A Craft Beer Getaway

Summer. When the weather is off or on any day if local craft brewed beer is your thing, drop by one of the small breweries in cottage country. Tours and tastings are free and you can buy a case or two of British-style ale or a great lager to enjoy back at your cottage or resort. It's a good way to meet the locals and get some tips on what to see and do in your neighborhood. You'll also pick up the basics of brewing you might try out at home.

For a long time the old regional breweries were being bought up by the big labels to churn out more industrial lagers while eliminating the competition. Since the 1980's there's been a renewed interest in what was almost a lost tradition. New craft breweries have sprung up all over southern Ontario and the Great Lakes.

If you'd like the easy tour all in one place, go to Bracebridge August 29, 2009 for the First Annual Muskoka Beer Festival. Hosted by The Griffin Gastro Pub downtown, about 24 craft breweries from Ontario will be participating at nearby Annie Williams Park with non-stop beer and bands. Check out The Griffin anytime for a memorable pint, a good chat with friendly locals and the great food. It's a bit of old Bracebridge down Chancery Lane, cozy, intimate and casual. Live music Thursday evenings and Saturday afternoons. The outdoor deck out back has a touch of grunge, but you can smoke at least.

For a map to most of Ontario's cottage brewers and some essential beer lore see OntarioCraftBrewers. If you're driving out from Toronto, try stopping by one en route. Once in Muskoka, the nearest craft brewery is Lakes of Muskoka Cottage Brewery in Bracebridge, with tours and tastings on select Saturdays all summer through September 15th. Their Muskoka Honey Brown is no more expensive and way better than the big commercial lagers. In Ontario some of The Beer Store(s) carry it and their full line including their excellent Muskoka Cream Ale.

My beer adventure started recently while out west on a trip to Grey County near Durham. Charlie MacLean of MacLean's Ales in Normanby showed me around his new micro brewery you can visit at his hobby farm. Built last year and only open since January, The Battleaxe Brewery is producing a half-dozen traditional British beers. Local demand is so strong just on word of mouth that Charlie's already planning to expand. It's a testimonial to his many years as a brewmaster, not beginner's luck in case you'd like to try your hand at commercial brewing. He got his start in craft brewing in England back in 1979 with the Real Ale Movement. Brits even in Britain were grumbling over their beer, most of it mass produced not only off the shelf in bottles and cans, but even the keg beers at the pubs. An insipid pint of bitter had invaded the colourful local pubs as more and more and more of them were bought up by the big brewers as well as their smaller suppliers. The industry wanted economies of scale and big profits, more bland lager everywhere for the younger less discriminating crowd of Euro imbibers.

The subtle satisfying flavour of bitter from an unrefrigerated keg, pumped up by hand from the cool cellar below, with its modest but sticky head, was transformed into a lifeless flat and warm poor thing in a glass better suited for washing the mud off your boots. Or gassed to death with carbon dioxide for a pump and miles of foam like some ne'er do well Guinness bastard. Dreadful to see grown men weeping. But progress and profits did spawn a generation of Punks, Punk Rock and Wine Bars.

Back in Canada Charlie continued brewing. British-style pubs were making a comeback, now imported lock, stock and barrel with pressed tin ceilings, Pig and Whistles and all, into big Canadian towns. New breweries for British beers were starting to make inroads. Charlie wrote a beginner's guide to home brewing he couldn't get published. Publishers/Agents apply to charles.maclean(at)sympatico(dot)ca

Perseverance paid off, and after 12 years as Brewmaster of the F&M Brewery in Guelph, another craft brewery you can visit, Charlie started his own MacLean's Ales in Grey County. Talking to Charlie it all sounds simple enough. For ale you cook your local select barley and 90% of your hops in a copper kettle, then cool that down and filter, before you transfer it to the stainless steel fermenter and add brewer's yeast and the rest of your hops for more flavour. Keeping the temperature rather warm at 22 C you watch the fermenting for 3 or 4 days and then filter again before cold conditioning and then the bottling. About 2 weeks work for a batch. The result: about the best beer you can remember. Try MacLean's Farmhouse Ale for a country smile. If you want a lager, it's a slower cool fermentation that makes it happen, but not at MacLean's Ales.

In case you think stainless steel is cheating, fermenting in wood barrels was a tricky thing to do, often marring flavours and adding nasty bacteria. Even in the old days brewers used pitch to line their barrels, says Charlie. Did it taste pitchy? No says Charlie, the barrels left to cure a bit before use. So a modern craft beer is near to what your English ancestors were drinking if you have any, though their beer was cloudy with all the yeast still in the beer. Charlie does brew some keg conditioned beer without filtering, if you like your beer cloudy. No one thought of filtering beer in England until cheaper industrial glass replaced ceramic mugs, he told me. Seeing how cloudy it was in a clear glass changed our habits. Now we admire its translucent beauty, though the stouts are as dark as ever.

Today you need to insure your craft beer is not only good, but free of contaminants, meeting government standards during brewing and lab tests. Craft brewing means first class sterile equipment and bottling, and a lot of care, not what you can get away with in home brewing. That way too unlike the commercial beers, you avoid Pasteurization and wrecking a lively beer. To make it work you need some passion for the art as well as methodical patience. Of course the real secrets are the ingredients and the formulas, how to tweak them to get the kind of beer you want. Charlie has the experience and is very particular about his ingredients, preferring local barley and even growing some of his own hops.

But it's also fun and satisfying to be your own brewmaster. Having a perfect pint is a close second. If you're thinking this could be your new hobby, it's easy enough to start with all the brew your own beer stores that supply the equipment, their premises, and the know-how.

Going for your own brewery as Charlie found out, is a bigger deal than you might think, even if you're a brewmaster. Before starting to build make sure you can build. It's not only zoning laws that could stop you, it's also the quirks of old laws on the books that can make it illegal to build a brewery near a school or church. In Grey County your brewery has to be at least 2 kilometers away from either. If you're stuck with a church close by you might be able to get their permission to go ahead. Other permissions might apply too. If you have commercial zoning, are you sure that includes retail so you can sell your beer on site? Behind every pint there's a story.

If you're in the Durham area, Charlie MacLean will be glad to show you around or sell you some of his brews by appointment via his email above, or in a pinch if you're nearby you can call him at 519-369-5061. He still does consulting for F&M in Guelph and the new Highlander Brew Co in South River, Ontario, so you could sample some of his beers that way too.

If you're not close enough to get in on the Ontario brewing action, try Quebec or around the Great Lakes in this free guide by Great Lakes Brewing News.

Still too far away? Brewing News regional guides cover most of the beer frontier in the U.S. and Canada.

Cheers!

Girls Out For A Swim

Summer. Lake Rosseau. Boys gone fishing. The ducks and the water remind us of a permanent time. Like in Europe for centuries when life was steady for most people and the past was like the present. A better example, the so-called primitive cultures who had respect for their environment, the indigenous people around here, the Indians. Were they stupid about progress or wiser than us, knowing in their shamanistic way that a future based on the domination of the planet by man, spells death for the planet. Their culture was unchanged as was their land for perhaps 60,000 years. At the current speed of Science and Technology we could wreck our planet in 150 to 300 years. At least they'll be no more troublesome people. If we're lucky, it's back to the Stone Age, The Sequel. Get that in movies a lot, the doomsday scenarios. For all the troubles of the past we can say maybe people were better off than we are and certainly better off than they thought. For our ancestors, a relief, in hindsight, not having to live with this constant hankering for the past, this feeling of loss that engulfs the modern world. Or with a fear of the future if they'd known what we're doing today. For us, life always, a bittersweet memory. And the future clouded and uncertain. We go back there to the natural world of the Muskokas, as long as it lasts, to shed some of this angst, cottagers and locals, and tourists from all over. At least it gives us a chance to think and breathe the fresh air of the past.

Kids And Boats And Steamships

Summer. Lake Rosseau. Could be the old days, except for the boat and clothes, when there were more families. In back, an original boat works of which there were a lot. Muskoka was famous for canoes and launches. You should check out an exceptional boating museum in Gravenhurst, Grace and Speed, the Muskoka Boat & Heritage Centre, down at the newly redeveloped wharf, a pretty classy affair. Loads of perfectly preserved boats and canoes, some in water, a 6 million dollar jaw dropping experience. Also commemorates the old steamships and grand hotels in Muskoka. While in Gravenhurst, a bustling metropolis in comparison to most other Muskoka towns, like they say on game shows, you've just won a fabulous boat trip on a real STEAMSHIP! Check out the RMS Segwun from 1887. Sail to delightful Port Carling and Millionaires Row. And you can, for real.

Small Town Hassles And Scandals

Spring. Parry Sound, Coast Guard Station. A modern statement, rather at odds with the old town and the beaches. Trees were planted on the Waubuno Beach side, but they're still not big enough to screen an architect's lack of imagination. Here at least there was a need for a modern facility and it serves Georgian Bay and its ships and boats well. But functionalism can get out of hand. One aesthetic mistake leads to another. Like in the New York subways where the stations and trains, never pretty, were vandalized by graffiti artists and remarkably the more damage the more crime. It took an astute commissioner of the Transit Authority to figure out the connection based on an academic paper on a new theory of urban decay. Vandals plant seeds of lawlessness, when they deface an environment, the Broken Window Theory. If you don't fix it, that signals no one cares and it's alright to break another one and another. Whole neighborhoods go up in flames thanks to neglect, but first because they're often an eyesore to begin with and an easy target for distressed people. Quick cleaning and repainting, replacing even cracked windows in the subway system actually reduced crime considerably. But it's an uphill battle. Same goes for our big and small towns. What happened to them anyway? These charming towns we remember. Was there a war? Concrete parking lots covering nasty craters from all the shelling? A nice neighborhood crushed by a Seniors Rec Center and concrete condos. Condos in the country? A giant ugly hospital sold for a song to a big city developer who turns it into a slightly uglier retread for a condo complex. This make any sense? Sure. We needed the rec center, depressing though it is, and we need more condos because there's a housing shortage and prices are high and I suppose this will keep them high. A lot of prime land available too, and nothing gets done. The only place for kids to go, the ones who throw rocks, is the hockey rink and church bingo. So they get into trouble or leave town, just like in the movies. Is there some sort of anything goes business and politics in bed together, or in a small town, a game of Monopoly where a few high rollers call the shots? Looks like it anyway.

Spring. Parry Sound, Seguin Bridge and Tower Hill. Why not a charming bridge over an idyllic river? Everyone can draw up a long list of eyesores and missed opportunities for any town. In a small town you can't miss them. They're everywhere. Not much discussion or input on anything in most of them, just like in big city alienation. With big city thinking applied to small towns, from malls to strip malls, to dumb ugly buildings, people get the idea that's all you're going to get. The reminders are everywhere. A minor hassle like no real downtown which big city visitors love and the locals now miss. There was one until the malls came. Shopping, apart from the basics, is an exercise in futility. Try to find any shoe that fits at any price. One shoe store in town and plastic leather everywhere else. A nice friendly coffee shop? Closest thing open is at the mall food court or the Drive Thru. The old town newspapers used to be concerned. Not so much now. They've been bought up, imagine, by media giants. Their local flavor is the local advertising. What they splash on page one is Council Agrees To Hike Parking and Water Main On South Street Needs Repairs. Inside on page 3, some harmless gossip everybody knows anyway masquerading as human interest stories, and sensational articles like Fall Is The Time For Canning. Anyway, who do you know who does canning? In Parry Sound it's Crofter's, the jam factory. Good jam too, organic. Even mango. It's not that warm here, if you're looking for a mango tree. Globalization, from California. Though, what the local rags are good at is flooding the towns with flyers and free guides and magazines that give you 5th graders' reports on all the fun tourists and locals can have, with hardly a word of useful or honest information, but plenty of wall-to-wall paid advertising. No wonder that cottage lakeside life in the Muskokas is the big thing and many small towns are treading water or slowly going under.

Bala, The Magic Of Small Town Muskoka

Summer. Bala, next to The Kee. You might wonder why there aren't more photos of towns on this blog. Problem is they're rarely picturesque. Blame it on history. After the fur trade boom and bust, the loggers moved in and cut down millions of trees. So trading posts turned into sawmill towns and nothing much was built to last. Fires burned the rest of the old growth forests and fires also claimed the early cabins and houses. A few brick buildings like a courthouse and jail, a post office or church, survive. After the money was made and no more to be made, these towns dwindled and some even turned into ghost towns like the barren landscape around them. In the 1800's settlers were brought in from Germany with the promise of cheap land, farmland they thought. Forest scrub looked rich and easy to clear and more fires burned. When it finally came down to ploughing, the soil was pitifully thin with solid rock below. Their farms failed and the winters did them in. What kept some towns alive were the steamers and then the railroad. But they never found another vocation until big city people slowly pushed north to get away from it all, and built cottages on every piece of lakefront they could find. Small towns didn't interest them either. Is was the magic of the wilderness they wanted.

Cooling Off In The Creek At Bala

Summer. Bala, kids swimming in the creek at the height of summer. This is the real Muskoka pulled out like a weed from the resorts. Bala always has been the heart of cottage country with its graceful Victorian charm. You can't do better for a vacation. You could get your bearings in a day or two at one of the B&B's or if they're full, the Bala Bay Inn, the right place for lunch on their big patio. Don't miss The Kee To Bala, a Big Band dance hall from 1942 and still authentic. All the greats have played The Kee, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, The Dorsey Brothers, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, The Glen Miller Orchestra and Louis Armstrong. Since the 60's it's Rock and Roll with a great patio on the water and first class rock bands on the weekends, like The Tea Party. A 2007-8 New Year's Bash with Colin James. Nearby there's a funky bar and a coffee house. Walk around. It's still a small town of 500 permanent residents, not trendy like Port Carling, nor burgerized and stripmalled. If you have time you could look for a cottage to rent or buy. $2,000 a week or $500,000 and up for something memorable.

Shoehorned Into A Tourist Brochure

Summer. The Muskoka Resort Experience. It's one way to smooth down those big city jitters, shoehorned into a tourist brochure. Ahh, the good life. The satisfaction rating is 90%. I know from friends who work in the industry. The other 10% gripe all the time about everything, usually to get an upgrade, a discount or a freebie. Mind you an oasis of grass in the woods, does depend on its own infrastructure, and is subject to things like storms that knock out power, so no TV, no Internet, even cell phones can go dead. Water can start to gurgle out of your tap and go rusty brown, cold and brown and trickle to a stop. Toilets don't flush. The local fauna can also intrude. A strange animal in the night scratching your window, a creepy nerve wracking growl, a friendly mouse scurrying over your bed, and especially in spring, wasps, mosquitoes, blackflys and noseeums can find their way in. Even with all that, spring is as busy as summer, and if you don't have a reservation, you could spend all night and all day looking for another place. Accommodations vary greatly. In keeping with the cottage theme, you can get bungalows masquerading as double cottages, or strips of motel units dolled up like the royal stables, or in the better spots a real cottage of your own, or at the lower end a corner of a 4-plex cottage or maybe a cottage suite with Muskoka room they didn't explain, wasn't cottagey, except for the Muskoka room, and not in the woods but in the reception center, the actual hotel part. All this can be forgiven once you're there, especially if they give you an upgrade, a discount (very rare, so don't make a scene) or a freebie. Another thing that can knock your socks off is the high end pricing for everything extra, whether it's orange juice and a bag of chips at the tuck shop, or of course the restaurant, where you can't say no thanks to the prices. Beware the ruinous game of golf at their club, usually somewhat discounted since you're a guest. And there are rules. If you've rented a powerboat, your resort might not let you dock it. They're noisy after all. If you're thinking of dropping in on another resort down on the same lake say, well their guests come first, so wait in line or don't bother because they're very exclusive. Even with blazer and captain's cap and your yacht in tow many won't let you dock for lunch. If you're driving it's not going to help unless you squeeze a reservation out of them on the phone first. The smart thing to do is, if you're in the lurch, tip big. The fun thing I'd say would be to hang out at two resorts and golf courses, so split your party and put your friends in the other one so you can pull off the guest of a (temporary) member.

The Not So Wild Wilderness

Summer. Kids from camp, Bala Beach. Now that I think about it, the kids were only tired. I remember a camp like that where if you weren't huffing and puffing up the trail or you didn't get your lean-to up before dark, well, you weren't having any fun.

Bored or Exhausted

Summer. Kids from camp, Bala Beach. If you're a parent, then you know about all these weekend events for visitors, from family lunches and golf at the posh camps, to pork and beans and potato sack races. There's a score of camps and summer schools, and with water all around, the regatta is the big thing. Camps on a budget, it's two or three canoes and qualifying rounds. Here it's neither. A wilderness field trip in Muskoka, kids bored, not even parents around to make them embarrassed.

Eenie Meenie Miney Moe

Summer. Things to do. When the best weather arrives in Muskoka, you still have to make things happen. Unlike the city where people feel trapped in the heat and need to let loose at a string of public events, a street concert, a carnival, a book fair, there isn't much doing when everyone's come to get away from it all and relax. Fairs are for the fall, though every town puts on some sort of summer attraction. A charity fundraiser at the community hall, hot dogs, hamburgers and beans for cancer research, a beer tent and band, maybe a carwash for junior league hockey, a horticultural show and sale of houseplants, a nature club slide show, local arts and crafts in stalls and tents, an antiques show. One thing the locals share with the cottagers, they're marching into retirement. Now and again there's a little excitement.

What A Nifty Gift Shop

Summer. Port Sandfield Marina, what a nifty gift shop. The big marina too, has such a glossy feel to it, dozens of fabulous yachts and cruisers you could buy or rent. Fell in love right here with this classic beauty. And she's got a sister berthed beside her. Reminds me of the way I used to feel about cars. Reminds me too of the glamorous days of old Muskoka. A lot of the action then was at the grand hotels. Like those left at Cape May, New Jersey. They vanished in fire, one by one, in the lonely off season. If you're up at Pointe au Baril Station, one of the last, the Ojibway Hotel, built by a timber baron in 1906, survives as a cottagers' clubhouse. If the grand hotels disappeared like lovely Victorian ladies in the fog, the big resort operators mushroomed in with their golf courses, spas and pools. Not exactly native ecofriendly tourism, more like vacation theme parks, without the Muskoka flavor. Pools in Muskoka when you've got a thousand lakes? You could be in Beverly Hills, or as the NY Times calls it, Malibu of the North, which is nice enough.

The Inflatables

Summer. Port Sandfield Marina, The Boathouse Gift Shop overflow. The Inflatables. They were a lot smaller when I was a kid. One thing you don't see much is kids with so much stuff available for them. That goes equally for cottagers, the 40 somethings and over, and the town folks blasted by winters, who look older. We import them now I suppose. Not Latinos like in the US, but Jamaican girls to clean the rooms at the fancy Muskoka resorts. Downsizing of families even in small towns is a surprise at first. You think maybe it's that unconscious modern culture shaping us again. But you see why soon enough. The small paychecks for small jobs in retail and the seasonal jobs. That's how small families get by.

The Old-Timers

Summer. Port Sandfield, part of the old marina. When this boathouse was new, there were still a lot of cottagers. At a Jazz Night do at some old community hall I ran into a table of them. Asked these old-timers how they got here. For one thing they didn't look like old money or new. And the cottage and boat talk wasn't about fixing a hole in the roof of a cabin. Still are cottages like that, $120,000. They were old cottage friends, several tables of Canadians and Americans, colorful characters. Basically there were two stories, the Canadian and the American. Most Canadians had family cottages handed down to them. Most Americans bought land when it was cheap. For real cheap you have to go way back, but a couple said their grand uncle left them some Muskoka land as a gift, paying a dollar an acre to the government. It was no good for farming, so they gave it away, millions of acres, whole islands for $200.00. Others built a little more every year, subdivided their lots and built and subdivided. All nodding together, big grins. Never could afford my own place now!

The Cottagers Parade

Summer. Port Sandfield. That's the thing about cottagers, they're at the cottage. A walk by the boat channel. Town's a tiny place. One general store with ice cream to go, a luxury cottage furniture shop, The Loft, and the fabulous marina, plus cottagers around somewhere of course. Maybe we should parade them out, declare a public holiday. Cottagers parading with fistfuls of asparagus at $7.99 a bunch, cottagers with yacht caps and inflatable rafts, cottagers line dancing with Molson Canadians, cottagers marching smartly with golf bags on their shoulders, cottagers and card tables, cottagers waving from convertibles, c'mon let's have some fun!

Like America But Cleaner

Summer. Port Sandfield and the boat channel between Lake Joe and Lake Rosseau. You could spend years of happy boating through these huge lakes and Lake Muskoka connected to the south, with well over a hundred islands and a thousand bays. Europeans go agog over this. They can count their lakes on one hand. Americans who are probably a third of all the cottagers in Muskoka, mostly from the North East and with plenty of water too, must be impressed. Of course the waters here are quite clean.

Cottagers For Life

Summer. Port Sandfield Marina. If you come for a visit you might wind up buying a boat. Many tourists wind up staying, transformed into cottagers for life. I dunno. It can be boring. It depends how boring your friends and family are. There are always a lot of, pricey in the extreme, dream cottages for sale in Muskoka, but hardly any for rent, booked months in advance. My theory, based on solid barroom research, is it's great if there aren't any hassles, pretty good if the hassles only last a summer, not so good when the pipes freeze and you've got to dig yourself out of the snow to go into town a half hour away for a quart of milk, and beg the guy at the store to fill your jerrycans with water so you can take a bath or do your laundry. If you're a happy camper or boater maybe you should leave it that way, or at least come up for a winter of cross country skiing and snowmobiling, before you buy that dream cottage thinking that's where you're going to retire, when even the birds fly south, and Canadians too.

The Heart Of Muskoka On Peninsula Road 7

Summer. Port Sandfield on Lake Rosseau. If there's anyplace that has more well-heeled charm in Muskoka it must be some island pleasure dome like the Whistling Pines Beach and Boat Club Resort that hasn't been built yet. But this winding isthmus, oddly on Peninsula Road 7, between Lakes Joseph and Rosseau was breathtaking even before the money came, old and new. You should go. For a day trip, start in Parry Sound and take the scenic and smooth Hwy 141 East. Stop for coffee or breakfast at Bent River's only Minature Golf-Gas Station-General Store-Restaurant. If you can extricate the kids, keep going to the undiscovered Village of Rosseau at the north shore of the lake for antique shops, and lunch at The Crossroads, an excellent upscale cottagers' hangout. For a fine light lunch instead, try Coffeeville. Then head south on the pristine blacktop 2 lane road through the hills and lakes to Minett, Port Sandfield and cool and trendy Port Carling for dinner. If you've still got time, take Hwy 169 South to Bala, where Muskoka begins. Try biking it or on a motorcycle, but be careful. Bikers wipe out even when it's bone dry.

A Warm Silence In The Woods

Summer. Forest Floor at Bala. With nature doing all the work, why not parklands linked by trails cutting through our cities? If you think it impractical, go see how it works at the enormous Englischer Garten in Munich, Germany. Bigger than Central Park, New York, it stretches about 5 km overall and includes a lake and 3 islands, plus 8.5 km of streams and 78 km of footpaths.

Friendly Foliage

Summer. Wildflowers at Bala. Country lanes and trails are the best shopping malls. And you don't have to buy anything.

Lovely Grasses

Summer. Wild Grasses at Bala. The cranberry marsh at Muskoka Lakes Winery. The footpaths along acres of green fields touch on gentle woods and water. One thing we don't see enough of are the great variety and abundance of wild grasses that used to cover the prairies and meadows. To see them now you have to go to a special reserve in the US, Wind Cave National Park, near Hot Springs, South Dakota. The beauty of these grasses is phenomenal. To think that all we've got left are lawns and golf courses and some grass in ditches. The cave gets top billing because it is fabulous too, 300 million years old with amazingly long corridors of rare calcite boxwork stretching over 116 miles, though so compact the cave system occupies an area somewhat over a mile square. You can camp there at Elk Mountain year round.