This Toronto brewery seems to craft fans here a fixture on the local scene, but is in business barely five years. It was co-founded by former homebrewers Callum Hay and Eric Portelance.
The brewery has tended to specialize in flavoured beers, often using mixed fermentation and barrel aging. Sours are in the picture as well. This range generally does not appeal to me, although I sample the types regularly to keep up on trends and styles.
Lately I noticed a fairly atypical beer in the Halo range, a 6% Event Horizon sarsaparilla stout, subtitled “foreign export”. The brewery page on the beer is impressively detailed, and shows a fairly traditional approach was followed. A complex grain bill came down to pale English malt, a few unmalted grains, and carafa and other roasted malts.
As the site also explains, the recipe has evolved over time. I never tasted earlier versions, and find the current one superlative. The body is rich – look at the gravities, accented with the sarsaparilla.
Indian sarsaparilla is used, a type that imparts a flavour similar to the true (smilax) sarsaparilla yet avoiding any safrole. This is the agent in sassafras, certainly, a tree bark from which extracts were made to flavour root beer, that has been associated with cancer in animal testing.
Sources online seem in conflict whether smilax i.e., the traditional sarsaparilla, contains safrole but in any case to my knowledge, roots of smilax – there are different types depending where grown but all similar, is not banned as a food additive, to my knowledge.
The Indian sort is in any case is a known substitute for smilax sarsaparilla. To me the taste, well-explained in the brewery page (e.g. “wintergreen”), is like root beer with an earthy note. The hop used is Amarillo, a New World hop that has an Old World smack as well, in my opinion – which fits well in this context.
While generally I do not think porter benefits from flavouring, I give slack for Indian sarsaparilla as employed by Halo. In other porters or stouts I like occasionally a kiss of ginger, orange flavouring (dried peel, coriander, etc.), mint and… not too much else.
Licorice, I almost never like. The taste ends often as discordant. Yet for whatever reason, Indian sarsaparilla in the Halo stout hits the right notes.
Below you see me enjoying the Halo product on a space-heated patio in downtown Toronto, at King Taps.
