La Barberie Blanche aux Mûres

I am not sure how long, but I have been eagerly waiting to write something about this little brewery in Quebec City called La Barberie. Please note that the brewery is NOT called La Barbarie - as in barbarity or barbarism, despite the helmet logo. It is called la Barberie because, as company folklore has it, its three co-founders all had long and luscious beards (la barbe = beard) when they got together and decided to convert their hobby of homebrewing into a full-time occupation. While La Barberie is first and foremost a brewery, they are also known for their little pub, which they call the salon de dégustation and is located adjacent to the brewery underneath a Highway overpass just outside the old city. The brewery is a work cooperative - owned by its employee members and governed by a council of members. It is one of many breweries in the Quebec micro-brewing scene with an expressed objective to help improve societal sustainability. In the case of la Barberie, their organizational form itself exemplifies communal values, its location in a low-income neighborhood symbolizes its solidarity with the under-privileged, it sells several products of which some of the proceeds are used to fund social causes, and it engages in a number of community building and environmentally responsible initiatives.

While la Barberie is also known for brewing over 160 different recipes, among others for local restaurants, depanneurs, and private functions, they offer a selection of regular brews in a fine 500 ml bottle. At a recent Christmas party, I came with four beers and I left with four, having received four of those beers in a little game called Yankee Christmas gift swap. I will review these beers over the next four posts. In working through them, I will follow what I would consider an appropriate sequence of drinking, if one were to drink several different beer styles during a given evening. For me, two simple principles set the initial order: Always drink from lower to higher alcohol content, and always drink pale malts first, then move to darker ones. I start therefore with the Blanche aux Mûres, which already introduces the first exception to one of the two principles above: Always drink Weissbier and Blanche first - this is to fully appreciate the flavours of the yeast in combination with the malts. But even here, you would drink a Blanch first, and then move to a Dunkle Weisse or a Wheat Double. This feature beer is laced with some fruit - probably blackberries.

The Blanche aux Mûres pours a wonderful foam head, as evidenced below, and shows a reddish appearance, presumably from the berries. This was yet another very Belgian beer, the ones for which I do not have a very receptive palate. I'd say the beer is balanced, with a dry malt flavour that a number of the interpretations of this style in Quebec share. It also had a peppery yeast spice on the front palate that I did not appreciate. Notwithstanding the spicy upfront character, the beer was balanced overall, with an acidic berry taste that nicely played off the malts. The back palate was quite bitter for a Blanche style, but not necessarily with hops - it might be a taste attributable to berry seeds.