The Fridge is Full of Holiday Cheer!

As much as we hug trees and conserve energy in this household, we keep a second fridge/freezer in the garage to host the beer collection, Gatorade (to aid us after too much beer) and various awesome vodkas are on a wine rack in the freezer (seriously). In the past six months, my husband Kelly and I have become craft beer nerds and have loved every minute of it. We were already fans of Kelowna’s Tree Brewing, Aldergrove’s Dead Frog and Fernie Brewing amongst other local brew houses, but we weren’t very knowledgeable about the many delicious varieties of beer and how big craft beer is in Canada. We’ve never liked anything with “lite” or, god forbid, “lime” in the title but our beer-virgin taste buds were about to be woken up.

We have to give street cred to Allan at Hog Shack Cook House in Steveston. We stumbled upon this Kansas City inspired BBQ shack in the spring and were hooked immediately on their amazing food and craft beer list. When they advertised a Craft Beer 101 course, we signed up. It was just us and another couple, but Allan treated us to a vast array of beers as well as a massive plate of yummy BBQ.

We had samples from all of these bottles, as well as a few they had on tap. We quickly gained an appreciation for beers other than pale ale and heard about the local beer society, CAMRA. Soon thereafter, we got our CAMRA memberships and attended Too Hop to Handle, Oktoberfest and the Tour de Richmond pub crawl. Wow – amazing limited release beers were consumed and new favourites formed. Not to mention a fun bunch of people!

So now the holidays are here and our beer fridge is stocked. Some of our favourites are from Driftwood, Elysian, Lagunitas, Red Racer, Phillips, NorthCoast and many, many others. We've been a big fan of the limited release bombers and purchase most of our beers at specialty liquor stores like O'Hare's Pub and Central City.


We attended a long table at the Pumphouse Pub in October and are going back for an amazing menu and beer pairing on New Year’s Eve. They tweeted, looking for someone to blog about the long table, so I offered to write something for them. Blogging about food and beer is new to me, so hopefully I do it justice! Stay tuned for my post on January 1^st, well, maybe on January 2^nd J