Chapter 2

     When the Robertson family returned from spending a sabbatical year in southern Germany in the summer of 1977, I still remember getting off the plane at the Toronto airport and ordering a beer while waiting for the flight connecting to Regina. I don’t remember which of the standard industrial North American beers it was, but I do remember how it tasted. Basically it didn’t! There was a hint of alcohol, but malt and hop flavour were below the taste detection threshold. I burped and the burp produced the slightest hint of beer flavour. (The air in the burp was warmer than the beer and malt and hop are more easily detected at higher temperatures.) It also was my first realization that perception of beer flavour is highly malleable, and depends on recent experience.

     When we left Canada one year earlier, industrial beers were my normal drink. But after becoming acclimatized to the more full-flavoured beers in Europe, I found them wanting. If industrial beer has more flavour at higher temperatures, why do people who drink it try to first get it as cold as possible? One contributing factor may be that they really don’t like beer and if it’s cold enough they wont be able to taste it. But there is an additional reason.

     Any distiller knows that alcohol boils at a temperature lower than that at which water boils. That means that as a water/alcohol mixture is warmed, the ratio of alcohol and water in the vapour above the beer tends to move toward an increasing amount of alcohol, and that impacts on the perception of taste. As the beer warms, the alcohol begins to dominate taste and any malt or hop flavour is overwhelmed. However, the more full-flavoured beers have enough malt and hop flavour to keep the alcohol flavour in balance at higher temperatures.

     That incident is significant because I immediately decided to not let my taste perception change back to where it had been before leaving Canada, when I had been satisfied with drinking industrial beer. This meant spending the extra money to buy imported beer to meet my beer supply needs. But I soon grew tired of not only paying the extra cost, but also of drinking beer that was either skunky or oxidized or otherwise reflecting its long life in the bottle, just to have access to a full-flavour beer.

     It was late 1977 and at that time I ate lunch in the University of Regina Faculty Club, now the University Club. I became involved in conversations over lunch with someone (Alex Kelly, Economics) who had tried a neighbours “home-brew” and in general, he had found the brews to be quite drinkable and varied in flavour. Perhaps I could make beer myself that would meet my needs.

     I dropped in at Harvest Brewing at the old address north of the China Doll Restaurant on Broad St. I was surprised to find a large poster on the wall featuring the Neuschwanstein Castle in southern Bavaria. I told the proprietor, Ron Thomsen that I wanted to learn to make beer like they served in that castle on the wall. Stuttgart is only a few hours from Neuschwanstein and we had visited it many times, taking visiting relatives to see it and cross-country skiing in the area around it. (It also served as the inspiration for the Disney castles.)

     Ron and I planned my brewing strategy, which involved starting off with extract kits, then adding partial full mash steps to the brewing. In three months I had switched to complete full-mash brewing, which meant that my starting materials were now malted barley, hops, water and yeast, the four classical ingredients allowed by the Rheinheitsgebot, the German purity laws.

     Ron talked about starting a home-brewing club. He was aware that other home-brewing supply stores had started brewing clubs as a means to promote increased sales of brewing ingredients and he wanted to try the same. I agreed to participate in any such club and help get it up and running if there were anything that I could do. I think that my only real contribution to the club was to give it a name.

     It has been the tradition of brewing clubs to choose names that produce an acronym that is itself a word related to beer. And the Ale and Lager Enthusiasts of Saskatchewan amateur brewing club was born. ALES has now become the second most successful amateur brewing clubs in North America, after the Quality Ale and Fermentation Fraternity (QUAFF) of San Diego California, in terms of awards won per year. Given the lead that Canada and the U. S. have over the rest of the world in serious amateur brewing, this really means that the ALES are also the second best in the world.

     I continued brewing and soon encountered a problem familiar to most amateur brewers. The standard brewing volume for amateur brewers is roughly five gallons or 23 liters. That will fill about five dozen standard size beer bottles. If one is sufficiently interested in beer to be actually brewing it, five dozen bottles of beer is probably no more than a three-week supply. If one is also proud of ones beer and offers it to others, cut that down to a two-week supply or less. It takes six to eight hours to produce those five dozen bottles of beer. After a year of brewing, one begins to think about productivity. Is it worth that much time just to have access to good beer?

     The obvious solution is to increase the batch size. I gathered new equipment so that I could brew with 70 liter batches. But 70 liters of beer weighs 155 lbs., and it is necessary to move that full volume of open liquid during the brewing process. I needed help.

     I recruited my daughter’s husband at the time (since divorced), Keith Wolbaum, who was the technician in my university research group at the time, and is now one of the Bushwakker owners, and a junior research colleague, Dr. Lynn Mihichuk, now head of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Regina.

     Wolbaum, Mihichuk, my wife Elaine and I and others had been part of another tradition at the U. of R. For several winters we began the weekend with a hearty trek on cross-country skis, starting at the loading dock of the Laboratory Building, then traveling east on the lake and under the bridge on the Trans-Canada highway, through the grounds of the Wascana Country Club, across Wascana creek to the east side of the Riverside Memorial Park Cemetery, along its northern side to Douglas Park and back across the lake to the starting point. The distance is roughly 10 km.

     We made our own trails, and we had a tradition of never canceling our trek because of the weather. After finishing we gathered at a local pizza restaurant for pizza and beer. When skiing hard in stormy weather a cross-country skier in good condition (and I was in good condition back then) can build up a layer of ice across his/her upper back and icicles will hang off his/her toque and his mustache. Our appearance was sometimes strange and from the reaction we got from other patrons at the Pizza restaurant, perhaps a little scary.

     Cross-country skiing without prepared trails is known as Bushwacking. We were the original Bushwakkers. (We later changed the spelling for copyright and symmetry reasons.)