I posted last week about some of the experimental, style-bending beer I sampled from Hopfenstark while in Montreal a couple weeks back (read the post here). Clearly I admire the push-the-envelope approach to brewing they and others are displaying. However, while in Montreal I also made a quick return visit to L’amère à boire, a mainstay brewpub in the Latin Quarter. They specialize in European lagers . Their beer takes a very traditional approach to old styles like pilsner, dunkel and Munich helles. They do pale ales, porters and other styles as well, but their signature beer are their European Pilsner.

I had a glass of the Cerna Hora, their take on the classic Czech Pilsner. It pours dark gold with a slight haze and topped with a fluffy, lively white head. The aroma is spicy, earthy hop, soft pilsner malt sweetness and some yeasty notes. The initial flavour brings out a grainy, rounded malt. The beer sharpens in the middle, with a spicy hop flavour mingling with sharper grain. The finish is very playful. At first is seems rather sweet, but the earthy, spicy Saaz hops build over a few seconds. Only at the end does the Saaz flavour start to really shine through. I also pick up a bit of yeast bite in the background. The linger has an appropriate bitterness, but it retains a good degree of balance.

While I argue the beer could be a bit cleaner (I speculate that it may not be filtered), it really offers an enjoyable pilsner. It hits all the key touchstones for a Czech pils – rounded but grainy malt, the distinct Saaz spiciness and a slight lean toward bitter without losing balance. It might be one of the better pilsners brewed in Canada.

A nice beer experience, but today I want to go a step further. With the deluge we see of imperial-this and Americanized-that, I often wonder if beer aficionados are losing sight of the joy of a straight-forward, classic style? It is increasingly hard to find a solid Munich Helles or Ordinary Bitter on the store shelves, jockeying they are with the latest experiment.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not complaining about the wondrous range of amazing beer on offer these days. We are blessed to have such a plethora of creative craft beer to sample. But the other day I was in my favourite liquor store and without having to move my head, I counted 13 different pumpkin beer. I am sure there were more if I swiveled my head a bit. How does a gentle summer ale or a Kolsch compete with that?

What is more intriguing for me is that while we are seeing the resurrection of certain historical styles, the ones with all the cache right now are the bolder, quirkier ones such as Gose, Rauchbier and Saison. Again, I am very pleased to be able to sample a handful of interpretations of Gose or Saison – it is strengthening my sense of styles which were unavailable when I was cutting my beer judging teeth.

Consumers have the right and the power to choose the beer they want to drink. Which is great. I just hope that in our excitement to try the latest fill-in-the-blank infused one-off we don’t stop picking up a bottle or two of something quieter and more straightforward. There are many amazing craft lagers and ales out there that quietly go about their business of being satisfying. We should be rewarding those breweries for making consistently high quality beer as much as we do the breweries who wow us with their experiments and envelope-pushing.

The good news is, unlike wine, beer tends to be cheap enough we can afford to buy both!