I was visiting friends in Calgary over the August long weekend, who took me to their neighbourhood craft brewery, namely 33 Acres Brewing, who expanded from their Vancouver to home base to a new Calgary brewery and tap room back in 2022.
Regular readers may recall my ongoing love affair with the Schwarzbier style, with my favourite being the Meridian Black Lager from our local pride and joy of Township 24 Brewing right here in Chestermere.
There is a new contender in town, in the form of the 33 Acres of Darkness, another dark lager in the German Schwarzbier style, which is an easy drinking lager despite its inky black appearance. True to style, the 33 Acres of Darkness has a light body, with notes of coffee and burnt chocolate, with a mild hop bitterness and just a hint of smoke on the finish. While I normally save my dark beers for the winter months, its light body makes the Schwarzbier style perfect as a summer slammer, weighing in at only 5% ABV.
My drinking companions could not get enough of the 33 Acres of Life, made in the style of a California Common, which regular readers may recognize as the style made famous by Anchor Steam Beer out of San Francisco, who kept this old-timey beer style alive for decades while the rest of the world had forgotten about it.
The California Common beer style is a relic of the California gold rush in the 1850s, when the prospectors were demanding beer to slake their thirst, but refrigeration was difficult to come by in those days. Fortunately, an ingenious brewer discovered a lager yeast that would ferment at temperatures of up to 24°C, while most other lager yeasts only work in the narrow range of 9-14°C. The result was an inexpensive brew for the working class, with the light body of a lager, and the full flavour profile of an ale.
The modern interpretations of the California Common beer style still use the same unique yeast strains, but are much more reliable due to use of modern brewing techniques with precise temperature control. From its humble origins as the drink of choice for grizzled old prospectors, California Common is now a beer style found only at a handful of craft brewers, and we are now lucky enough to have a local example right here in Alberta!
My favourite of the day was a one-off seasonal called the Schweinbräu Märzen, a centuries-old beer style from the Austrian city of Salzburg, which 33 Acres took great care to ferment in an oak barrel instead of the more modern stainless steel vat, staying true to the historical style.
The oak is more porous than the stainless steel vats typically used in modern brewing, so small amounts of air exchange and extraction of tannins and lignins from the oak allow the beer to age and develop over time. This brew is available only for a limited time in the Vancouver and Calgary taprooms, and poured a light amber into my glass, with a toasty malt on the palate followed by hints of honey and lemon hop finish.
As those readers with a basic understanding of the German language may have already deduced, Schweinbräu is a beer style best paired with pork, and the kitchen was serving up plenty of bratwurst while this one-off brew was on tap, which we dug into with gusto.
Fortunately, all the different styles from 33 Acres Brewing are widely available in cans at liquor stores throughout Alberta, so you can enjoy them from the comfort of your own home, or visit the Vancouver or Calgary brewery taprooms to sample directly from the source!
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