Early this spring we noticed that shoots were sprouting up in the area of our garden where we grew hops last year. The neat thing is that this growth started without any effort on our part. They shot up pretty quickly and within a few short weeks we were training them up a makeshift trellis, same as we did last year.

However, this crop (which is cascade and Mt. Hood)  has been much more aggressive than last year’s, which meant that we had to run twine from above our deck to our garage:

Burrs that will mature into hop cones (there are already dozens!):

So while I wait for the hops to mature I am passing the time by working my way through a recent USA beer haul:

The picture above is about a quarter of what was brought back from a recent Michigan visit. We grabbed plenty of Rogue, Dogfish Head, Avery, Bells and Great Lakes. So far highlights from this batch have been the Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter (maybe the best porter I’ve had), Bells Hopslam (a mighty, imperial hop monster) and Stone Double Bastard (really surprised by this one, almost a Belgian character to it that I was not expecting). It may be hot outside, but there’s no need to be thirsty!

Is Mondiale de la bière the best beer festival in Canada? It certainly trumps the baseball cap and macro-suds fest that we have here in Toronto each year. Unlike the Toronto fest, there are literally hundreds of beers from around the world, with microbrewed beers getting as much profile as any of the mass-produced stuff. It is also mentioned (favourably) in Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing, so they must be doing something right.

This past week was my second visit to Mondiale in three years. I have to say that I was deeply impressed by the lineup of beers available at this, the 17th edition of the festival. There is just no way that you could possibly get through all of the beers on offer inside of the five days the festival runs (your wallet and your liver would give out). This is not an elitist beer snob festival by any means (though they definitely seem to be welcome). There is no admission charge and no minimum spend on the coupons you exchange for beer samples, so if you want to blow seven coupons (coupons are $1 each) on 1 oz. of Sam Adams Utopia or stick with the 1 and 2 coupon samples, the choice is yours. You can even bring your own sampling glass in lieu of the official degustation glass (priced at $8).

Some quick highlights: Kuhnhenn Solar Eclipse (a 17% ABV stout), Birificio de Baladin’s Noel (a nice Italian-made spiced beer), a number of strong offerings from Le Trou de Diable (I’m always envious of the extent of the microbrewery/brewpub scene in Quebec – there are two brewpubs in Shawinigan!) as well as new (to me) brews from US heavy hitters like Dogfish Head, Rogue, Great Divide and so on. The only letdown was the new Unibroue offering – Blonde de Chambly – which, if you ask me, tastes pretty much the same as Blanche de Chambly.

I’ll be posting more about Montreal shortly. I made my first visit to Depanneur Peluso and picked up a few really solid Quebec microbrews that deserve their own postings. In the meantime, ponder the greatness of a city that offers this kind of cusine (yes, it looks like a glutinous mass of gravy and fries, but it’s turkey and peas poutine):