NEAROF

Is there anything they won’t milk? In the past couple years, I’ve sipped cow milk, almond milk, rice milk, soy milk … and those are just the milks I remember. But quinoa milk? This was new to me. If you read much about food, you’ll know there’s currently a love-in surrounding quinoa – the latest [...]

Unless you have a reasonably tuned palate, a very large number of Starbucks coffees taste pretty much the same. It’s not the fault of the beans, no sir. It’s all about the Starbucks roasting process, which, in the traditional Starbucks method, required every bean to be roasted to a dark, oily char – hence the [...]

I’m not sure how common these are outside of Alberta, but in the past few months, I’ve seen a couple new growler bars freshly installed at liquor stores in this province. I found one at the massive new Wine and Beyond liquor store in south Edmonton last fall, and the newly renovated Liquor Depot in [...]

“Waaaaarm up with an ice-cold beeeer!” hollered a tray-carrying vendor at a particularly chilly autumn CFL football game I attended last year, if memory serves. I loved his pitch, mostly because it’s so perfectly outlandish you can’t help but laugh, but also because some beers are designed as winter warmers, even if not in the [...]

When I reach for a low-cal beverage (other than water, naturally), I typically grab a bottle of Coke Zero. I prefer Coca-Cola to Pepsi, so translating that preference to the low-calorie cola world is logical enough. But I’m also one of those long-suffering Canadians who has a fondness for cherry colas, a terrible affliction given [...]

If you’ve travelled the roads of West Africa, you’ve no doubt seen the vendors streetside, at bus stations and at the markets, all selling little tied-shut plastic baggies full of deep-red-purple juice. In Burkina Faso, it’s called bissap, and it’s delicious. If you bought a baggie of cool, refreshing bissap from a vendor, you know [...]

While I don’t mind a glass of sweet iced tea from time to time, occasionally spiked with a wee bit of vodka for weekend sipping, it’s not typically a drink I reach for on a regular basis. But an intriguing offer is hard to resist. When American Vintage Hard Iced Tea offered NEAROF! a three-can [...]

I’d heard great things about Red Racer India Pale Ale from beer-loving friends, but my first sip of the stuff was at Bottlescrew Bill’s, a great Calgary watering hole that caters to the seriously beer-obsessed. How good was it? Here’s a tweet from my experience at the time: “Finally got around to trying Red Racer [...]