the Southern Tier beer dinner at the Academy of Spherical Arts last Friday, I should probably post a little write-up about it.

This was the first beer dinner presented by import agency Roland + Russell for one of their represented breweries, and while the turn-out was a bit lighter than they’d hoped (most likely due to the insane number of beer dinners that have taken place recently), it was still a great night. It definitely helped that the Academy is an absolutely gorgeous venue, and that the chef did a pretty fine job on the food and beer pairings. And having Phin DeMink and Paul Caine on hand from the brewery to speak and answer questions was a big plus as well.

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This past Tuesday evening, the unofficial Month Of Beer Dinners continued with a dinner at the website-less Abbot On The Hill that featured three courses paired with beers from the Dutch breweries Bavaria and Koningshoeven.

I must admit that when I first heard about this dinner, I was a bit confused by the beer selections. Aside from the fact that both breweries are Dutch and are repped in Canada by Premier Brands, I couldn’t see much in common between a large (albeit family-run) brewery that specialises in mainstream lagers, and a small abbey brewery that produces Trappist ales. But as we learned during a talk by Daan Bastijn, president of Bavaria’s North American office in Atlanta, there is a connection between the two, as Bavaria took over the operations of the Koningshoeven brewery in 1999 in order to assist the aging monks in the production of the beer. This arrangement led to Koningshoeven losing the rights to use the official Trappist beer logo for several years, although when the contract was renewed in 2004, Bavaria stepped back into more of an arms-length role, and their official Trappist status was revived in 2005.

(Oh, and by the way, i forgot my camera and had to use my phone to take the photos in this post. Which explains why they’re even shittier than usual.)

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