OTG | FOOD & DRINK
My Kind of Beer with Chris Goddard
ONTARIO HOP GROWING
I
recently had the pleasure to be a beer judge for the 2020 Great Ontario Hopped Craft Beer Competition (ONHops BrewOff for short) in Niagara Falls as part of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Convention. The thing that makes this competition unique is that it pairs a local Ontario brewery with a local Ontario hop grower. After the teams have been matched, they are each tasked with brewing the same style of beer. The finished results are brought to the competition to compete “head to head” in a winner-take-all battle. This competition was created by the Ontario Hop Grower’s Association in 2012 to help celebrate the rebirth of Ontario hop growing and the amazing brewers who use them. “Re-birth of Ontario hop growing,” you are thinking, “I didn’t even know we grew hops in Ontario.” Up until recently the hop industry in Ontario was quite small, but back in the 1800s and early 1900s hop growing was a going concern here in Ontario. As Europeans flooded to the new world, they brought with them their crops and their thirst for beer. The latitude of Ontario provided the perfect climate for hops and the soil in certain regions provided the hops with the drainage and nutrients that they loved. This led to not only a boom in hop growing but also in beer production – but this boom wouldn’t last. There were a handful of things that led to the collapse of hop growing in Ontario: US tariffs on the import of hops (and barley for that fact), the spread of downy mildew exacerbated by Ontario’s humid summers, and most importantly — Prohibition!
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Twitter: @Chris__Goddard (2 underscores) • Email: chris@craftbrandco.com.
Prohibition in Canada (1916–1927) dealt the first blow but when prohibition in the USA (1920–1933) closed the border for the export of beer, the industry was dealt its final blow. Many of the hop fields were plowed under and replaced with grape growing for wine production as wine could still be consumed for religious ceremonies and exported to the USA. It wasn’t until the renaissance of craft beer in Ontario in the early 2000s that farmers turned their hands back to hop growing. Which brings us back to Niagara and the ONHops BrewOff competition and the daunting row of nine (of the 18) Imperial IPA’s sitting in front of me to judge — all featuring delicious Ontario-grown hops. We used the Beer Judge Certificate Program (BJCP) guidelines as our measuring stick for the beers which makes things both easier and harder because there is a strict style definition and set of parameters that guide our palette. Meaning that the beer not only has to be great; it must be great and definitive of its style as well, which makes this quite difficult. Almost all the beers were delicious to drink but not very many of them stuck close to the style guidelines which meant that some ultimately didn’t score well. In the end, after all of the glasses had been downed and the scores tallied, Toronto’s own Great Lakes Brewing and Eden, Ontario’s VQH Farms came out on top with their delicious Farmer Strong Imperial IPA. And what did I do after judging all those beers? I went for another beer of course!
