The Background

Beau’s are early adopters of bits and pieces of craft beer culture, so it’s not a huge surprise that they were the first brewery in Canada to formalize the idea of ongoing collaboration. The B-Side Brewing Label reflects the history of many members of the Beau’s family as punk rockers. Steve Beauchesne is such a fan of the Dead Milkmen that I’m frankly surprised there isn’t a beer called Sour Jane. I like Steve. He’s a great dude who has made his brewery part of the communities of VanKleek Hill and Ottawa in a really positive way.

Anyway, the B-Side brewing label is an attempt to provide exposure to brewers from other parts of the world who either don’t have the ability to get their beer into Ontario or (quite reasonably) can’t be bothered to deal with the LCBO. B-Side kicked off in 2013 with the signing of Anders Kissmeyer who produced a Nordic Pale Ale with the brewery that is still available at the LCBO for a very reasonable price. It’s a nice beer, but not the only one in Ontario from Kissmeyer who had also designed a beer for Bush Pilot, thereby slightly undercutting the premise. The Nordic Saison that emerged as a follow up was a limited time affair whose yeast profile had, at least on the two bottles I sampled, a somewhat unfortunate whiff of burning hair.

The launch of Beau’s second B-Side brewer, Portland, Oregon’s Gigantic, may not in practice be helped by the fact that it comes at the culmination of FeBREWary. Beau’s has released a new beer every week for a month and while one of them is the resurgent favourite Strong Patrick, I can’t help but feel that there’s a little audience fatigue happening. Even though the Le Coeur Noir Black IPA was quite good, I’ve not heard a lot of scuttlebutt about it. I guess this is the price you pay when everyone gets all amped up for International Gruit Day where our motto is: “Gruit: Do it to it.”

The Beer

La Formidable is an American-Belgo IPA, which just means that it’s an American IPA with a Belgian yeast strain. This is fairly familiar territory for Beau’s with previous examples like the Rudolphus IV and Farm Table Belgian Pale Ale having cut a swath through the vast undergrowth of experimentation. Gigantic themselves have a Belgo IPA called Intensify. Put the breweries together and what have you got? Bippity boppity booze, probably. This should be a cakewalk.

The Arbitrarily Chosen Score Based on Various Criteria

Today we’ll be using the standard Welles-Nelson scale of Transformer Awesomeness to gauge the quality of this product. This is only applicable to the 1986 film and is not pertinent to the rebooted Michael Bay franchise which operates on the LaBeouf “Go Go Go Go Go Go Go Go” Quotient.

Scores can range anywhere from the least cool Transformer, the Quintesson judge who relies on his legions of Sharkticons to destroy prisoners all the way up to the most cool Transformer, Rodimus Prime. You think he’s not cool? He has his own theme music and is voiced by John Bender. In 1986 that’s as cool as is possible.

La Formidable weighs in a 6.9% alcohol and pours a vibrant orange colour with a voluminous off white head. The aroma is a sweet orange peel for the most part with some prodigious phenols from that Belgian yeast strain contributing some mild clove spice and light bubblegum. The body is cloudy but quite substantial and the sweetness tend to balance the bitterness right up until the swallow. There is a pronounced hop burn in that takes place on the finish and it lingers, leaving the impression of disharmony.

I rate this beer: Wreck Gar.

Notice that I didn’t say it’s a Wreck. Wreck Gar is the leader of the Junk planet in the Transformers movie. Voiced by Eric Idle, Wreck Gar’s dialogue is mostly made up of marketing slogans and pop cultural ephemera. The theme song during his first appearance is Weird Al Yankovic’s Dare To Be Stupid which mirrors that popcultural panglossolalia. Wreck Gar’s body is made up of disparate parts from various places and there’s the sense that he’s not quite all there. He’s cool, but in an iconoclastic way that is certainly not for everyone. I mean, hell, some people like Wheelie.