More and more hops are being grown on the Island

Hop to It

Is a 100-Mile beer possible?

With all this talk about local, seasonal beer ingredients, Monday thought it would be a good idea to ask Victoria’s brewers if an all-local beer would be possible.

“Hop-wise, yes, it is. Grain-wise, we have a lot of hope that we’ll be able to,” says Phillips Brewery’s Matt Phillips. “Grain is a really difficult thing to grow on the Island. There’s a lot of moisture here. It’s a long growing season, which is great, but with grain, we really want to have low protein levels and it’s a little bit difficult to get those levels when it’s as wet as it can be here.”

Canoe’s Sean Hoyne says higher protein levels in grain make for cloudy beer, which is bad news for brewers like him who don’t filter. “Using European malts allows me to do that [not filter],” Hoyne says. “I can do that with a certain percentage of Canadian malts but if I go too high, it comes out a bit too hazy.”

Gary Lindsay at Driftwood says a number of factors will have to come together in order to make a 100-percent local beer.

“On the Peninsula, there are a couple of producers who are making grain and it depends on how their crop yields come in this year and how well they can get them malted in the fall,” he says. “So those things, if they can come together and get the ingredients that meet the specifications we need to make a beer, then we’d be trying to use them.”

Phillips says with our recent dry weather, there may still be hope for a 100-mile beer this year.

“Wetter years, last year for instance, I don’t think you’d be able to make beer out of the grain,” he says. “We’re not in the ideal climate for making 100-percent-local beer, but there is the off chance that we might, on occasion, get that year.”

Another factor is authenticity. If you want to make a beer that is truly faithful to the style, you want to get your ingredients from the source.

“If we want to make a true English bitter, we want to be using East Kent Golding’s and English Northern Brewer’s to reproduce those particular beer styles, which are benchmarks,” says Spinnakers’ Paul Hadfield.

Whether or not Victoria brewmasters can manage to pull off a completely local beer, all of the breweries are dedicated to using locally grown ingredients, whether it be hops or seasonal fruit, whenever they can. Hadfield says Spinnakers has even gone so far as to plant their own hops.

“This year, we planted a whole bunch of rhizomes on our property out by Sooke River,” he says. “By next year’s harvest, we will be supplying probably about 50 percent of what we need. Then after that, we will be doing 100 percent.”