With the first sign of a sunny weekend in May, I somehow found myself on one of those pedal pub party machines, where you and a dozen like-minded reprobates pedal your way from one brewery to the next, on a giant 15-seater bike with blaring disco music and its own beer tap.
Should you not be familiar with this infernal machine, it arrived in Calgary back in 2018, and has been a regular feature on the streets of the Inglewood neighbourhood, carrying excited tipplers on tours of the so-called Barley Belt, home to more than a dozen craft brewers, a few distilleries, and even a stealth winery.
Things started to get fuzzy after a few brewery visits, but our last stop was at Cabin Brewing, a long-time favourite of mine. For those not familiar with the name, Cabin Brewing was started in 2018 by three veterans of the Alberta craft beer scene, with the head brewer leaving behind a long and illustrious tenure at Calgary’s Wild Rose Brewing to start up Cabin Brewing. The other two founders share similarly impressive pedigrees, which shone through in the layout and decor of the brewery and attached tasting room.
Their flagship beer is the Super Saturation New England Pale Ale, which I ordered with glee after dismounting the pedal pub, ready to replenish some fluids lost in the aerobic exercise to get there. Pouring an unfiltered and hazy pale orange into my pint glass, the Super Saturation NEPA has a particularly silky mouthfeel, thanks to the addition of locally grown raw wheat and oats to the brewing process, sourced from the fourth-generation family-owned Red Shed Malting in Penhold, just a little south of Red Deer. This is Cabin Brewing’s best-selling flagship brew, and one I have enjoyed many times before. I have always been a fan of hazy beers, believing that the filtration process used to make your beer crystal-clear removes some of the flavour, so this beer checked all my boxes.
For those not familiar with the NEPA style, it was the adventurous brewers of Vermont who came up with the idea of a hazy and cloudy pale ale, with a more tropical bent and easily quaffable beer than the over-bittered IPAs that are so popular with craft brewers.
The New England Pale Ale style languished in obscurity for its first few years in the early 2000s, but took off in popularity in the 2010s, and has been riding high ever since, with more craft brewers jumping on the opportunity to create an alternative to the plethora of near-identical traditional IPA brews on the market.
Flipping from an east coast style to the opposite side of the continent, the Cabin Brewing Sunshine Rain IPA is a shining example of the Pacific Northwest style of IPA that has ruled the craft scene for many years. Bursting with tropical notes from the Oregon hop varietals, with a sharp pine resin bitterness balance by a sturdy malt backbone. Definitely hop-forward, and not for those raised on a steady diet of Coors Lite.
There were even a few one-off seasonal Czech Pilsners in the taproom, which always make me reminisce of a long bygone vacation I spent in Prague, sipping dark lagers from skinny glasses in a 500-year old brewery while munching on pork knuckle in a spicy stew. The other pedal-heads had to pull me away from my dreaming recollections to sate the appetite we worked up, dining on Cabin Brewing’s specialty New Zealand style meat pie, a delicacy in the land down under that they have made locally in Alberta by an expat Kiwi, much to the delight of the hungry pedal pubbers and no doubt the entire ANZA diaspora.
While the Pedal Pub may not be for the faint of heart, get yourself to Cabin Brewing or one of their many neighbours in the Barley Belt on your next visit to Calgary, and enjoy the long-awaited patio beers that signal the beginning of summer!
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