The Anchor Weekly – The Chestermere Lake News

This past weekend featured the eighth annual Calgary BeerFest. Naturally, your intrepid liquor columnist was all over that like a… well… like a liquor columnist on a beer, I guess. Your humble narrator remembers this festival back in its simple and unpretentious beginnings. For the first two years, the festival was held in an aircraft repair hangar on the SAIT campus, then spent a few years in the the dank and windowless basement of the Big 4 building on the Stampede Grounds. When the Stampede Casino moved out of the Big 4 into new digs back in 2008, Beerfest moved [...]

Your intrepid liquor reporter was out on one of those newfangled Internet dates last week, and ended up at the Vin Room in Calgary’s trendy Mission district. The Vin Room is a wine and tapas bar, making it the perfect location to impress a lady on that all-important 3rd date. This locale has been good to me in the past, and I have not yet taken enough of those Internet dates there that the worry of crazy exes showing up and injecting unwanted drama into the proceedings is a risk to be avoided. For those unfamiliar with wine bars, it [...]

May is shaping up to be an exciting month. The snow has all melted, and the lake will soon be seeing recreational boaters and windsurfers galore. While not exactly local news, May 5 will mark the Mexican national holiday Cinco de Mayo to commemorate the Mexican victory over the invading French army. What does this have to do with liquor, you ask? Patience, grasshopper. First the history lesson, then the boozing. Back in 1862, Mexico owed large foreign debts to Britain, Spain, and France. Diplomatic agreements for repayment were made with Britain and Spain, but Emporer Napoleon III of France [...]

Waterloo – promise to love you forever more. Waterloo – couldn’t escape if I wanted to. No, gentle reader, this week’s column will not be about the glorious lyrics of Abba, in all their majestic disco splendor. Instead, let’s talk about the city of Waterloo, Ontario. The fans of German beer in the audience may recognize Waterloo as the location of the world’s 2nd largest Oktoberfest celebration, trailing only the original in Munich for debauchery and sheer gallons of beer consumed while wearing lederhosen. The middle managers in the audience may recognize Waterloo as the birthplace of the Blackberry, a [...]

Your globetrotting liquor reporter has just returned from a junket along the Pacific Northwest and what a time he had! It all started with a business trip to Vancouver that I decided to tack a week of vacation time onto, beginning with a scenic 4-hour AmTrak ride along the coast from Vancouver to Seattle. The beer fans in the audience may be thinking to themselves that Washington state is the heartland of the American hop industry, with over 75% of total domestic production. Yes, gentle reader, along with water, malted barley, and yeast, hops are the final ingredient in beer [...]

Our Yankee cousins south of the 49th parallel have reason to celebrate this month. Yes, gentle reader, April 7 marked the festival of New Beer’s Eve, so named for being that glorious day way back in 1933 that was the end of Prohibition in the USA. Much like the lineups of today for a new iPad or Star Trek movie, the thirsty folk of the American public lined up for hours, waiting for the saloons and public houses to throw open their doors at exactly midnight on April 7. As you might imagine, there was much rejoicing on the streets [...]

Your intrepid liquor reporter is writing this column on the first day of spring. The sun is shining, and I might even pop down to the local pub to see if they were adventurous enough to open up the patio. Springtime is a special time of year. A young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of amoré, in no small part because the bulky winter coats start to disappear from the lassies in favour of a more revealing wardrobe. In addition to the baring of pasty sun-deprived flesh, spring is our first opportunity to drink outside in the sunshine after being [...]

Your intrepid liquor reporter will need a full year to recover from the gallons of green beer that were consumed during a 3-day pub crawl over the St. Patrick’s Day weekend. Yes, gentle reader, there were plenty of Kiss Me I’m Irish t-shirts to be found, as well as plastic leprechaun hats and giant 4-leaf clovers stuck to the walls of nearly every drinking establishment in the land. Most of us know Saint Patrick’s Day as that one day of the year we wear green and drink to excess. Those are certainly worthwhile activities that your humble narrator wholeheartedly supports, [...]

With spring nearly here, your intrepid liquor reporter has been waiting with bated breath for the sampling and tasting season to get underway. The winter months tend to be bereft of booze festivals, but that all changes when the snow melts. The first wine festival of the year runs near Valentine’s Day, quickly followed by Calgary’s oldest Beerfest a few weeks later. Held the first weekend in March at Bottlescrew Bill’s Olde English Pub, it is an opportunity to sample different beers from Canada and around the world. As if that wasn’t reason enough, all proceeds go the Mustard Seed [...]

If there’s one thing your intrepid liquor reporter can be called in February, it would be predictable. That’s right gentle reader, February marks the first wine festival of the year, and your humble narrator was there sampling the wares until closing time. It was like Xmas for tipplers! The month of January is like a bleak and alcohol-free desert as the liquor industry recovers from a month-long hangover after New Year’s Eve, so I’m always ready and raring to go when the first wine festival of the year rolls around. This year’s event was a particularly momentous occasion, as 2012 [...]