Drinking the Forest: Part Two

A Microbrewery in Haut-Saint-François

[Read Part One: La Bière d’Épinette, the Origin and the Soda]

AT THE EDGE OF the small Quebec town of Cookshire, a couple of hours east of Montreal in an area of mixed farms and woods, the small-scale brewery 11 Comtés produces a range of expected and less expected beers. I’m not a fan of hoppy ales that hijack the idea of a fermented malt drink, although they’re a microbrewery’s bread and butter. 11 Comtés has options like that, but I first visited last summer because I wanted to see the source of a bottle of on-point, cask-fermented wild-yeast beer that I’d come across and really liked. I sat with friends outdoors under a tall post-and-beam roof enjoying another bottle of the wild-yeast beer and sampling my friend’s choices. I returned later in the summer, by which time I’d become interested in bière d’épinette, “spruce beer.” That old French-Canadian drink can take the form of non-alcoholic soda or a malt-and-hops beer, but I hadn’t yet found a real-beer version to taste. None was on the brewery list, so I opted for something else, but as I was paying I asked the young woman at the counter whether the brewery ever made anything like a spruce beer. She returned with a can, which I took with me. The poetically named Il y aura du ciel à l’infini (“The sky will go on forever”) was a blonde beer flavored with balsam fir (sapin baumier). Evergreen beers are sometimes criticized as tasting like a Christmas tree, but this was carefully balanced. It was immediately clear that real-beer bière d’épinette could be very good. The young woman had said she picked the fir tips herself.