Ashley Cotter-Cairns has a divine degustation at Flaveurs Bieres et Caprices.
Flaveurs Bieres et Caprices
2007 review
Submitted by Ashley
Cotter-Cairns
For those of you as French-challenged
as myself, I will explain the concept of a degustation.
It's simply a way to express the chance to sample widely from a certain group of foods and/or beverages.
Very often, you'll find brewpubs offering a degustation of their house beers in Montreal -- it's no different from a tasting sampler in English cities, with small, but significant portions of each beer served all together for side-by-side comparison.
The concept of degustations
involving beer and food pairings is picking up pace in the wake of the
popularity of similar wine-based events. In the case of Flaveurs Bieres et Caprices,
a high-end event held in the sumptuous ballroom of the Windsor Hotel in
downtown Montreal, the obvious element of interest was the
beer.
Italy was the 'guest' country of the event, and I must confess that I was pleasantly surprised by the Italian beers available.
It's an up-and-coming country that has not had much of a serious beer scene until now. In fact, many of the beers at Flaveurs Bieres et Caprices 2007 were fairly recent creations. Based on those I had time to sample, Italy is going to be a stronger presence in world beer in the next decade or so.
I should begin by telling you about the food. Obviously, with 100 beers to taste and a wide array of delightful dishes to pair them with, it was important to be selective about which foods to try -- and how much of each to taste.
The organisers put a lot of effort into creating 'tasting paths' around the various stands. If you were so inclined, it was possible to navigate around the tables, tasting one beer with one food, following their respective tasting path to the final beer, which was paired with a handmade chocolate or truffle.
A special mention
should be made about the staff.
Each and every person there had tried all the beers on their table and
knew exactly what the flavour profiles were and which foods they should
be tasted with.
It should be added that some of the beer tables had way too many beers for one person to be knowledgable about, but they did their very best!
To give you a 'flavour' of the food on offer, it included a lamb Tikka, confit of duck with mango chutney, a tartlet filled with snails and morel mushrooms in a creamy sauce, a divine slice of fillet steak in Bearnaise sauce, two different pastas in freshly cooked sauces, a guinea-fowl and deer pate... the list goes on and on.
The only criticism you could make about the food was that almost everything was quite rich, so it was easy for your palate to become a bit jaded after a while. And I haven't even mentioned the dozen or so different olive oils you could sample, with or without luxurious balsamic vinegar, all on a selection of rustic bread styles.
Sweet tooths were well and truly spoiled by the hand-made chocolate selections. Three words: OH. MY. GOD. Fabulous. Some even had beer in them, like the pilsner truffles and brown ale pralines.
I was seriously tempted to set off the fire alarms and shovel a couple of kilos into a sack on the way to the exit. They were THAT good.
But the UNOB is a beer website, so I ought to mention the beer. Fortunately, Flaveurs Bieres et Caprices had a truly impressive selection of beers of the world for visitors to experience.
There was something for everybody, from several Unibroue beers and a good chunk of harder-to-find Quebec microbrews I had never tried before, through the 19 different Italian beers and a vast array of others, from the US to Germany, France, Switzerland and Belgium.
I'm going to upload reviews of the many beers I
had time to do
justice to as soon as possible, which I'll link back from this page.
For now, suffice it to say that no
beer fan could have been
disappointed with the selection of brews, or the foods
they were paired
with. Everything was top drawer.
Reviews from the event
Aramis lager rousse
BABB
Teobroma stout
Fffado
beer
IPA
du Lievre
So, was Flaveurs Bieres et Caprices a success? For me, this is an event that's a few years ahead of its time. As food and beer pairing continues to increase in popularity, beer will attract a more affluent crowd who are used to spending serious money on a hobby (see the success of wine tasting events as a path to the future of beer-themed events like this one).
For now, although it was quite sparsely attended during my session (the icy weather probably had a lot to do with that -- it was bitterly, bitterly cold outside), I would say that for those who attended, Flaveurs Bieres et Caprices must have been an unqualified success.
Anybody on the fence about trying it this year should make a note in their diaries for November 14th-15th 2008 when FB&C next comes to Montreal.
It's certainly not a beer 'festival' per se, but a totally new kind of beer experience. Getting beer lovers to adjust will take time and education. I also think a $50 entry fee would present less of a barrier than $75 in advance or $90 on the door, but still keep away huge crowds.
I came away with a much broadened enjoyment of beer and all
the residual pleasures it can offer and thoroughly recommend it to
anybody with a taste for the
better side of life. Events like this show that beer has
as much right to share a table with superb food as wine does. Tres, tres bonne!
GET INVOLVED!
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