One-off Stand-off at The Victory Cafe – Toronto Beer Week

Another night in Toronto Beer Week, and more events to entice and entertain.  So much so, that my friend Josh drove down from Kenora Uxbridge, to come along.  So off we headed to The Victory Cafe to drink some one-offs from Beau’s and Nicklebrook.  Upstairs, and a batch of tickets bought for $20 that would get us one of each one-off, some food (it was a lot) and a draw ticket.  We greeted Rob from Beau’s, and got glasses of Festivale, Festivale Plus Sticke, and Gose.  Josh is a beer lover, but doesn’t get to too many places to drink a wide variety of styles, so all three from Beau’s were new styles for him.  We sat on couches and sipped and discussed and generally had a great time.  I had drank the Festivale and Sticke before, but the Gose was a new one for me, and it was excellent.  Great wheat aroma and flavour, but with this really nice bit of malt towards the end.  I would love to drink a lot more of it.

A genuine concern of mine in bringing Josh was taht I would end up in a huddle with the usual variety of other beer geeks while Josh sat with some beer way out of his depth hating Toronto Beer Week.  In fact many of the usual variety of beer geeks did indeed engage us in conversation, but they were all warm and welcoming to Josh, and on top of that, while he didn’t love every beer, Josh was a champ actually spending time trying to identify the aromas and flavours he was getting, and picking which ones were lending to goodness vs evil.  I was pretty impressed; it was a shame he couldn’t make the BrewDog dinner.

While I went to erase any chalk lines on Josh’s car that might have lead to parking tickets, Josh got food, and so I came back to a mini Indian feast.  Really great curries with a wonderful naan.  Hard to beat a good Indian.  We also grabbed the selection of Nicklebrook beers, which was their Pale Ale, Marzen, Maple Porter and Uneik Lambic-style beer.  It was pretty cool to be able to walk Josh through a lot of the tastes/textures the beers presented, talk about the different styles and deconstruct the beers a bit.  As we were finishing up, the draw began, for some swag from both companies, including a pair of Leafs tickets from Nicklebrook.  Sadly we didn’t win anything.  At that point we decided to head up to Kilgour’s, despite having heard the cask had already been drained.  We made our farewells to all and sundry and headed off.  I’m going to include our Kilgour’s stop here, because not only was the cask gone, but so was everybody else.  So Josh and I took a table and a few pints of Black Oak Pale Ale, called a local friend to come, corralled Mike over to us when he wandered in and made our own party.  All in all, a fun night.  Glad to have company and also a different perspective on what we were tasting.  It was also good having Josh, as he had a long drive home, so I actually got to bed at a decent hour, which was a good thing, as we were up early to go down to see a filming of Shad on George Stroumbolopolous.  Woot!

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