The new IPA from Les Trois Mousquetaires is more than just a beer drinking experience, it’s Deja Vu. It takes me back to my time in California sipping on some danky IPAs and enjoying the cool San Francisco breeze. Alex has captured the essence of what I love about IPAs and he has taken me back! This beer is a way for me to reminisce those glorious youthful days roaming the streets of San Francisco as well as creating wonderful new ones here in Montreal.

IPAs, which I’m sure you are aware, stands for India Pale Ale. To most it’s an acquired taste but to me it’s a just a standard like Budweiser to the southern United States. By definition an IPA is a hoppy beer style from the Pale Ale category, essentially it’s the big brother of the Pale Ale. What does that mean? It means it’s loaded with a cluster f*** of hops and utilizes pale malts such as Munich, Crystal and the very popular 2-Row malt. This creates a light delicate beer with a bunch of flavour. What has occurred over the course of over 100 years is the transfer of utilizing English pale malts and bittering hops to utilizing newer malts and fruity hops which have advanced the flavours of an IPA.

There are many different styles of IPAs, there are hoppy IPAs as well the more traditional English IPAs which are similar to a hopped brown ales and on the more malty side. My enjoyment comes from the more modern American IPAs. Breweries and brewers have taken the America Pale Ale style, usually more tropical than an IPA, and gone absolutely ballistic by adding more and more hops to create and IPA and adding even more to create an Imperial IPA. Increasing the ABV with each tier and creating a horse race to produce the best IPA / DIPA in the world.

So what’s the best any brewer of brewery can do in such a competitive day and age? Scale back and go the opposite direction. Forget the competition, forget being the best, just brew a nice IPA which you love to drink! And that is exactly what Alex and LTM have done with their new IPA. Back to simple life, brew a good IPA without having the expectation to surpass anything or anyone. That is the nature of true success, without the dreams of creating a beer that rivals all and only keeping the intention to brew a good beer for the sake of brewing is what lands you that number 1 spot. Here to talk to us about this amazing new IPA is the brew master himself, Alex! Bonjour Alex et merci beacoup! (That is all the French I will use, trust me any more and ill probably ruin the language. My French = Bad, C’est tres tres mal.)

Alex Ganivet-Boileau, an Interview with the Brew master HopCitizen: The new IPA has me dumbfounded, it’s a fantastic super hop forward IPA, one which I have not seen done much in Quebec, where did you gain inspiration from? Alex Ganivet-Boileau: As a brewer, I want to brew beers that are similar (and better) to what I love to drink. Most of the very best IPAs I’ve enjoyed we’re North-East style IPAs. Very fruit-forward, not so much bitterness but a lot of aromatics, with obviously intense hops but also a fruit character coming from the yeast. The texture of those IPAs was also an inspiration. They are not filtered, so you can feel and taste all the yeast and hops in suspension. That’s what we were aiming for, without wanting to clone any other beer out there, because it was important for us that our version would have a personality of it’s own. So it’s a mix of influences of different North-East IPAs, but with a LTM touch. HopCitizen: It is to be a year round release, and with beer I’m sure each batch may be slightly varied, do you plan to keep the same recipe or will you maybe change it up a bit here and there with new batches? Alex Ganivet-Boileau: When we developed the recipe, a lot of efforts went into making sure we could secure hops contracts to always brew the same beer. It is not in our philosophy to launch a new beer, make two or three good batches, and then changing the hops and the recipe because we can’t find those hops any more. We want every single batch to be as good as possible, so we will never compromise. The hops won’t change, the yeast won’t change, the malts won’t change. Of course there is always some fine tuning to improve it, like water chemistry, fermentation temperature and the dry-hop sequence for example… All little details that won’t be obvious but will make the beer ultimately better. I guess I’m the kind of brewer that is never totally satisfied by a recipe. But this is where the fun is. It’s craft brewing after all! HopCitizen: When will the IPA makes it way to a consistent shelf beer such as your other great Serie Signature beers? Alex Ganivet-Boileau: My personal opinion is that I hope it will never be a consistent shelf beer! The aromatics in this IPA are fragile. We don’t want it to sit at room temperature in a store for several weeks. But we plan to release a new batch every month or so. Our strategy is that the stores that sold the previous batch very quick will receive more bottles and the stores that did not sell every bottle after a few weeks will see their quantities cut down, until we reach a certain point of balance between freshness and availability. And while I’m at it, I cannot stress enough how I really wish that all the stores will always keep the bottles at cold temperature. A lot of great hops DIED to make this beer. So please have a little respect for them, will you? Thanks a lot.

Many Bothans died to bring us this information. Thanks again Alex for the information on LTM’s new IPA which is making waves all over Quebec. It is a true delight to drink down, and I can’t wait to get my hands on some more.

Song of the week Periphery’s new album just dropped last week, and I was super stoked to have a listen form start to finish. Periphery was born out of the djent genre of metal, with syncopated rhythms a lot of groove. Since my first taste of Periphery, they have continued to evolve into a progressive djent behemoth. Although there are many songs on the new album Periphery III: Select Difficulty the one that really stands out for me is Marigold. Starting off with a melody played by violins with a fast and lively tempo (Allegro), the melody quickly transforms from violins to guitars and the journey into this heavy, groovy, progressive song begins. Spencer’s vocal melodies during the chorus, they way they create a wave, plays in well with the guitars rhythm. This song has everything that makes Periphery as a band sound distinct from other bands. Angelic clean vocals, gutteral heavy deep screams, groovy aggressive guitars, progressive licks and pattern changes, and of course crazy out of this world lead run. The outro leaves you with some mellow serene sounds as if to say the therapy has finished and it’s time to just breath Go check out the new album, it does not disappoint!

Tastes are a very funny thing, they can last a lifetime. The connection between your impulses in your body and the brain can create the most deepest memories. In psychology the term is used is simply Remembering, in which our brains utilize two main methods, recognition and recall. I to this day can still recall the taste of my grandmothers food. I remember that rice dish with chicken very clearly and I can still taste it even today. Remembering old flavours and scents and seeing visuals of the past is one of the most serene moments anyone can experience. It allows you to relive a single moment in time on the fly. The same continually tends to happen with beer, I can still recall the taste of my first Trillium beer, Scaled Up, I can still feel the energy it sent through me, I can still taste the explosions of the hops, the fruity pungentness, and everything about the beer. Memories are a crazy thing, and this IPA brings back memories for me.

ABV: 6% || IBU: 40

Bottled: June 10 2016 || Drank: June 18 2016

Utilizing Citra, Simcoe, Centennial and Chinook hops the new IPA is a combination of pungent tropical hop kicks and a glorious medium to light body mouth feel that sits just right on your palate. It is indeed a very palatable IPA with very minimal bitterness. As always LTM uses all 100% Quebec malts and with this IPA, frontenac and maltbroue were used, as well as other ingredients including of course barley, oat and a bit of carawheat. I am getting a bit of the yeast flavours, but they are very minor and play in well with all the other flavours. The armoas on this IPA are a real kick in your face, it’s like being struck by a rhino. Some of the flavour it gives off from that hops produces an almost, what I call, soapy hops. Don’t take soap as a bad thing! It’s definitely not. This same soapy hop flavour is what makes the Mid Western IPAs and Pale Ales such as Half Acre Daisy Cutter shine! I would say it was better on tap over bottle, but as is the case with most IPAs and certain other beer styles, tap always seems to take the torch. However, you need to stock up your fridge with this IPA every month, I know I will!

4.5/5

An Article by Hopcitizen. Photography by Hopcitizen.