Victoria Beer Week, take 2

Five years ago I went to Victoria, B.C., the capital of the province and a touristy cruise-ship stop, for their second-ever beer week.  This month I got back to the event and found all breweries I had stopped off at in 2014, all seemingly thriving. I stayed in Swan's Hotel and Brewery for a night; Swan's had a deal on some small second-floor rooms right over the pub, discounted for the noise factor, and I took one.  But the pub was being remodeled, was closed, and I missed the decibel experience.
Canoe Brewing, a block from Swan's, seemed unchanged, still with the great waterfront view and the stylish interior.   But the next stop on my Saturday afternoon stroll was to Phillips Brewing Co., and

In 2014 Phillips was a straight production brewery in the B.C. mode, growler fills just a few hours a week and bottle sales just in bombers. Today, a jazzy new sign heralds a lively brewpub, a dozen house-brewed styles on tap, hockey on the tube, and growlers filling up every day.  My server told me this had happened in 2016 with more changes like a line of soft drinks and canning for the beers and the pop.
Phillips has definitely seen big changes.
Beer week in Victoria is a series of events curated/produced/imagined by festival staff, led by beer writer Joe Wiebe.  The Saturday night program was called All About the Wood, a celebration of barrel aging.  A dozen breweries from across B.C. brought beers they had aged in a variety of barrels--bourbon, wines of all sorts, gin, rum, tequila.  Some poured from kegs, some from bottles.
Brewers or knowledgeable people from the brewery fielded questions about this process.  Bourbon barrels, by law, can only be used for bourbon once so they are available to brewers after that, with plenty of oak still on hand to mingle with the whiskey flavors. Wineries and distillers of other liquors get more use out of a barrel before they sell it.  Dageraad Brewing in Burnaby brought their Cuba Libre, a Belgian dark ale aged in rum barrels.  Well-used rum barrels, the brewer said, some used so many times they were falling apart and leaked too much beer to be usable.
An unusual taste was Quintus, a dark saison brewed with figs and sumac berries and aged in whiskey barrels.  Torchlight Brewing came over the mountains from Nelson, over on the eastern side of B.C/

Sunday morning I walked up Government St. past Phillips and then past Vancouver Island Brewing, founded in 1984 and still going strong.  The city had posted a rezoning notice to the effect that VIB was applying for a pub license for on-premise sales, just as Phillips had done.  A left at the next corner took me past Hoyne and Driftwood, side-by-side production breweries as they had been five years ago.  A couple more blocks and I was at Moon Under Water, another pleasant experience from 2014.  Maybe three dozen people had gathered, all home brewers here to learn from Clay and his brewing staff by following the early steps of making an ale on the small pilot brewing system.  The ticket here included a sandwich and a pint of your choice--I chose Creepy Uncle Dunkel, which was the same beer I had here five years ago.

The picture on the right shows the homebrewers jotting notes on the brew day worksheet the Moon folks provided.  The three tanks over the stored kegs caught my eye.  I wondered if they were horizontal fermenters.  No, Clay said, they were a new Dutch-made system for delivering beer to the taps in the pub out front.  Saves time switching out kegs and delivers more consistent beer to the front of the house. 

So all the breweries I had seen in 2014 were still going strong in Victoria, in several cases growing and adding new features.  A great beer town.
(Visited 03/02-3/19)