Dude brews and trees
Breweries often brand themselves with logging themes. For very understandable reasons. What’s nicer than a cold brew after a hard day’s work in the woods?
Barrels and axes, logging and drinking, chopping and chugging; overdoing either results in a hangover. Only, the one leaves within a day or two, the other takes more like a generation to recover — or, for the real deal, centuries.
A month before I moved to Vancouver Island I hitchhiked through Scotland. Driving through the world-renowned landscapes, picturesque yet relatively barren, my ride James and I chatted about the reforestation projects we drove by. His daughter, eight-years old, had one of those drawing boards where you slide the handle at the bottom to clear the picture again. Hearing that I planned on moving to Vancouver Island, James called his bud.
“Make sure you drink the right beer. Lucky, that’s what we drink on the island.”
Keeping buddy’s advice in mind, I soon came across Lucky on the Island. “The beer from Duncan” so people say. At a party, years later, mate with a Lucky t-shirt gave me the whole spiel: logging is the way of life on the island and lucky is the beer that goes with it. Fair enough, I said, but you’re wrong on where you’re beers from. They used to brew in Duncan, yes, but Lucky is from San Fran based General Brewing. In the States, the brand got sold to Pabst, in Canada, to Labatt. If you want to support the islanders, drinking an island beer makes more sense than a brand of Labbat: we agreed on that.
Lucky’s appeal on the west coast eventually faded as thousands of craft breweries fermented their way into the market. But their take on the forests of the west coast are not altogether different than Lucky’s marketing ploys.
Men working on a logjam captioned “Making it through the day always meant one thing, LUCKY” or “IN HARM’S WAY WAS THE job description” were the angle Lucky’s marketing took. What are the new breweries up to?
Some of my favorite island breweries frquently feature forestry themes: Driftwood has a New Growth pale ale; Sooke Oceanside Brewery (SOB) crafted a Springboard IPA; and, Axe and Barrel brew in Langford. Twin City with a Run of the Mill IPA themed their whole establishment after logging (no surprise as they’re serving Port Alberni, once home to one of the biggest logging camps in the world.) “Walk deep into the forest and you’ll feel it — the sense of walking through history. Colossal tree stumps…” commemorate SOB, and Phillip’s Brewery also make a Stump Gin.
Logging themed craft beers are in no way unique to Vancouver Island. In West Virginia, Big Timber Brewing pour a Loggers Lager and Pumphouse Brewery from New Brunswick collaborated with chainsaw pioneer Stihl to host a demo of Marcel Dupuis, Timbersports champion.
With an electric Stihl model, I learned to use a chainsaw . (We have come a long way from the 64kg chainsaw handbuilt by Andreas Stihl.) I get it, cutting up wood feels amazing, almost as good as drinking beer. I also appreciate the need for good forestry. I’m German and my family name, Axmann speaks for itself. However, Germany has no real old-growth left.
In fact, temperate old-growth rainforests have fallen the world over. Scotland used to have an expansive old-growth temperate rainforest. Few people realize this because it has not been that way for generations. If the forests of Cascadia go the way of the Caledonian Forest, we will rob our future generations from real forests, leaving them with stands of trees and decaying stumps. When children draw in British Columbia, let them have the Supernatural, the Beautiful and the ancient to inspire them, forever. As for the breweries, you inspire us (some of us a little too often). How about more Old Growth IPAs and Carmanah Ales?
