Craft breweries along the BC Ale Trail launch dozens of new summer beers
Among the limited edition releases are beer-wine hybrids, sours, hazy IPAs, and a Beermosa
IF CRAFT BEER is your preferred hot-weather thirst-quencher, you’ll welcome the news that craft breweries province-wide are getting into the summer spirit.
BC Ale Trail has announced the release of more than 50 new summer-inspired beers.
Take Westham Island Strawberry Sour from Barnside Brewing (which is on the New West, Delta, Surrey & Richmond Ale Trail). At 4.4 percent ABV, it was brewed with more than 500 kilograms of strawberries freshly harvested from Emma Lea Farms on Westham Island. Beermosa is another Barnside offering. The sour-based, mimosa-style beer has an effervescent, Champagne-like character with a blast of citrus, clocking in at 4 percent ABV.
Five Roads Brewing’s Double Whammy Passionfruit Mango Sour is tropical and tart (5 percent ABV), while the latter taste goes up a notch in Tin Whistler Brewing’s Tart Prickly Pear Sour (5.3 percent ABV): made with more than 250 pounds of prickly pear cactus fruit, it’s fruity and rosy red, with a nickel from every can sold being donated to the Osoyoos Desert Centre.
According to the BC Craft Brewers Guild, sales of craft beer have doubled in the last four years and continue to grow. B.C. is the birthplace of craft beer in Canada, having been started by Horseshoe Bay Brewing’s John Mitchell in 1982. There are now more than 200 breweries throughout the province. To be considered a “craft” brewery, businesses must produce less than 200,000 HL annually, worldwide and be at least 51 percent BC owned, among other criteria.
An initiative of the BC Craft Brewers Guild and Destination BC, BC Ale Trail is a series of self-guided itineraries with more than 170 breweries across five regions of BC.
For more information, go to BC Ae Trail.
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