Your intrepid liquor reporter has shaken off the gloom and shadow of our long winter, and is once again enjoying the sweet sunshine while sipping suds on patios and watching the trees slowly come back to life.
Yes, gentle reader, patio season is upon us again, and your humble narrator is celebrating with the finest local beers that our fair province has to offer.
A new addition to the veritable cornucopia of local craft beers is the Dandy Brewing Company, which set up shop in Calgary this past September.
It was challenging to find those Dandy beers for the first few months, and your intrepid liquor reporter did make a few pilgrimages directly to the brewery, located in a nondescript light industrial bay off Deerfoot trail, just so I could sample the liquid gold directly from the wellspring.
Luckily, distribution got sorted out over the winter months, and you can now find Dandy beers on tap where beer nerds tend to gather, as well as on the shelves of Co-op Liquor and other well-stocked booze merchants.
The Dandy Brewing Company is Calgary’s first nanobrewery, referring to its tiny 3BBL brewing capacity. For those readers who are not beer nerds, BBL refers to a 31 gallon barrel, so a 3BBL brewery means they have a brewing capacity of around 300 litres per batch, which is ridiculously small when compared to other breweries. That’s why they are called a nanobrewery instead of a microbrewery.
Despite their nano size, the Dandy Brewing Company is definitely punching above their weight, with two flagship beers available year-round, and occasional one-off releases for their growing fanbase of beer nerds.
Their first brew is the Golden Brown Dandy Ale, made in the style of an English Pale Ale. True to the English style, this beer is lightly carbonated, so may surprise the macrobrew drinkers who expect excessive fizziness in their brews.
Made with our world-renowned Alberta barley, the Golden Brown Dandy Ale has a toffee undertone from caramelized malt, which is nicely balanced by an earthy fresh bite and slightly bitter finish from the Fuggle and Brewer’s Gold hops that are imported from the UK.
This is a session ale at heart, so you would be comfortable enjoying several of these over the course of an evening.
Their next brew is much more flavourful, and is the favourite of beer nerds like your humble narrator. The Dandy In The Underworld is made in the style of an Oyster Stout, another ale originating from Jolly Olde England.
Readers that wore tie-dye shirts in their youth may also recall Dandy In The Underworld as that title of a glam-rock album from T.Rex back in the swinging seventies, so the name of the beer is cool for two reasons!
The Oyster Stout style of beer has a long and storied history. As the name would suggest, oysters are actually used in the brewing process, although this was not always the case. Back in Victorian England, it was common for the working classes to drink stout beer, and the briny flavour of oysters complemented the beer, so the two were regularly consumed together.
Sometime in the 1800s, an enterprising brewer discovered that crushed oyster shells were an effective clarifying agent to help de-murkify beer prior to bottling, which is how oysters first found their way into the brewing process. A bit later, an even more adventurous brewer threw caution to the wind, and threw the oyster shells directly into the boil, instead of waiting until the end of the process to filter the beer through the crushed shells.
It turned out to be a good idea, as oyster shells are mainly calcium carbonate, which provides a mineral-rich water base for the beer. To this day, home brewers and megabrewers will artificially harden their water with calcium carbonate to tweak the flavour profile.
The Dandy In the Underworld Oyster Stout is made in the old style from Victorian England, without any actual oyster shells used in the brewing process.
Surprisingly light-bodied for a stout beer, the colour is a deep brownish-black, with notes of espresso and molasses from all the dark malts, and only a mild hop bitterness in the finish.
While nursing a few pints of stout on a sunny patio, I found it paired well with salty bar nuts, so try it out with nachos or salt & pepper wings.
So, my advice for happy patio drinking this summer is don’t delay, try a Dandy today!
