Herr Chevalier Visits Canada

Henninger beer is currently sold in Ontario at the LCBO. It has a typical German blonde lager taste, one of hundreds of imports available here. In fact, its quiet presence on the shelf hides an unusual Ontario history.

In 1972 Henninger, then based in Frankfurt, Germany (brewing is now in Dortmund) licensed a venture in Hamilton, Ontario to make the beer. Edward (Ted) Dunal headed the plan, a former Carling Brewery sales executive.

Part of the funding was raised by a public offering of shares and debentures. The brewery used was the old. disused Peller-Brading-Carling plant, which today houses Collective Arts Brewery. Dunal and Henninger took it over after a dozen years use by Hamilton harbour authorities.

Standard Canadian beer histories record that Canadian Henninger was brewed from 1972 until 1981, when Amstel of Holland bought the brewery. Amstel continued to make Henninger – two brands in fact, Export and Meister Pils – along with a Canadianized Amstel and other brands.

Amstel brewed here until 1991 when it gave up on Canadian brewing. The brewery was later sold to Bill Sharpe’s Lakeport Brewing, and another storied history resulted, outside my scope here.

A pioneering craft brewery, Brick Brewery of Waterloo, Ontario, now the Waterloo Brewery, took over making Henninger.  By  ca. 1997 all Henninger production in Canada ceased. It had a run of almost 25 years here, spanning the pre-craft and early craft eras.

Under Brick Brewery the beers were restored to German Pure Beer Law requirements, i.e., 100% barley malt. During the Amstel period, as related in a 1991 Toronto Star news story, Henninger was not all-malt, yet it was when Ted Dunal was in charge from 1972 until 1981.

In 1975 ads in the Toronto Star touted Henninger’s use of Chevalier barley. From the July 11, 1975 issue of the Toronto Star:

… [Meister Pils is] made here in Canada in our small independent brewery in a particular way from very particular ingredients. We use only two row Chevalier barley….

But most important , we use the same yeast that we use in Germany. Not similar yeast, the same yeast. We actually jet it over from our Frankfurt brewery.

Chevalier barley traditionally was associated with English top-fermented (ale) brewing. It was made obsolete by the 1930s with the onset of newer varieties. These tended to crop better or yield more beer, but some felt Chevalier was the knight of good flavour.

About 10 years ago Chevalier was revived from seeds stored in a seed bank. See my earlier post, here.

Brewing writer Ron Pattinson set out characteristics of typical 1970s German malting barleys in a post from 2015, see here, but none are called “Chevalier”.

What explains, then, Chevalier malt in 1970s Henninger? It seems it was German malt as Henninger’s Toronto ads stressed the imported ingredients. A September 9, 1980 story in the Toronto Star, covering a German trade fair here, stated:

Henninger in Canada is made with strict quality control to produce an identical product to that sold in Germany. In fact, hops, malt and yeast are all imported from there to assure consistent taste with the product brewed in Frankfurt.

Other Henninger ads in the Star insisted on the same taste as the German original, but technical details are sparse. The most specific is for the German yeast used.

Still, some ads stated plainly: “We even import malt from Germany”. It thus seems Chevalier was used in 1970s German Henninger, and then here, unless non-Chevalier German malt was mixed in Canada with Chevalier malt.

I bought the beer regularly in Toronto, under Amstel and Brick. I recall the taste being malty and “strong”, with possible dimethyl sulphide impact (sulphury, over-boiled egg, a characteristic of some German lager).

The modern German Henninger is clean, fairly light. Solid, middle of the road beer in my opinion.

Henninger never took more than a tiny percentage of the Ontario market. At the time, for the taste Henninger offered, Ontario consumers didn’t want to know – or not enough of them.

Had Henninger grabbed enough Canadian market share maybe craft breweries would have sprouted here much earlier than they did, as by all reasonable parameters Dunal’s Henninger was “craft”. In any case, it didn’t happen.

Ted Dunal was ahead of his time, that much we can say.

Note re image: the Henninger label shown above was sourced from the Beer Store listing linked in the text. All intellectual property in the image belongs solely to its lawful owner. Image used for educational and research purposes. All feedback welcomed.

 

2 thoughts on “Herr Chevalier Visits Canada”

  1. A further resource: a mid-1930s U.S. study on barley yields of different varieties includes Hanna and Chevalier in numerous tables, but one table, No. 19, lists “Moravian X Chevalier”. It is not clear (to me) if this is a hybrid grain as further in the table another conjunction of two types, also separated by an “x”, is called specifically a “hybrid” but the first is not. Plant science is beyond our expertise and we note these sources for what they are worth, yet again wondering now how different Hanna and Chevalier, apart what Wiggans (1921) seems to have considered superficial differences, really are. https://books.google.ca/books?id=OUfxLocnpKkC&pg=PA76&dq=Chevalier+malt&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjh6tGv7uPiAhVPMt8KHdXRB344HhDoAQhfMAg#v=onepage&q=Moravian%20X%20Chevalier&f=false

  2. Based on our further reading, this plant study published at Cornell University by Roy Wiggans, apparently in 1921, A Classification of the Cultivated Varieties of Barley, states there is no difference essentially in morphology between Hanna and Chevalier barleys, and that the attribution of name is somewhat arbitrary.This places the “re-discovery” of Chevalier malt about 10 years in some doubt, in our view.

    https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112001702379&view=1up&seq=423

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