I’d describe myself as: A. Complex and contemplative B. Friendly and unpredictable C. Uncomplicated and transparent D. An acquired taste If I weren’t a beer, I’d be this mythical drink: A. Ambrosia: The only thing I can imagine tasting better B. Butterbeer: Drunk quidditch! C. Flaming Moe: If it’s not on fire, it’s probably boring […]
Whitney Moran
Posted inFood + Drink
In like a Lambic
Anyone who’s lived in Halifax for more than five minutes knows how hard it is to keep a secret here. But since 2011, the north end’s beloved Propeller Brewing Co. has been quietly concocting something special: a series of Lambics. The first, a traditional Framboise, launches this weekend. Created through the ancient process of spontaneous […]
Posted inFood + Drink
I’d tap that: 5 to try at Seaport Beerfest
Choosing from 275 beers and ciders is no task for the lily-livered. As with any festival, you’ll get the most out of Seaport Beerfest with a game plan. Topping my list is Stillwell’s Cask Pavillion, featuring five rotating casks per session from some of the Maritimes’ best: Boxing Rock, Garrison, Propeller, Big Spruce, Hell Bay, […]
Posted inLifestyle
Summer is beer
① PATIO Tis the Saison North Brewing Co. Summer Saison (5.5 percent) French for “season,” this style was traditionally brewed at the end of winter and unleashed in the summer. Considered a “farmhouse ale”—North’s specialty— named because of its earthy, rustic character, Saison was kept on hand to quench the thirst of farmhands during the hot […]
Posted inFood + Drink
Brew looks like a lady
“For most of recorded human history, women have been responsible for supplying the world’s beer.” That’s the Oxford Companion to Beer talking, so you know it’s legit. Known as brewsters, female brewers of the English Anglo-Saxon period often brewed beer between baking bread and servicing their husbands, while women who brewed in commercial breweries were […]
Posted inFood + Drink
Stillwell’s raising the bar
If someone had told me this time last year that a beer bar would open where I’d want to spend nearly every waking moment, I would have cry-laughed into my tiny bottle of Duchesse De Bourgogne, daydreaming of a place where Lambics and Saisons, smoked porters and cask ales all lived in perfect harmony. Last […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Insistent Garden
“It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.” So says the narrator of Rosie Chard’s sophomore novel. The former landscape architect brings her encyclopedic knowledge of plant life to bear in this dark domestic tale of a young woman, Edith Stoker, whose family is suffocating her. Set in 1969 East Midlands, UK, […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt releases a book about every 10 years. The Goldfinch began gestating around 1993, while the author was visiting Amsterdam, was researched largely in a New York library and further inspired by a trip to Las Vegas. So it’s no surprise that the novel treats all three places with such detail they become surrogate […]
Posted inArts + Music
Fuck yeah Kaleigh Trace
It’s that time of year again. Store aisles are cramped with paper hearts and mushy sentiments, and most people are suddenly obsessed with the status of their sexual relationships. But for one incredible woman, sexual health is number-one on the priority list, all year long. The voice behind the sex-positive blog thefuckingfacts.com, the lady behind […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt releases a book about every 10 years. The Goldfinch began gestating around 1993, while the author was visiting Amsterdam, was researched largely in a New York library and further inspired by a trip to Las Vegas. So it’s no surprise that the novel treats all three places with such detail they become surrogate […]
Posted inArts + Music
Well-Read Women
Although the gift-giving “season” has again come to an end, keep Well-Read Women in your back pocket—literally, although it’s rather sizeable, or figuratively, if you’re ever in need of a coveted object for the biblio-femme in your life. Here, a collection of literary “heroines” is depicted in vibrant watercolour, portrayed with as much mystery, sensuality, […]
Posted inArts + Music
Mother, Mother
If you’ve read Zailckas’ first book, the non-fiction title Smashed, an exploration exploring the author’s lost, drunken, teen years, it might not come as a surprise that the characters in her first novel Mother, Mother, are so incredibly, indelibly fucked up. The story follows, from varying third-person perspectives, the unstable saga of the Hurst family. […]