Mondial De La Bière

The trip to the 2011 Mondial De La Biére in Montreal started with a 12 hour train ride -- from NYC? Hey, that's only twice as long as it takes to drive, and not much longer than it took Henry Hudson. But you can't drink SIXPOINT in a can and read about beer while driving, so that's alright!

First stop in Montreal -- DIEU DU CIEL!

It was Mercredi Noir (Black Wednesday), a dark beer special that evening. But the dark stuff was being held back until 10pm, when the Mondial folks would arrive. So, until then we enjoyed the well executed BASSE MESSE, a nice light Kölsch -- a style rarely even attempted outside of its place of origin. Also, a crazy, sour, wild mango beer called SOLSTICE D'ETE AUX MANGUES (Mango summer solstice) -- leave it to DDC to make something wildly unique and interesting. Also, a tasty Helles called HELIUM (an important note on this one in a later blog entry) and another interesting one -- a spruce beer (ANNEDD'ALE) which was about as close as you could ever come to drinking a pine tree... but a nice pinetree! Seriously, I made some album/book shelves last week, cutting some pine wood, and it was much like that very pleasant pine experience. [A much more contemplative and careful analysis of this very special beer is made in a later post. The prior description is that of an over-tired, under-beered traveler.]

Once the dark stuff began to flow, we were treated to... well, EVERYTHING! Look at the picture above -- that's what we drank! At least between the both of us. If you note the ABV of those beers and the lateness of the day, then you can understand the brevity of the post. More on the actual Fest in subsequent posts! [I know that may seem lazy, but bear in mind... we were up at 7am, rode a train for 12 hours, endured TWO customs checks -- the US wanting to look at us LEAVING our country and the Canadians wanting to look at us ENTERING their country.]