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Hopping Along Ontario's Ale Trail: Day Two

© Paul Ruschmann

Our second day's sampling began at Sleeman Brewing & Malting Company (551 Clair Road West, Guelph; 1-800-BOTTLES). Founded in 1851, this is the oldest brewery on the Ale Trail. Even though it is the Trail's largest, Sleeman still brews in batches small enough to keep its beers in the "microbrewed" category. Inside the upstairs tasting room, a tourguide acquainted us with the rich, trivia-filled history of the Sleemans and the family brewing business. Now I know what those numbers and words underneath the bottlecaps stand for. Unfortunately, the brewery doesn't offer prizes for collecting the complete set, and bottlecap questions are rarely asked on quiz shows.

The original Sleeman product is Cream Ale, a style popular in Canada but seldom found in the States. It's a perfect beverage for long summer evenings. Silver Creek Lager, a pilsener named for the original source of the brewery's water, is another good summertime choice. Sleeman also brews a number of year-round favorites. They include Brown Ale, made in the tradition of 19th-century cottage breweries (it's now Sleeman's largest-selling beer); Original Dark, which is really ruby-red in color; and Steam Ale, Canada's only beer brewed in the "California common" style, slowly cooled and aged in open vessels.

Sleeman, too, has been acquiring breweries. It now owns the Upper Canada Brewing Company, which had, for years, produced fine ales and lagers at its Toronto facility. Fortunately, Sleeman continues to brew and distribute the Upper Canada line, which includes deceptively powerful Rebellion Ale, ultra-smooth Dark Ale, and distinctive Maple Porter.

F&M Brewery (355 Elmira Road North, Guelph; 1-877-316-BEER) was worth the extra effort spent finding it. It's in a small industrial park-like complex northwest of downtown--not a place where you'd expect to find a brewery. F&M brews all-natural beers which, for reasons I can't fathom, are hard to find on tap. In our years of visiting Ontario pubs, we'd had only one F&M product, MacLeans Pale Ale, which earned thumbs up from both of us.

Inside F&M's noisy hospitality room (a bus tour had just arrived), we sampled Special Draft, with a distinctive buttery taste; flavorful StoneHammer Pilsener; and a fresh Premium Dark Ale, which was lighter in color than most ales of this style. All of the breweries on the Ale Trail operate retail stores, but F&M is the only one to offer beer to go in a "Keggy," a 12.5-liter container with its own supply of carbon dioxide and a tap handle. It's designed to keep beer fresh for days inside your refrigerator. A Keggy costs a few dollars more than a 24-pack of bottles, but contains about 50 percent more beer.