Woo! I just saw that our special 1812 beer, Stitchback, got an awesome review by Mike Di Caro on Spotlight Toronto! Check it out:
The standout beer of the evening was probably the Stichback/Switchback collaboration. According to Woods, it was the brainchild of brewery friend Victor North, who also brews at the downtown location of the 3 Brewers brewpub restaurant. North explained that he went to Kensington Market and picked up a whole bunch of interesting ingredients to make a beer evocative of something brewed in 1812 Ontario—another of this year’s OCB Week themes. There were multiple batches of this beer made and each one is a little different, but some of the ingredients include spruce tips, panela or jaggery sugar (an unrefined sugar in block form), smoked malt, rye grain and an unidentified variety of hops from a planting that is 200 years old. It was a malty and layered beer with flavor and aromas of malted milk chocolate balls, bramble, dark toffee and smoke with a mild hint of bitterness and peppery, spicy rye on the finish. It’s a distinctive beer that’s much more malt-forward than the current local trend of hop-prominent microbrews
