Good vibrations and The Hip too at the Clarington Beer Fest

It came in hot, with a blazing sun greeting the early patrons, and it went out wet and wild when a mini monsoon forced an slightly early end to the musical portion of the festivities.

But in that time between, the Clarington Craft Beer Fest, held August 20 behind Manantler Brewing in downtown Bowmanville, was all about the chill.

A few brewers (and radio personalities) certainly felt it when they hit the drink in the Dunk the Brewer event (always a big hit at beer fests), but that's not the kind of chill I'm talking about. There's a relaxed atmosphere - an aura, if you will - that is ever-present at Manantler Brewing (especially around brewers James and Chris and Everyone's Favourite Cellarman Trevor) and that mood just naturally became part of the beer fest.

But don't take it from me: listen to another brewer.

Sean, the founder of William Street Brewing in nearby Cobourg, has known the Manantler team for a few years and he raved about the atmosphere at the festival.

"These boys are great, they really are," he said. "There's such a wonderful, relaxed vibe here."

William Street was my second official stop on arrival, as Sean brought Wheat King IPA, which is a) an IPA and b) named after a Tragically Hip song, so it was  a no-brainer for me. Except when I joined the line everyone (okay, the trio of beautiful and clearly influential women standing in front of me) was going on about the Orange Cream Cycle beer and I got that instead, figuring I better snap this up before it was gone.

It's a beer fest. You gotta get your good thinking in early.

The Orange Cream Cycle was orangey, vanilla-y and tasty. Thank you, ladies.

But before that visit I was at the host's booth, manned at the time by both Chris and Trevor, to try Old Man's Paddle Pantry, a beer brewed for the festival with pals 5 Paddles and Old Flame breweries and Matthew Chellew of brewer's supply store Brewer's Pantry.

OMPP, a Belgian-style Spiced Table Beer, was dark and spicy and extremely sessionable at 3.8 per cent.

Trevor and Chris at the Manantler booth

There was an unofficial stop before the OMPP as well, as I came on the scene a little early and started the day downstairs in the tasting room with a Steady Horse, a Session IPA that I loved last year and had been tweaked a bit for this year's version with the addition of Eldorado hops.

I enjoyed my first Steady Horse - 2016 version - a couple of days prior, and got a free brewing lesson from Trevor at the same time.

"Most beers we don't brew that often are changed each time," he said. "They're ideas. We can't guarantee the same hops will be available and even if we could get them they don't always taste the same each time. The malt profile will usually stay the same but the flavour profile will change."\

For the record, Steady Horse (4.5 per cent), was just as juicy and delicious as always.

Back on ground level and the festival, I eventually returned to William Street for the Wheat King IPA, which tasted of citrus and cereal and tropical fruit, with a little hazy wheat flavour as well. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this beer go towards the Gord Downie Brain Cancer Research Fund, so drinking this beer was a win-win for me. Also, my crack research team (Google) discovered the song (🎵Wheat Kings and Pretty Things...🎵) was playing on the  radio when Sean proposed to his wife.

Awwww....

William Street's tribute
to the Tragically Hip

Sean also had an announcement to make as he was pouring this for me.

"This is my last beer fest. I'm retiring," he said solemnly.

He did later clarify his statement, noting that this was his last beer festival as a brewer. With a background in sales and marketing he decided it was time to hire a brewer to do most of the heavy lifting while he concentrated  on sales.

He will still brew from time to time though. (I asked.)

I hit up Beau's All Natural next where I found myself chatting with David about the family brewery's decision to sell shares to employees. Did you get in on this action, I asked?

"Oh yeah. I'm good for my retirement," he  said with a grin before adding he was part of the family. "My cousin is the boss."

I tried the Patersbier, a 4.7 per cent Belgian-style ale that is part of their Farmhouse Table series. It was decent, but I had my eye on another of the Van Cleek, Ontario (Ottawa area) brewery's Farm Table beers: the IPA.

This has become one of my go-to beers lately, partly because it is cheap ($4.55 for 600 ml at the LCBO) but mostly because it is damn good.

I'll get to it later, I  said to myself.

I paid a visit to Church Key Brewing as well. This Campbellford, Ontario brewery (#5 of 12 things to do in Campbellford - Trip Advisor) has been friends with Manantler since the beginning as it was there James and Chris brewed their now retired  Pursuit of Abbeyness beer while the Bowmanville facility was under construction.

The early crowd at the Clarington Beer Fest

I enjoyed Church Key's Pale Ale and pronounced it most excellent.

And then I was out. I had plans for later that afternoon and I also had to finalize my evening. I was coming back to the Beer Fest, which ran until 10, but I wasn't going to miss the final-ever Tragically Hip show, scheduled for 8:30 that night.

Similar thinking was going on in the minds of most Canadians, as the concert, live from the K-Rock Centre in the band's hometown of Kingston (less than two  hours east of us on Hwy 401) and live on the CBC for the rest of us, was simply the biggest thing going on in Canada on this day.

A strategy was therefore in order (though I was already breaking my rule about not doing any hard thinking after a beer fest had begun), but that would have to come later.

So I did a walkabout at the Clarington BluesBerry Festival - going on at a closed-off downtown Bowmanville a couple of blocks away the same time as the beer fest - with the highlights being a blueberry butter tart from KCC Catering (delicious) and an authentically cool jazz trio (Ray Charles, meet Joe Cocker) doing a soulful rendition of Sweet Georgia Brown.

After a stop at the Third Floor Loft in Oshawa to re-charge my batteries, I picked up my son Matt and we headed to his buddy (and new daddy) Tiy's place, where I chilled with his pals for a bit (having friends from childhood is cool, but when they're all awesome people to boot, that's priceless) before leaving them to their Hip viewing plans and returning to the beer fest.

Astronaut Beer from Manantler

I found the festival in full swing (I missed brewmaster Jim's turn in the dunk tank, damn the luck) and headed straight for Old Flame, the one brewery I missed earlier, for their Blonde, an easy-drinking Helles lager.

I paid a return visit to Manantler next, where I found festival organizer-extraordinaire Tasha gushing with delight over the turnout, and enjoyed a Roberta Blondar Blonde Ale, or Astronaut Beer, as I call it, as well as a wild boar slider or two from Three-Six Kitchen & Lounge.

I also spent some time chatting with Matthew and his trusted assistant Jess (who also moonlights as the bar manager for Buster Rhino's in downtown Oshawa) and the lovely and talented Ashley (a former Buster Rhino's bartender) at the Brewer's Pantry booth.

Matthew and I talked about our mutual love of the Hip and with showtime fast approaching by this point, I went inside and settled by the screen, watching the Olympic coverage and drinking another Steady Horse.

It turned out to be an excellent decision, as a few minutes later all hell broke loose outside and volunteers, musicians and roadies started coming in with equipment as the heavy rains hit the festival.

Huh. Maybe thinking after beer festivals have begun really is the way to go.

When the U.S. Women's 4x400-metre relay team took to the podium at 8:30 (Hip time!) and the last notes of the Star Spangled Banner drifted off into the ether, I thought that was the perfect segue to go live to the concert, that most Canadian of all things.

Alas, they were late and it was more Olympics for five minutes or so before I went back outside, figuring technical difficulties was going to delay my Hip experience. The scene at the fest was slightly chaotic, as the festival-goers were doing their best to escape the rains.

The beer was running out anyway, as I found out when I went back to the Beau's booth to find the Farmhouse IPA keg empty. "All gone. Sorry," was what I heard from David.

Damn.

So I went back downstairs to learn the Tragically Hip show was on after all, and I had missed the first two songs.

Double damn.

But as the melancholy refrain of Wheat Kings greeted my ears, all my worries faded away and I stayed in the bar for a few songs, enjoying At the Hundredth Meridian and In a World Possessed by the Human Mind before I made my way out.

It had been a fantastic beer fest and a wonderful day, but I decided the best place to see the rest of this show was from the comforts of home.

I'm hip to that.

The Hip and Gord Downie say farewell

Did I just hear that?

Did I just hear three, count 'em, three encores?

Gord Downie at the ACC August 10

I did hear three encores, and to quote the man himself, "I never heard that before." And as it was at the end of the final concert in the Tragically Hip's long and legendary and oh, so Canadian existence, it seemed somewhat appropriate.

The Hip embarked on a abbreviated Canadian tour this year to promote their very likely final album, Man Machine Poem, and to give fans one last opportunity to see them and front man Gord Downie, who had been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer earlier this year.

It was the last show, held at the K-Rock Centre in Kingston, Ontario - the band's hometown - that attracted most of the attention, though the tour built momentum throughout its run, and it became something of a uniquely Canadian phenomena.

Nearly 12 million people - I am going out on a limb and say the vast majority were moose-kissing Canucks - watched or streamed that final show, with 27,000 viewing the concert on the big screen outside the venue in downtown Kingston.

That's a lot of love for Gord and the boys.

I've been a huge Hip fan for more than two decades but I've only seen the band three times. I had a chance to see them in Ottawa in their early days - '89 or '90 I think - but I foolishly passed on the opportunity. So it was in Barrie at the Live 8 concert in 2005 when I had my first live Hip experience (just a three song set, but it included New Orleans is Sinking: the greatest song in rock 'n roll), and I watched them in Oshawa at the GMC a few years ago.

So when tickets went on sale for this year's farewell tour I snapped up a single (after two days of trying - damn you, ticket scalpers!) for the first of the three shows at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto.

And on a Wednesday after work (officially declared Tragically Hip Day in the city) I headed into the Big Smoke to get my Hip on. I stopped at my folks' place first, and after crushing a couple of Coors Lights (oh yes I did!) with my childhood pal Gary in the old neighbourhood, I took the subway to the show.

(Riding the subway is dusty work, so I stopped downtown at Beer Bistro to sooth my parched throat with a couple of really tasty Bronan IPAs from Niagara-on-the-Lake's High Road Brewery. Because man cannot prepare for a Tragically Hip show on Coors Light alone.)

The atmosphere inside the ACC was electric and extremely emotional, with a demographic that skewed towards the under-30 crowd and was overwhelmingly white, with both observations quite surprising to me.

The opening number was The Luxury, an obscure song from 1991's Road Apples, but the shiny faces in the crowd got the rest of the body parts up immediately and by the time Little Bones (also from Road Apples) rocked through the speakers the crowd was in full voice.

And we never sat down for the rest of the night.

The Tragically Hip

I'm not going to review the entire show in this forum - that's been done a thousand times already by a thousand other people - so I'm just going to tell you that it was an experience I'll never forget. At times the crowd of 20,000-plus was singing louder than Downie, and there were tears streaming down over tears as fans contemplated seeing them for the last time.

By the time Poets came on -  the fifth song of a two-part encore - we were all drained.

Ten days later, after arriving home following the Clarington Beer Fest, my heart would be touched again as the band put the finishing touches on the tour on home ice in Kingston.

The Hip didn't play New Orleans is Sinking at the August 10 show I attended (they played it at the other two Toronto dates), but it made an appearance in Kingston, kicking off the first encore in style.

As I mentioned at the top, the band played three encores and Downie worked in a short speech on First Nations' living conditions with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the house. The band played 30 songs in total including nine - nine! - in the encore alone, finishing with the classic Ahead by a Century, from the 1996 release Trouble at the Henhouse.

I went to bed happy that night.

Cheers!






















.......