My Best Friend’s Girl
The Establishment Brewing Company
Part of the brewery’s core offerings, My Best Friend’s Girl is a light and fresh Kölsch-style ale with notes of lemon, pear, orange cream and slight floral notes.
It’s a light, casual, easy-drinking, pale-gold-coloured beer best enjoyed with tableside service during the Kolsch Haus events at the brewery, where they follow the lead of servers in Cologne, Germany, the home of Kolsch. Your small, skinny glass will be refilled until you put your coaster on top of it, signalling you are done.
Price: About $19 for four 473 millilitre cans; 4.8 per cent alc./vol. It is widely available at local liquor stores.
Two Pillars Brewery
Pale
This tiny brewery in Crescent Heights is making a big impact, winning four medals in the Alberta Beer Awards and three more at the Canada Beer Cup last month.
Owner-operator Boaz Leung says the four-year-old brewery produces very small batches of beer, usually 100 litres at a time, to be enjoyed at the taproom. But he has contracted a larger brewery to produce the core beers so some can be sold in stores.
The Pale is a Belgian-style beer with a rich golden hue, a nose with malty, yeasty notes and flavours of marmalade, caramel, flowers, straw and pear. It’s creamy on the palate, with great freshness and balanced bitterness and acidity.
Price: About $19 for four 473 ml cans; six per cent alc./vol. Look for it at Alberta Beer Exchange, Calgary Co-op Wines Spirits Beer Oakridge location, 5 Vines Wine, Craft Beer and Spirits, Metro Liquor, Oak and Vine and Vine Arts.
Ol’ Beautiful Brewing Company
Pegasus
The Calgary brewery has been overwhelmed by the local support it has received from the public and other craft breweries since the June 29 fire. Luckily, they produced their beer at another location, so they are still brewing.
Owners hope to reopen a taproom at the previous site in the future.
Named after the flying horse of Greek mythology, Pegasus is a juicy and fresh American pale ale with a lovely balance of hoppy aromas and flavours of grapefruit, peach and apricot. It has just enough bitterness to balance the fruit. Very well done.
Price: About $19 for six 355 ml cans; 5.4 per cent alc./vol. It is widely available at liquor stores throughout the city.
Eighty-Eight Brewing Co.
Wave Pool Tropical IPA
It seems appropriate that a brewery that embraces an earlier time, when Calgary hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics, should win gold in one of craft beer’s premium categories. Taking top IPA honours is like winning downhill skiing or grabbing hockey gold.
I’ve been enjoying this IPA for quite a while now. Launched six years ago when the brewery started, it balances fruit and bitterness with the precision of a figure skater. Medium-full-bodied, it exudes tropical aromas of mango, tangerine and peach.
The fruit remains on the palate, with notes of pine and cedar keeping everything in check. There’s a slight sweet note on the mid-palate that keeps you wanting more.
Price: About $19 for four 473 ml cans; 6.2 per cent alc./vol. Check for it at your local liquor store. It is widely distributed.
Contact Darren Oleksyn at dm.oleksyn@gmail.com or follow him on Instagram or X. Looking for a specific product? Because inventories are always in flux, it’s a good idea to call a store to confirm they have it. A search on Liquorconnect.com (https://www.liquorconnect.com/) can give you an idea of stores that have carried the products.