Weekly Mash – June 23, 2014 | West Coast Beer Geek

Last week I actually got a chance to adventure around Vancouver, just north of it to be exact, in Porteau Cove BC Provincial Park which is one of my absolute favourite places to camp due to it’s awesomeness and relative closeness to where I live. We are avid campers (we’ll call it luxury tenting) and have taken our kids since they were a few months old to many different places on the west coast and interior so I was excited to get back out, test out some new gear and of course drink some great beer! In other news we had some minimum pricing / unhappy hour changes in BC to which I think the nicest way to describe it is the word asshatery. Anyway, here is my weekly update.

My Favourite Craft Beer’s from Last Week:

Import Craft Beer: New Belgium Rampant Imperial IPA
BC Craft Beer: Old Yale Brewing Sasquatch Stout

Weekly Craft Beer Review Recap:

Click here to see the best of my week’s reviews via Storify, or simply scroll down from this post.

Interesting Craft Beer Links Around the World:

Joshua Bernstein, author and writer for imbibe magazine wrote a cool article on the Evolution of IPAs that is worth a read and talks about some of the newer hop varieties we are seeing in beer.
The American Homebrewers Association voted for their Best Commercial Beers in America (aka craft beers), no surprise to see Pliny the Elder at the top (oops spoiler alert).
Dogfish Head’s blog has 5 things you should know about aging beer with some good advice on aging, I sort of disagree with #5.

Interesting Craft Beer Links BC and Vancouver:

Van East Beer Blog has both an Open Letter to BC Government Officials John Yap & Suzanne Anton as well as blog post titled 43% Does Not Sound Like Happy Hour To Me that basically captures the crockery that is BC’s new Happy Hour minimum pricing law. Never heard of a Happy Hour that involved increasing prices!
Postmark brewing opened, to many “meh” comments in the craft community. I haven’t tried their beer yet, so you will have to try them out and form you own opinion on the matter.
Four Winds brewing release Phaedra IPA in bottles, let the hunt begin!

Adventure of the Week:

Camping in Porteau Cove is one of my favourite places to go for a quick weekend, provided you pre-booked a site 3 months in advance! This is about 30 minutes out of Vancouver smack in the middle of Squamish and Horseshoe Bay with some nice waterfront campsites overlooking the beautiful Howe Sound.

We arrived on Thursday night in the rain, quickly setting up the tent (fumbling along as it was the first trip of the season) as well as a new picnic table sun/rain shelter, got everything setup and well kind of just cozied up and went to bed in the pouring rain – we have a very waterproof tent thank goodness! Once Friday arrived, our camping counterparts (my brother and sister in law) arrived and setup in the nice warm sun and the camping commenced. Porteau Cove is one of those places you really sit down, relax and enjoy the water as there is no playground other than nature, and not a lot of hikes that you can walk to easily directly from the campsite beyond a small one up to a mini lookout. It also a scuba diving training ground with some sunken features in the cove near the front and lots of people fish and crab here. You do have to prep yourself for the nightly and early morning trains (usually 2) as they can scare the crap out of you in the middle of the night and pass by about 10m away from some of the campsites. Here are some of the photos I took, will write up a camping and beer article soon!