As I walked home with my four Trafalgar Ales and Meads, I worried about where I’d be sleeping tonight. I had promised my girlfriend I would never, ever buy any of their products again after a particularly gross tasting bottle of Hop Nouveau. But here I was. Going against the collective beer geek better judgement. A bag overburdened with a Chocolate Orange Porter, an ESB, an Imperial Oaked Brown Ale, and a Ginger Mead (which I will not be discussing; I’ve not had enough meads).
I get that Trafalgar must have made something good to get past a tasting panel of well-trained beer judges at the Ontario Beer Awards. While their gold medal winning Schwartzy stout and coffee Schwartzy stout were nowhere to be found in Toronto - or even as placeholder pages on ratebeer, untappd, or beer advocate - I was assured, they do exist for public consumption. They must be respectable beers. Similarly their other winners, a ginger beer and a highly touted pumpkin ale, must have something going for them. Maybe, just maybe, Trafalgar has improved.
Now, winning “best newcomer” at the awards… that’s debatable. Sure they hadn’t won or perhaps even entered since 2007... but many of the breweries in the competition have existed for less time than Trafalgar has snubbed the OBAs. A brewery from the 1990s born again? Perhaps it was a kind of rapprochement. A sending of Dennis Rodman to North Korea brokering of the peace between the beer snob elite (the West?) and the everyman of Trafalgar (a deranged dictatorship?). A kind welcome back to the fold of a brewery maybe about to turn things around.
That’s sure not how most saw it. “Negative comments” (which one should not normally respond to?) abounded. Someone even called the brewery a scumlord on twitter!
The only way to get fresh data about the potential improvement of the brewery was to drink them. So I put my money where my mouth was and picked up four bottles from Yonge and Summerhill. I chilled them and poured them into a simple tulip. Sure it wouldn’t be blind, but most beer drinking is done with all the messy attachments to the world fully intact.
For full disclosure. I really wanted to be wrong about these beers. I’m not some sadomasochistic person who wants to spend $18 for some bad beer and to write a longwinded vindictive post on some forum. I mean, I’ll do it, but I’d rather have some good beer along the way. I had hoped, like Isaiah, to bring the good news.
Here goes…
ESB. Clear copper with a loose white head. Round caramel malts, earthy and floral hops. Sharp, resinous/earthy bitterness, maybe a little metallic. Low carbonation and a touch thin/watery in the finish. I cannot find any obvious faults or issues. Trying to remove the Trafalgar connection and imaging it’s a pint from Granite… it’s really quite decent. Well hopped with a balanced caramel malt character. Some (like my now annoyed girlfriend) might say the malt is thin and one-dimensional. I thought it was pleasant enough. If you like ESBs, then maybe give this one a shot again.
Chocolate Orange Porter. Black with a very loose tan head (oils from the orange seem to be making short work of it). Orange Crush smelling orange peel with some odd earthy character. That Orange Crush character holds over and is met with some bitter, chalky cocoa, and smoky roasted malt. Thin and watery with a light carbonation. Comes across as far too much orange (which at least doesn't taste artificial) for far too little porter with some messy cocoa in the middle confusing the whole lot. I didn’t finish this.
The Might Oak, Imperial Oaked Brown Ale: Dark brown with a thin, loose tan head. Caramel malts, vanilla (American oak), and some toffee. Sweet caramel malts with a single, vanilla almost over soaked oak cube character (ever soaked oak cubes in liquor to condition them? This tastes a little like the resulting liquid). A touch vegetal. Almost no hop character and very low bitterness. Thin and low carbonation. Again, trying to play devil’s advocate… if this was from Great Lakes would I like it more? Probably not. It would be a clunking dud from them, where it’d be a marginal win here. But if you love American oak enough to drink a pint of it (at points it almost tasted like vanilla ice-cream with the sweet malts) and can look past the thin body, this might be worth trying.
What have I learned? Biggest revelation is that there is a Trafalgar beer that I can drink. The ESB. None were infected. All the beers had a strange thinness to them (even the “imperial”) on the finish. The seasonal beers seemed more poorly executed and messy than the other, regular lineup beer. “Ambition’s a tricky thing… ambition can backfire,” someone once said. Sounds about right.
Has Trafalgar improved? I don’t think so. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. I can imagine their occasional offerings can sometimes, like the Schwartzy stout, do something totally fantastic. But that’s not the point. That’s not why I stopped buying them in the first place. It was a matter of consistency. It was a matter of their beers tasting like they were made to slot into an LCBO release, move one unit at a time, and then steal off like a thief into the night.
So Trafalgar, I tried. I want to like you. Wholeheartedly. I just need evidence to support that. And that, to this point, is lacking. Maybe someone else on here has a more positive experience with these beers? I’m begging to be convinced. ISO: Schwartzy.
