Amsterdam Blonde Lager

Matt's weekly choice : Amsterdam Blonde Lager

For each of the beers we sample we will be rating them on five different classic categories. Look, taste, smell, feel and overall rating. This Amsterdam Blonde Lager was poured from a 473 ml can.

 Look - 3     Smell - 3    Taste - 4    Feel - 4   Overall - 3.5

Look - Very clear with a yellow-golden tinge to it. Minimal head when poured from a tall can into a pint glass. Lots of visible carbonation in the beer. Looks like an average blonde lager.

Smell - Not very much smell to this beer, a slight tinge of hops and a bit of a floral scent to it.

Taste - For a light blonde beer I thought the flavour was great. It was a very clean, refreshing taste which goes down really easy. Slight tinge of caramel, malt and sweetness. Nice, almost bitter after taste which arises from the floral hops.

Feel - It has a smooth, carbonated feel on your palate. Crisp and easy to drink.

Overall - In my opinion this is a great beer for a sunny summer afternoon. Nothing too memorable about the taste but it is produced from all natural ingredients and not pasteurized. Nice to drink very cold and slowly warming where you can get more of the essence of the beer. For the price it's a great choice for Toronto locals.

- Matt

Toronto Breweries

 We will be discussing three of the largest microbreweries in Toronto. Steamwhistle, Mill Street and Amsterdam breweries have grown in popularity and size over the last few years. These breweries produce a variety of different beers and two of them have large restaurants where you can enjoy them with a nice meal.

Steamwhistle Brewery

Steamwhistle is located in the heart of Toronto at The Roundhouse at 255 Bremner Blvd. It has been a brewery enjoyed by Blue Jay's fans for countless years and known to produce a single pilsner beer in a green glass bottle. They have a very informative tour which explains how they grew as an iconic Toronto based beer company. Their slogan is "Do one thing really, really well" and they believe in perfecting their one pilsner to excellence.

Mill Street Brewery

Mill Street is in the Distillery District at 21 Tankhouse Ln. They have a large brew pub where they serve fantastic food and draught beer. You can get a sampler to try an assortment of their many handcrafted beers. They have over 12 beers to choose from with many new and seasonal varieties coming out every year. They recently expanded into Ottawa and Pearson airport and continue to produce excellent innovative beers.

Amsterdam Brewery

Amsterdam brewery recently relocated their brewery to Leaside Village at 45 Esandar Drive. At this location you can take informative free brewery tours where you can sample their beers.They also have established Brewhouse which is located right on the lake downtown at 245 Queens Quay W. In the Brewhouse they serve all of their beer types while selling gourmet quality food. They have beer samplers where you can try four of their beers including a different seasonal beer for each time of year.





Keep calm and drink on!
E & M

Types of Beer

For our first post we wanted to help our followers understand the various types of beer. Here are the names and definitions of all the delicious varieties of beer.

Lager

A lager is typically pale, crisp, dry and refreshing. It is fermented for a much longer period and at a lower temperature than ales.

Pilsner

In 1842, Czechoslovakian brewers created a new type of lager, the pilsner. Pilsners have a familiar golden colour and a notable hop accent. Even though pilsners and lagers are both bottom-fermented, you can rely on a difference in tastes to help distinguish between the two.

Ale

In ales, you will find much more flavourful beers that can have strong individual personalities. Many of them will have fruity, herbal or spicy characteristics. Ales use top fermenting yeasts that do not require the refrigeration that other yeasts do.

Pale Ale

Surprisingly, pale ales may range in colour from golden to deep amber. They were named pale ales because they were much lighter in colour than the dark porters and stouts that preceded them. Pale ales are generally more highly hopped and lightly carbonated. Pale ales are robust beers that can be enjoyed with strongly spiced foods.

Porters and Stouts

Dry or sweet, flavoured with roasted malt barley, oats or certain sugars, stouts and porters are characterized by darkness in colour and rich roasted malt flavour. Porter is an ale brewed with a special combination of malts to create a heavier flavour, aroma and colour. To complement this heavier flavour, Porters generally have a fuller body and a slightly sweeter taste.
Stouts often use a portion of unmalted roasted barley to develop a dark, slightly astringent, coffee-like character. Stout features a rich, creamy head and is similar to a dark Porter, but is usually less sweet-tasting and more heavily hopped.

Wheat Beer

Wheat beers often have an unfiltered pale and hazy appearance because of the type of yeasts used. Wheat beers have a wide range of flavours as a number of spices are used in the brewing process. As the name indicates, a white beer is brewed with a large proportion of wheat and malted barley. White beer and weissbier are the most common types of white beers.

Light and Extra-Light Beer

Light and extra-light beers are brewed in a similar fashion to ale and lager, but are lower in alcohol and generally contain fewer calories. A light beer in Canada contains 2.6 to 4% alcohol by volume and an extra-light beer contains less than 2.5% alcohol by volume.

Fruit/Vegetable/Spice Beer

In recent years, brewers have revisited a past tradition of adding flavour and in many cases real fruit or vegetables to the brewing process in order to create a wide variety of new beers. While most fruit beers are ales, they typically do not carry much of the ale character. In order to allow for the fruit flavor to come through nicely, the malt’s flavor is not dominant and there is a low bitterness level to the beer.

Keep calm and drink on!
E & M


This was sourced from http://www.brewers.ca/en/types-of-beer

Welcome!

Hey everyone and welcome to Evan and Matt's Let's Talk Beer blog! Over the next few months we will be discussing anything and everything about Canadian beer. Each week we will be sampling beers of a certain type. From a lager to a nice indian pale ale, we will be expressing our opinions of the beers and making suggestions to our fellow beer drinkers. We will give details into how beers are made, local Canadian breweries and the differences in each type of beer. We look forward to a fun and informative experience helping our followers choose the most delicious beers!

Keep calm and drink on!
E & M