‘Tastes like Winnipeg?’: Jeanne’s cake-flavoured home brew tops local beer competition

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This article was published 15/11/2023 (1060 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A local home brewer has tapped into Winnipeggers’ favourite dessert debate with his competition-winning Jeanne’s cake-flavoured pastry stout.

Chuck MacKenzie, a retired St. James resident and home brewer for about 15 years, developed a beer in honour of Jeanne’s legendary and famously divisive cookie-bottom log cake covered in icing and chocolate curls.

MacKenzie aptly named his pastry stout “Love It or Hate It.”

“I thought to myself: how am I going to make something that tastes like Winnipeg?” said MacKenzie.

“You can’t make a beer that tastes like a Salisbury nip… or a garlic sausage beer,” MacKenzie added with a laugh, listing some of his rejected flavour ideas before he settled on the chocolate-and-vanilla profile that won over fellow home brewers during a competition that called for a Winnipeg-inspired beverage.

The task was to create a beer that “tasted like or invoked Winnipeg,” said Colin Koop, co-owner and general manager of Devil May Care Brewing Company.

The independent brewery went back to its roots to run the local competition, receiving more than a dozen entries from creative home brewers — members of the Winnipeg Brew Bombers club.

Among the entries: a rye lager celebrating Crown Royal’s history in Manitoba; a nostalgic blue raspberry beer bringing back memories of eating candy as a child; and a honey dill beer that “didn’t work out,” Koop said.

(Both he and MacKenzie expressed hope the talented brewer behind the honey dill creation would find a way to perfect the recipe.)

Using a chocolate flavour profile with vanilla beans and maltodextrin to give the beer body without making it overly sweet, MacKenzie made only one batch of Jeanne’s-flavoured beer and submitted it to the competition.

It was a hit.

“It was really tasty, with kind of beautiful chocolate and vanilla complements, a nice mouth feel,” Koop said, comparing it to an imperial stout beer reminiscent of the British Young’s double chocolate stout.

“There is a cookie crust component to this beer that definitely comes through.”

Personally, MacKenzie said he doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth and isn’t a fan of the cake that inspired his beer.

Asked if this experience will change his mind, MacKenzie laughed. “It just might,” he said good-naturedly.

His grand prize is the opportunity to brew a very limited supply of his Jeanne’s cake-flavoured beer at Devil May Care and have a release party at the Fort Street tap room Nov. 17.

The party is open to the public but only three kegs of MacKenzie’s beer are available. He expects it to go fast.

“It’s amazing. It’s my 15 minutes of fame!” he joked.

katie.may@winnipegfreepress.com