Trou du Diable's Quality Control

 Interview with Quality Control manager of Trou du Diable, Marylou Trudel

 Non-Flash podcast

What started out some years back as an informal private gathering of Quebec craft brewers has morphed into a full-fledged day-long beer fest, showcasing and celebrating some of the best small breweries in La Belle Provence -- La Soirée des Brasseurs. The fest takes place in downtown Shawinigan and is hosted by that town's brewpub and separate production brewery, Le Trou du Diable. There will be more info about the festival and the brewers who attended the most recent Soirée in future posts.

While at the Soirée, which took place on Saturday Aug. 8, 2015, we met with Marylou Trudel, a microbiologist and professor of microbiology, who serves as the Quality Control manager for Le Trou du Diable. She also happens to be the sister of André Trudel, the brewer.

B.R., André, and Marylou.

A lot of what Marylou does for the brewery revolves around the mysterious little creatures that turn sugar into alcohol. She's responsible for propagating and maintaining 12 unique yeast strains, and protecting the beer from wild yeast and bacterial infections.

Marylou began working with the brewery in 2012 and is a major force in ensuring consistency and high quality of the suds that flow out of Shawinigan. Her favorite TDD beer currently is Apocalypso - a white IPA with Calypso hops - which is fermented with the San Diego Super Yeast strain, her favorite yeast.

Listen to the podcast for more about Marylou's work, and what she finds to be the most challenging yeast strain to work with!

B.R. visiting Alex of Les Trois Mousquetaires.

Fred, the brewer at the TDD brewpub.

Stephane, the chief at Dieu du Ciel.

Isaac, one of the head honchos, at TDD, at the brewpub.

Cantillon and poutine, almost as good as tater tots and champagne -- no, actually better!

The only non-Canadian brewery at the Soirée.
Well, if you're only going to have one, might as well be this one!

Dieu Du Ciel At Spuyten Duyvil

The Wallonade Belgian blonde and the Symbiose 4 sour.

[link to podcast page]
Dieu Du Ciel At Spuyten Duyvil podcast

For the past few years NYC has been the very lucky, and unique, beneficiary of a tap take-over by Montréal's Dieu Du Ciel brewery. Usually DDC invades the Blind Tiger sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, though it wasn't possible this past fall. So, they made up for it by coming in April, with some 22 different beers! Six of them were exclusively featured at Spuyten Duyvil.

The brewery began in September of 1998 with a modest, but busy, 4-barrel brewpub in the Mile End neighborhood of Montréal (kind of like their Brooklyn?), but the success of and demand for their beers created the need for more capacity. So, in the fall of 2007 a 20-barrel production facility was built in St-Jerôme, about 30 minutes up the highway from the city, in the foothills of the Laurentian Mountains. There, their flagship beers are brewed, bottled and kegged for domestic distribution and export.

We met up with co-founders Stephan Ostiguy and Jean-François Gravel at Spuyten, where they told us that, while it's nearly impossible to find such a wide array of their beers on tap anywhere outside of their brewpub on Laurier and St-Laurent, it's completely commonplace to find 18 different beers pouring at the brewpub on any given day.

While that may be true, we've never seen so many of their rare and special beers up at once at the brewpub. Purgatoire old-style porter aged in red wine barrels, a collaboration with Trou du Diable (10.2%), Péché Mortel Bourbon aged in bourbon barrels (9.5%), Equinoxe du Printemps cask scotch ale with maple syrup (8%), Symbiose 4 sour beer aged in oak barrels (6%) -- ALL at once? You best travel to NYC if you want that experience!

They explained that it's a huge benefit to the microbrewery to have the brewpub to test out new beers or tweak old recipes. Aside from it being easier to experiment on the smaller system, they can immediately gauge public reaction to the beers through the brewpub patrons. The smaller brewpub system also allows them to create very challenging, unique and unusual beers, if they choose, without having to sacrifice resources and tank space.

The Dieu Du Ciel brewpub is a certified beer geek travel destination. And it's great to have some of their beers available in places like New Beer and the Whole Foods Beer Store in New York. But it's also nice to know that once a year, Dieu blesses us by descending from the heavens to baptize us with some of their choicest creations that they save up all year long, with which to sanctify the New York faithful!

Le Trou du Diable

  [link to Le Trou du Diable podcast page]



On June 24 at The Festival in Worchester, Mass., we spoke to Isaac Tremblay of Le Trou du Diable, a Shawinigan, QC based brewpub/brewery.

In the main podcast, we talk about the general details about the brewery, which is located about halfway between Montréal and Quebec City. But in the supplemental podcast, we speak specifically about the "Shawinigan Handshake" story. That short but entertaining podcast is linked directly below.

[link to Shawinigan Handshake podcast page]

Brewer Isaac, second from the left.

The origin of the term comes from an incident in 1996 when Prime Minister Jean Chretien was confronted by a protester. Chretien, who lives in Shawinigan, was likely a bit on edge, his home having been broken into around the same time (his wife chased away the would-be burglar with a piece of Inuit art!), and when the protester got up in Jean's face, Chretrien throttled him and pushed him away. A reporter joked that Chretien simply greeted the protester with a "Shawinigan Handshake", and the legend was born!

Prime Minister Jean Chretien gives Don Cherry a "Shawinigan Handshake"

In 2012 Canada's Junior Hockey championship, the Memorial Cup (the Stanley Cup of for the best 20-and-younger players playing in Canada)m was hosted by the Shawinigan Cataracts , so the brewery did a re-design on the original artwork of the Shawinigan Handshake beer, replacing the devil with Don Cherry. Cherry, an outspoken hockey commentator on the CBC, was the first public figure to support Chretien for standing up for and defending himself when he was confronted. Apparently, Cherry was happy to be depicted in the illustration, which shows, if nothing more, that the guy has a sense of humor. By the way, the hometown Cataracts ended up winning the championship!

Clearly Canadian... ou Canadien!

The Shawinigan Handshake is a 7% top-fermenting wheat beer, inspired by the Brooklyner-Schneider Weisse. They use a German yeast strain and Chinook hops. 

The brewery lists over 60 beers in their repertoire, many with amusing names, such as the La Schieve Tabarnak! Well... amusing if you understand Quebecois!

At The Festival.