Hangin' with the Harpers

We were lucky enough to be invited to 24 Sussex this summer to pour beer for the Prime Minister’s annual garden party.

I’m a very proud Canadian and being able to serve Beau’s at the Prime Minister’s house was quite a thrill. It also started bringing up all sorts of Hollywood movie memories. Its quite the Forest Gump feeling having your picture taken with the Prime Minister…where he’s good at ping pong, we’re good at beer.

And when photographers took a shot of us while Mrs Harper poured a pint of beer, the Big Lebowski quotes kept jumping through the old noggin…”yes, this picture was taken was Mrs. Reagan was first lady of the country; yes, yes, not of the state”. Although we were a bit luckier than the Big Lebowski in that Mr. Harper also found time for a picture with us.

I also found out that Mr. and Mrs. Harper have very similar senses of humour…
Me: Would you like to try pouring another pint, Mrs. Harper?
Mrs. Harper: No; I don’t really see that as a skill I need to master.
Me: Yeah, I guess you’ve got a pretty good gig already, eh?
Mrs. Harper: Yes, yes I do. I spent a couple hours on the motorcycle today.

And later…

Me: Would you like to try that again, Prime Minister
Mr. Harper: No. I don’t see that I need to master that skill
Me: That’s probably true…but if you don’t mind, I’m going to drink this beer that was poured for me by the Prime Minister of Canada
Mr. Harper: Cheers.

All in all we were there for three days, Rob and I did the first two nights and my Dad and Jamie did the third. Quite a cool experience.

Application Mailed!

We’ve been working hard over the last 6 weeks or so going through the process to get certified organic and today, we mailed in the application!

The process of getting certified is quite a challenge. It involves much more than just using certified organic raw materials and requires a crazy amount of documentation. After going through the process though, there will be a couple cool things we can do. For example, we could trace back from any bottle or keg of our beer which batch of beer it was, what lot of grain and hops went into that batch, where it was malted and which farm grew it! Crazy.

We needed a tremendous amount of help to get our record keeping and process documentation ready for the certifier, and we were very fortunate to get that help from our intern, Anne Morin. Anne is graduating from University of Guelph’s Alfred College campus in quality assurance and nutrition and she was responsible for getting us up to speed. We’ve hired her for the rest of the summer to help us make sure we stay compliant and also research more enviro-cool things we can do.

The application itself is hundreds of pages long, documenting every cleaning procedure, every quality assurance program and tracking procedures for every ingredient for every brand. I weighed the thing and its 1.5lbs of paperwork!

Back From Boston

I'm still reeling from my trip to Boston. Every year the Brewer's Association holds a craft brewers convention in a different city, this year in the land of chowder. Because it was relatively close, we were able to bring a few people from the brewery...so Dad, Matt, Jamie and I piled ourselves into a minivan and headed south last Monday.



We arrived Monday night (after a dinner stop at 7 barrel brewing co.) in time to check in and go grab our first Boston pint. Tuesday morning was the brewery tour day, so by 7:30am we were loaded into a bus on the way to Trinity Brewpub, Buzzards Bay Brewing, Mayflower Brewing and Cape Cod brewing. By 9am I had an oak aged scotch ale in hand, while munching on bacon out of a chalice. Very nice way to start the day. After the tour we hit the welcome reception at Harpoon Brewing Co., where 2000 brewers were allowed to wander around the entire brewery.



On Wednesday the seminars and tradeshow began. Crazy good opening speach and keynote address by Greg Koch of Stone brewing. It started off with a video highlighting the best parts of being a craft brewer and a challenge to brewers to continue with what makes us great. You can watch it here: http://vimeo.com/4298464. After the seminars ended, there was a visit to Boston Beer Co., where Mr Sam Addams treated us all to Lobster and crazy beer brewed at their research brewery. Dad was very happy because they also had the hockey game on.

Thursday was more seminars and tradeshows, followed up by 60+ cask conditioned beers back at Harpoon. Friday was all day seminars and closing reception. On saturday we headed home, stopping only for beer to bring back to the brewery (Phil in particular was itching for some hoppy stouts) and lunch at American Flatbreads.

I've been back for a few days now and my head is still going in a million directions - between catching up on being gone for a week and starting to work on all the big projects that I want to undertake this year, now that I'm full up on inspiration again.