With my appetite already whetted for my upcoming Belgian trip (please see this month's Feature Story for details), it seemed almost inevitable that April's TOTM would focus on something Belgian. All the more surprising, then, when I realized that the logical Taste of the Month came not from across the Atlantic, but my proverbial own backyard.
My book project for the year 2000 is a completely updated version of my 1994 book, Stephen Beaumont's Great Canadian Beer Guide, and as such, I have been regularly blind-tasting Canadian beers for over a month now. It was in one of these blind-tastings that I discovered the TOTM for April, a beer very familiar to me but one which I have perhaps been guilty of ignoring for too long.
Conners Best Bitter was the subject of the first beer column I wrote for The Toronto Star back in the very early 1990's. It was a good beer then and remained so for a long time, but when the brewery's sales flagged and consistency became suspect, I pretty much stopped buying it. After some time, the Conners brands were sold to Brick Brewing of Waterloo, Ontario, and as I noted in the Coda to my June, 1999, story about the visit of the Andechs monks to Toronto (http://www.worldofbeer.com/features/feature-199907.html), Brick has done a pretty good job with them since. It seems, however, that I hadn't noticed exactly how good!
My notes on the Conners Best Bitter refer to the beer's aroma of fresh and canned fruit (orange, canned peaches, fresh pineapple) mixed with faintly woody hop. The body I found to be full and rather rich, with layers of fruit laid on top of notes of nut, toasty butterscotch and wood. In summary, I noted that it was fresh, tasty and likely a very good "session ale." And what better praise can there be for a best bitter?
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