It’s that time of the year again. The sun is out and we are all inside drinking beer and watching hockey. This playoff run the Canucks have a similar looking team but slightly updated, so I thought I should do the same for the Canucks Drinking Game. Hope you enjoy and of course if you have any suggestions please post them in the comments:
The rules are as follows:
One drink every time they say:
- “Slap-pass”
- “Cycle”
- “Fearlessly Blocked”
- They refer to the Sedins as one entity. This includes “the Twins”, “Sedins”, “Brothers” or any other time they don’t respect them as individuals (Hopefully Daniel comes back soon!!!)
- Any comment of Kelser chirping or not chirping
One drink every time :
- Edler’s stick breaks
- The Green Men evoke any emotion from you (laughter/anger/embarrassment all count)
- Mason Raymond (Macy Ray) falls over
Two drinks any time you hear:
- “Great save Luongo!”
- “The fans call a penalty but the ref doesn’t”
- the defense “walks the line” on a PP
Finish your drink if Jim Hughson says “Brew-ha-ha” or “Howitzer” or a pane of glass falls on any player.
If you really want to kick it up a notch take a shot every time they say “fakes a shot, takes a shot”
And if you aren’t satisfied by the end of the game, take a shot of Crown for every star Crown Royal gives out.
Drinking games only get better when more rules are added, so please post more below.
Unlike a lot of my posts this will have a clear beginning, middle and end. Spoiler alert! It began last sentence, it will reach its midpoint about half way through this post and will end just before the “post comments” button. I don’t want to keep you on the edge of your seats for too much longer, so here is my complete, abridged story of being the Vancouver Craft Beer Week intern.
Your protagonist was sitting at his computer a few months ago at a turning point in his life. He was wading around the internet, hoping some sort of opportunity to float by his way offering employment, but he was finding nothing. Instead of waiting for something to drift by him, he envisioned a job he wanted and created it for himself.
That job was the Vancouver Craft Beer Week intern. Even though it did not exist, he knew he wanted it. So to get such a job he would need some sort of bait. His tackle box (resume) had nothing directly applicable to the job he wanted that didn’t exist. So he made it up. Literally, not figuratively. He started a blog about his beer knowledge, and committed to this blog as a way of continually documenting his interest in the craft beer community.
Irrelevant, just too funny to not post
The bait was explosive. Not only did it get him his made up position and had him doing the type of work he went to school for in an industry he loved, he was knee deep in it. No longer was he home brewing on the whims of what he read on the internet. He was attending monthly meetings with like minded experts on making great beer in the comfort of his own home. No longer was he staring at a wall of craft beer wondering where and what the different companies were like. He was remembering meeting the brew masters and where he met them.
Last by not least, no longer was he looking for work, but he had found a job doing what he wanted to be doing thanks to interning and volunteering for VCBW. It was his internet research, data basing and marketing, which really helped him lock down his new job.
Yet if he didn’t find this job I am sure something else would have popped up sooner or later because through his experience he met an entire new network of people who knew he was hungry, somewhat talented, and shared an interest with them. So for all of you unemployed somewhat talented people, find something you really enjoy and get involved with it. People will eventually either pay you for what you like doing or what you are able to do eventually.
Working for Newad Media for a few years, and as a bathroom attendant for even longer, I thought I had seen everything thing everything there was to see in a men’s bathroom. Then I went to my favourite local craft brew establishment, St Augustine’s and had my mind blown. Above the urinals, where I was used to seeing boring ads that I found myself reading just because something was there, was a menu of all of the beer on tap that night, and how much was left in each keg!
When there, I spend most of my time there browsing their impressive tap list anyways. So having it right in front of me in the bathroom allows me to spend more time conversing at my table. The only drawback was that it did not match up perfectly with the printed menu, confusing both the patrons and the servers. The numbers also didn’t seem to change throughout the night. In time I am sure St Augustine’s will be able to have a live feed of the % of keg beer left fed directly to the tables, bars and urinals. Keep pushing the technological limits of my drinking experience St Augustine’s!
Or as I like to call it, the Graham With Appreciation Night. Out of the 23 categories, Graham notched six awards, including a second place in the best in show. An impressive showing without a doubt, but this may be more calculated move than most think. From the outside in, it appears Graham is just a talented brewer who happened to pick up a remarkable amount of awards at a homebrew competition. On closer inspection, however, this may have just been a narcissistic ploy of an event to feed the megalomaniac ego of Graham.
A number of years ago Graham began homebrewing as a convenient way to save money, as this West Ender article claims. It then goes on to say that he created VanBrewers as a way to share his love for homebrewing with like minded people. A year and a half later VanBrewers hosts the Russell’s Golden Stag Awards and Graham goes home with a lot of hardware. Success story or greedy mass egotistic desire for supremacy?
Investigative journalism aside, the night was a big success. 12 casks from homebrewers were on hand. My favourite was the Russell Wheat Wine, a 10% barley wine caliber brew that went down all too easy. Out of the best in show homebrews I tried, Darren Hollett’s Jumpin Jackalope Jalopeno Cream Ale stood out. It was like drinking a Jalepeno popper.
I didn’t win any awards for my Ginger – Oh Snap beer, not that I was expecting to, but I am still glad that I entered it. I was given my score card back with a lot of detailed feedback from credited brewers and judges. I will definitely be saving the brews that work out this year to enter in future competitions in hope to compete with the juggernauts of the homebrewing scene.
Or Hoppy Seconds as the sign outside the Alibi room said. As if “Sloppy Seconds” could be confused with another meaning than CAMRA’s event featuring all of the leftover beer from Hoppapalooza II.
The event was great. Lots of people, despite the Canucks game being on and no TVs, and a ton of unique craft beer. On cask they had Swan’s Scotch Ale, which I am glad I drank after my burger due to its over powering taste. It was delicious, but you the scotch flavour was definitely present.
My favourite of the night had to be Gary from Red Racer’s Imperial Roach-a-palooza. To my understanding it was made by ringing out the hop bags of other IPAs and ESBs. A process similar to making a roach joint. Or so I have read about. The result was an amazing bitter taste.
Time and tolerance didn’t allow me to try them all last night, but I look forward to drink the rest of them next year. If you aren’t a CAMRA member already, I highly suggest you to sign up. They host many parties throughout the year featuring craft beer. A club well worth joining.
Last week I had my first inside look at Vanbrewers, a group of homebrewing enthusiasts who promote the craft in Vancouver. They are a non-profit organization dedicated to the education and advancement of homebrewing and overall beer appreciation.
April’s VanBrewers’ meeting had a turn out of about 40 people, which seemed like a lot to me considering there was a Canucks playoff game on. They did, however, have the game showing on two TVs. President Graham With said he would likely be voted out if he didn’t. The members were generally male with varying sized beer bellies, all age ranges and think I only counted one moustache. All with a vast amount of beer knowledge.
I learned more about homebrewing tips in the hour and a half that I was at the meeting than a week of internet research and trial and erring. If it wasn’t for the hockey game being on, there would have been demonstrations on different brewing techniques. Most of the brewers who came brought a sample of their hard work and shared with everybody else. The beers were divided up in to the four traditional classes, light, medium, dark, and other.
One of the reasons for the large turnout was many brewers were turning their entries to the VCBW homebrewers competition. After helping out for the VCBW BC beer judging, I thought why not help out on the homebrewing side?
For those who are turned off by tedious amount of cleaning in homebrewing, you should stay away from preparing for homebrewing competitions. There were over 300 entries in the homebrewing competition, which meant over 600 bottles needed to be labelled with their corresponding, non descript code. Brewer’s creative name for their beer such as “Un-American PALE-estine Ale” becomes something like “065-C12”. This is to ensure the judges are unbiased when sizing up the beers.
That was the only day I was able to help out with the judging, so that story ends here. The winners will be announced on Wednesday May 11 at the Russel Golden Stag event at the London Pub Wednesday. Tickets are still available.
One of the great things about Vancouver Craft Beer Week this year is the first annual Collaboration Brew. 28 BC Breweries worked together to produce a Cascadian Dark Ale, a style originated in the Pacific Northwest. Not only is this a great showing of how the BC craft beer community is united and can work together, but they are working together for a good cause.
The proceeds of this beer will be donated to the Japanese Red Cross Tsunami Relief Fund.
The beer will be sold on tap, cask and in bottles at participating venues and retail outlets during VCBW. Do your part to help Japan fight back at Mother Nature by buying a pint.
So it’s kind of silly I didn’t post something like this long ago. Even so, without further delay, here is my Vancouver Craft Beer Week post.
A few months ago I was hanging around on the internet looking for exciting jobs or internships and wasn’t finding anything. So I decided to go on Facebook and see what was happening. As usual nothing too exciting was going on there either, but I noticed that Vancouver Craft Beer Week posted something regarding this year’s upcoming event. I decided to mix my job searching with my procrastination and sent them my resume. Later that week I was their marketing intern.
Being an intern wasn’t really anything I was looking for ideally, but this gave me a position in an industry I would love to work in, and doing the sorts of things I went to school for. Things marketing directors and presidents don’t want to do, like internet research, database management, and writing press releases are things I would be happy to do, and happy to get on my resume.
But not all that glitters is gold. It is not all glory being the VCBW intern. Although the work they feed me on paper appears manageable, when you are working under Beer Week conditions, you need to have an editor or at least a designated driver. All jokes aside, there is a lot of work involved to put on such an event. There are over 55 breweries at over 70 venues partnered with VCBW during the 9 days in May celebrating craft beer in Vancouver; 28 breweries collaborated to produce a Cascadian Dark Ale that will be featured at many of the events; and over 150 beers were entered in the Brewery Creek BC Beer awards. It doesn’t organize itself. A lot of work is put into this celebration of craft beer and I am happy to do my part.
Now I can finally defer all of the reoccurring questions to my own blog, which will pretty much redirect everybody to the official site. It has an extensive list of all the events and I will be sure to post anything I know of that isn’t posted on there.
Volunteering feels good.
I have volunteered for many things in my life. In high school I did some volunteer work for the Cancer Society around Christmas time, I volunteered my organs to those who need some after I die, and I even altruistically volunteered my labour for Vancouver Craft Beer Week as their marketing intern. Most recently, I have donated my time to help with the VCBW BC Beer Awards.
It was my first time at a beer judging event so I didn’t really know what to expect. There were about 15 volunteers helping to label, pour and bus the beer up to the four tables of judges. There were over 150 beers that were dived into seven categories. Breweries involved include interior favorites such as Tree, Okanagan Spring, Tin Whistle, Cannery, and Mt. Begbie, Island staples like Driftwood, and Phillips, as well as Vancouver heavyweights Red Racer, Storm, and Deadfrog and GIB. Lots of the beer I have seen before, but definitely a lot I haven’t.
As a rookie beer nerd, looking into the elite judging the beers was an experience. I don’t know how I envisioned it, but it wasn’t like this. I guess when I think of beer drinking I didn’t really picture taking 150 critical sips of beer, but this was extremely official, check out the BJCP and you will get an idea of what I’m talking about. Upstairs where the judging was happening was very professionally done.
Downstairs with the volunteers, not so much. We were granted the privilege to sample the remaining beer that wasn’t being judged. So for a 650ml big bottle of beer, the remaining ½ litre that isn’t sampled goes to the volunteers to test. The beer, or as I call it “volunteer fuel”, kept everybody happy and working hard all day. The other volunteers were all over the map, the range included computer programmers, home brewers, students, journalists and unemployed beer fanatics. All great people.
To the volunteer goes the spoils
Watching the judges was one of my favourite parts. Of the celebrity judges on hand I recognized VCBW president and Urban Diner creator Paul Kamon, Matt executive from CAMRA Vancouver, Graham from VanBrewers, and Nigel from the Alibi Room. There were others I probably should have recognized, but I’m still a rookie in the beer scene. What I found funny about the whole situation was the ritual that the judges took when sampling the beer. It was a lot like a basketball player taking a free throw or a pitcher about to take a pitch, the process had to be the same in order for the beer to be judged the fairly. Like any ritual or routine, it can look funny to those who haven’t seen it before. Some would exhale fully and then dive in nose first into the beer in an attempt to inhale the beer before sipping it. Others would close their eyes and tilt their head back as if they just escaped the desert having their first sip of water in weeks.
Nonetheless it was a great experience to volunteer for the VCBW Brewery Creek BC Beer Awards, one of the many signature events happening during Vancouver Craft Beer Week. The winners will be awarded on Saturday May 14 at the Beatty Street Drill Hall. Click the link for tickets.
After signing up for my CAMRA membership, I was pretty excited to attend my first CAMRA event. 17 brewers produced “Sessional Beer” casks, which means the beer will have a low percentage of alcohol. Session is a British term that means you can drink a large volume of beer during an amount of time (“session”) without getting too wasted.
I was pretty suspect of the low % constraints, but with low alcohol came big flavours. Traditionally the British Session beers are English bitters. At the Spring Sessional, however, there were no style limitations only and ABV of 3.5%. So the variety of beer covered pretty much everything. There were bitters, brown ales, berliners, ales and saisons.
I would have loved to share my amateur opinions on the beers, but unfortunately I didn’t realise there was a handout listing all the beers with room to write taste comments. Fortunately, I did steal somebody else’s as I left. I don’t know who I took it from, what their background is, or what they planned on doing with these notes, but I can’t imagine it was much. I think they were just making notes because they thought that’s what you were supposed to do. Maybe they thought that they might run across one of these rare beers in the liquor store next week. Any way, their comments were entertaining, “too hoppy”, “mouth full of tots going on”, “unique”, and “easy drinking” were the most insightful. One of the beers that did stand out for me was the Noble Pig “Honey Badger Pale Ale”, but that was mostly due to its clever naming. Click the link if you don’t know what I mean.
All in all it was a great event. Got to experience a number of amazing beers, hang out with a number of interesting beer nerds, and was excused for being excited to drink beer at 11am. Thanks a lot CAMRA and I cannot wait for your next event.
Cheers.
