Things to do in Vancouver: Beer Education and Cocktails at Granville Island Brewing

Granville Island Brewing had a private event called “Brunch for Dinner” on June 19th, 2012 at the newly renovated Limited Release brewery.  The events featured their Beers of Summer and decadent brunch canapés to pair your drinks with, but the event wasn’t your usual event and you had to work for your beer. I’m not talking about work hard for your money work but more of a fun approach to education.

Once you sign in, you were handed a card which told you to visit three different stations.  At each station, you would learn something new about beer you didn’t know about. Well, at least I didn’t.

The first station was the “Exbeeramenting” station where they featured their award winning beers with a twist. There was a bartender, who taught you the wonders of mixing beers with other drinks you would never imagine.  All three cocktails were refreshingly summer-esque and I must say, would be the perfect addition to a nice Sunday brunch on my garden patio.  The three features were the Lemon Berry (False Creek Raspberry Ale and Lemonade), the Hef’n Berry (Robson Street Hefeweizen and False Creek Raspberry Ale) and the Beer Mimosa (Robson Street Hefeweizen with OJ). After tasting all three as I mingled with beer enthusiasts and talked about beer pairings, I quickly moved to the second station.

The second station was the  “Beer 101” room where Vern, the Granville Island Brewmaster taught you the Coles edition of the basics of beer making and the basics of how to pair beer with food.  (FYI, the smell of hops made me cross eyed.  It was that strong.) Once I became an honorary beer master, I was given some beer tickets to grab a beer from the bar.  With beer in hand, I headed over to the food table to test out my beer pairing skills.

Three beer cocktails and a plain beer in, I headed over to the final station, the “Hop” tag.  Based on the Granville Island Brewery dictionary, the “Hop” tag is a “hashtag’d word pertaining to beer, or food and beer pairings”.  At this station, they asked me to tweet or post something about the event on Facebook and so I did.  As an award, I was handed yet another beer ticket!

Thank you to the Granville Island Brewing team for arming me with my newly attained beer skills and introducing me to the Beer Mimosa and their Raspberry Ale!

– Olive M @35olives