Brewers Backyard - Canada Day Edition

On Canada Day I decided to get off my ass and do something productive rather than just sit at home, sample beers and play games (Rift is back in my life)...so we drove over to the Evergreen Brick Works, which was just 7 minutes away via DVP.

If you haven't been there, the place is a cool collection of a converted factory, warehouse, trails and ponds in the back. The only downside is that it is not easily accessible unless you live behind the trails or have a car. Sure, you can take TTC there, but the trip frequency is not the greatest.

The Reason

Why did I decide to get off my ass and go? Well, it was Brewer's Backyard and there were some interesting collaboration beers as well as some good eats.

The Event

For $20 you got a mug and 2 drink/food tickets. No, you don't have to buy the mug, but I thought it was cool to have one. The tickets themselves are either $4 or $6. The $6 tickets are interchangeable and you can get either a food item or a drink item, while the $4 tickets were beer only. One other thing I wasn't told about at the ticket booth is that the tickets bought you only half a pint of the collaboration brews, but full pints of the regulars. I made my peace with that last one since the collaborations were on the stronger side and I had to drive back home after.

The Beers

Amsterdam, Great Lakes and Indie Ale House were present and had booths set up at the Koerner Gardens.

At the time I was there, Amsterdam was offering the following:

• Lemon Wheat - collaboration with Broadhead
• Framboise
• Market Pale
• Oranje Weisse

Great Lakes was offering the following

• Crazy Canuck Pale Ale
• Orange Peel Ale
• Miami Weiss
• Lake Effect IPA
• Saison de la Canneberge

Indie Ale House has these on tap:

• Broken Hipster
• Golden Devil

I wanted to try all the beers I hadn't had before, but I ended up only having the Broken Hipster, Golden Devil and Saison de la Canneberge. The Lemon Wheat and Lake Effect were having some problems with the temperature and I was told to return in a bit...I would have had I not had to leave...so next time guys.

Broken Hipster - refreshing wheat with a lot of fruity notes and low on the spices

Golden Devil - heavy hitter with sweet honey notes and a lot of spices (wish I had written down some notes)

Saison de la Canneberge - tart, extremely refreshing and veeeery drinkable, easily my favorite of the bunch

The Food

The food was provided by Kanga, Sweet Sammies and Indie Ale House and was all very delicious. My favourite of the bunch were Kanga's butter chicken pies. 

Sweet Sammies' maple bacon ice cream sandwiches were also a hit. The ice cream was sweet with a strong maple aroma up front and a very nice bacon note at the back.

Overall, I enjoyed the event and wish I hadn't driven so that I could wait around for the other beers and sample everything. At the end, I walked around the trails, saw some turtles, took photos, sobered up and went home. I will definitely do one of these again.

Breakfast Pizza

OK, so this is not a beverage review, but I decided to put it up. On friday I had the idea of combining an entire breakfast platter into one. I thought that the pizza format will be the best. It turned out that some people have already tried this so I decided to add my version of it to the internets. Here it goes...

I used the following:

And the proportions:

- 2 potatoes,

- 2 eggs,

- 2 strips of bacon,

- 1 slice of ham,

- a bit of flour,

- patented (yea right) spice mix (salt, red and black pepper, pepper flakes, oregano, parsley),

- cheese, I had mozzarella;

First I preheated the oven to 350 F. I shredded the potatoes and the cheese and diced the bacon as follows:

Next I drained the potatoes, added some flour and placed half in a small pan. I melted a bit of butter in the pan prior to placing the potatoes in. I used a spatula to compress the potatoes. I added some of the spice mix. The goal here was just to make hash browns, half cook all ingrdients, place them on top and bake everyting to fuse it all together.

Next I cooked the bacon and placed the chunks on top of the hash browns. Next I cut up the ham into large chunks and placed those on top. I added some of the cheese.

Next I cooked the two eggs sunny side up but left them a bit runny. I placed the two eggs on top of everything else and added the rest of the cheese on top. The final product looked like this:

Lastly I placed the pan in the oven for about 10 minutes when the cheese melted and everything looked like this:

Hmmm....how did it taste? Amazing. It tasted like any breakfast meal you can buy at a diner or make yourself. In total it took me around 50 minutes with cutting, shredding, frying and baking. I would definitely make this again. Let me know if you have any suggestions/recommendations or want to share your creation.