Podcast Companion: The Craft Brand Company

In this instalment of the BAOS Podcast Companion, I’m digging into a few of the beers from Season 9, Episode 53: Back to the 90s with Toronto’s Craft Brand Company. Craft Brand Co. have been partnering with world-renowned breweries since 2013 to bring exceptional beers with unique branding to the Ontario market, and for the past five years have even been getting them brewed fresh and local through their partnership with Brunswick Bierworks.

Craft Brand Co. even put together a pack of beers in advance of the pod so that anyone watching or listening could drink along! We’ll take a close look at three of the beers they had in the episode from Stockholm, Sweden’s Omnipollo, and Stavanger, Norway’s Lervig.

Omnipollo Maz

Oat Pale Ale - 5.6%

Maz (formerly “Mazarin”) is the second beer that Omnipollo ever brewed. They describe it as founder Henok Fentie’s take on a “thinker’s beer”. “Rather than being big and undecipherably complex he wanted to create something that would calm a hop yearning nerve without fuddling the brain too much.”

It pours with thick haze and a fairly muted nose with mild notes of stone fruit. It has a light to medium body as you’d expect for under 6% but the oats give it a nice smooth creamy feel that really elevates the overall texture. It’s rocking a palate of peaches and cream oatmeal with soft stone fruit coming through, next to no bitterness, and a malt bill that just gives it a super soft, mellow feel all the way through. It really delivers what they were aiming for, a nice smooth treat. It’s simple and uncomplicated.

Omnipollo Zodiak

IPA - 6.2%

Zodiak is Omnipollo’s house IPA, and if you had to pick a beer from Craft Brand’s lineup to call it’s flagship, I’d say this probably fits the bill best. It’s been available to the Ontario market for several years now, achieving LCBO Top Ten Bestseller status. It’s probably the most widely recognized beer that Craft Brand has brought to the Ontario market.

It’s brewed with a classic trio of C-hops, Citra, Columbus, and Centennial. The nose is all citrus and pine. Lemon and orange zest give it a nice zippy aroma and the pine is a nice contrast. It’s got a peppy carbonation with a lot of citrus hop flavours, which could come off sharp in a lower ABV IPA, but the fuller body balances it out just right. The pine and slightly dank element give good contrast to the ample citrus. It gives way to softer stone fruit flavours further into the mid-palate. The bitterness is fairly low, but well placed, and it drinks nice and dry throughout. It’s an easy one to keep drinking.

Lervig Back to the 90s

India Red Ale - 6.5%

Back to the 90s is an India Red Ale that boasts a full hop bill including Cascade, Chinook, Simcoe, Mosaic, Citra and Enigma. The aroma is boasting resinous malty sweetness as well as grassy and tropical hop aromatics of mango and grapefruit zest. On the palate, the malt bill is surprisingly roasty, almost like that of a stout in that it starts out bitter with a toasted biscuity profile. The hop character then steps up bringing caramelized grapefruit, combining burnt sugar sweetness, pithy bitterness, a tropical touch of mango, and a touch of grassiness on the finish. As it warms, some more subtle spicy characteristics of rooibos tea start to come out. Even though the style is not really for me, I like the depth of flavour and the tropical hop characteristics this adds to the profile of a typical red ale.

The Craft Brand Co. provides a truly unique service to the Ontario beer scene by bringing beers from globally renowned breweries to be brewed fresh for us that we might never have the chance to enjoy otherwise. Look for their beers in the LCBO, the Brunswick Bierworks retail store, or straight from their online store, The Bodega, for shipping province-wide.

Article and photography by Nathan Lefebvre.

Find The Craft Brand Company online:

Podcast Companion: Microbrasserie La Souche

World Renowned Beer, Brewed Fresh for Ontario

Nathan

Nathan is a craft beer enthusiast from Ottawa, ON. He is the Co-Founder of @TeamLactose, he’s passionate about travelling for beer and he loves talking about beer from Ontario, Quebec and beyond.

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