DISH

GREAT HEAD

Amber’s is beer with an Edmonton touch

JASON FOSTER / greathead@vueweekly.com

It’s a long way from the packaging department at Molson’s to being the head brewer at tiny microbrewery, but Joe Parrell couldn’t have picked a better time to make the transition.

Parrell walked away from his job at Edmonton’s Molson plant a razor-close two hours before the fated strike this past summer. As most Edmontonians

know, rather than

settle a fair deal with

its workers, Molson

shuttered one of the

oldest breweries in

Canada, throwing

150 workers out of

work. And Joe Parrell

would have been one

of them—had he not

run into Jim Gibbon,

the owner of

Edmonton’s newest

microbrewery,

Amber’s Brewing,

the previous spring.

As Parrell found

out then, Gibbon

is a walking, talking

can of Red Bull—all

energy and passion. Gibbon knows business. He knows marketing. He has a clear vision and plan for Amber’s Brewing. But Gibbon needed a brewer. And that’s where Parrell comes in. When offered the opportunity to be head brewer at Amber’s, he jumped at it.

As Parrell explains, the decision wasn’t a hard one: Molson’s didn’t allow him to explore the full brewing process the way his new job at Amber’s does.

“Ive always wanted to brew. I never had the chance to do the creative side of brewing,” he says. With Amber’s one-person operation, though, Parrell now does everything. “Instead of going to meetings and talking about what needs to be done, here you just do it.”

As for Gibbon, he has been working on the Amber’s project for two years now, crafting the company’s identity, honing the marketing strategy and building the brewery. In December it all came to fruition, with the launch of its brewery in the old Wing’s factory on 99th Street.

Amber’s offers three beers at the moment, with more in the works. The most interesting may be the Australian Mountain Pepper Berry Ale. It’s a pale golden beer with the thinnest of heads. The aroma is intriguing, drawing you in with a hard-to-describe spicy fruitiness and grainy sweetness. It has some raspberry tartness, but also some light-coloured fruit aroma of pear and blueberry. Wheat also makes its presence known.

The base beer is light and somewhat grainy. But the dominant feature is the mountain pepper berry. It is supposedly a small, blueberry-like fruit native to Australia, albeit with a spicier note than the more familiar berry. It’s a subtle-tasting fruit, offering more in the way of mouthfeel than flavour. I find it dries out the beer and adds sharpness, almost but not quite acidic, to the beer. Unfortunately, the fruit also causes some astringency, which lingers after the swallow. All in all, though, it’s an original beer that will stand out among boring blueberry wheat ales and such.

They also offer an unassuming Pale Ale. An orangey-gold beer with a moderate white head, it offers a subdued aroma of rounded malt sweetness and just a touch of hop. The malt is soft and biscuit-like with a low-end bitterness, though the hops are too timid for a full pale ale, not allowing the beer to reach its potential. They could withstand a bump to bring bitterness closer to expectations without losing drinkability, though overall it’s a pleasant beer.

What may end up as their signature beer is Bub’s Lunch Pail Ale, named in honour of Edmonton cartoon icon Bub Slug. Anyone who lived in Edmonton in the 1980s will remember the full-page weekly colour comic of that name in the Journal, which has since morphed into the nationally syndicated Betty. Bub was the cartoon symbol of Edmonton’s heart—a blue collar, loveable guy who always found a way to get by.

Bub’s Lunch Pail Ale is similar to the Pale Ale, light gold in colour with an enjoyable and understated clean malt flavour, but Bub’s has an enhanced hop flavour and aroma—the familiar grassiness of the cascade hop variety. This adds a dimension to the beer, while remaining accessible to average beer drinkers.

Bub’s label is festooned with a smiling, hard-hatted Bub with the High Level Bridge waterfall in the background. There’s no mistaking this is an Edmonton beer, and that’s exactly Gibbon’s plan: he wants his beer linked to Edmonton and Edmontonians.

To that end, his marketing and packaging are sophisticated: using old family heirlooms, he has crafted an image for his beers that is deeply steeped in Edmonton’s history.
“I want to make beer by Edmontonians for Edmontonians,” says Gibbon. “Calgary has Big Rock, Edmonton needs our own signature beer.”

Of course, Edmonton already has the world-class beers of Alley Kat, a fact Gibbon is fast to point out.

“Alley Kat has done a great job,” he says, pointing out that his goal with Amber’s is not to compete with Alley Kat but to compliment their beers. Amber’s appears to be aiming slightly more mainstream. Its beers are muted and clean—creating quaffable, affable pints.

With Alley Kat and Amber’s physically only a few blocks apart on 99th Street, I wonder if the prospect of a craft beer hub in Edmonton surfaces. A number of mid-sized US cities such as Portland and Denver have developed vibrant beer scenes, with multiple microbreweries, brewpubs and diverse beer availability. Edmonton, especially in this boom, may be well positioned to create its own version in the great white north.

And maybe the timing couldn’t be better: Molson has abandoned us with their plant closure, and Labatt continues to take us for granted. Right now could be the perfect time to open up some local beer space.

With the stable and dependable Alley Kat and the upstart Amber’s (with possibly the fledgling Roughneck tagging along), are we possibly seeing the birth of a local beer scene worthy of boasting? It’s too early yet to tell, but isn’t it a joyful thought to contemplate? World-class local beer made right here in Edmonton that people flock to drink. The day may yet come. V