NEAROF

This is it. My first ever Stampede. While I have it on good authority that it is possible to eat a free dignitary-flipped hotcake breakfast every day for the duration of Stampede, I know there will be days when I want at least one meal other than breakfast. Lunch? Supper? What’s a new Calgarian to [...]

During the winter months, I gravitate toward big, heavy, complicated beers, with lots of roasty, toasty, malty flavour. It’s the liquid equivalent of curling up under a nice, comfortable blanket with a good book while a roaring fire blazes on your TV. But in the summer? Sometimes I just want something simple, delicious and yummy, [...]

When it opened in the mid 1980s, Alberta’s Big Rock Brewery was an upstart little brewery daring to do things differently in an industry dominated by the likes of Molson and Labatt’s. Since then, it’s grown a whole lot, evolving from a feisty microbrewery to a mainstream craft brewery that has found a mass market [...]

Cloudy beer scares most North Americans. Why? Who knows. Maybe folks here are so used to micro-filtered megabrews that they can’t fathom beers you can’t see through. Even wheat beers, a category where all sorts of amazing beers are murky with yeasty goodness, are often pressed through a filter before they’re bottled. Note Big Rock’s [...]

You can take the boy out of Edmonton, but you can’t take the Edmonton beer out of the boy’s beer fridge. Or something like that. I may be leaving Edmonton for a sweet new gig in Calgary, but province-wide distribution means I won’t have to give up this classic E-town beer that’s just about tops [...]

I like hoppy, flavourful beers, so a quality India pale ale is a match made in heaven. I’ve found such a brew in Wild Rose Brewery’s India Pale Ale, a hoppy brewed creation from Calgary. And speaking of Calgary, now is probably as good a time as any to make an announcement of sorts. Here [...]

Given enough time, deadlines and stories churned out, plenty of writers turn cynical about what they do. The repetition of shuffling words from brain to screen by way of fingers, day after day, is a tedious process far less romantic than first-year journalism students believe it to be. For some writers, a byline quickly loses [...]